What does it mean to “solve the right problems in the right way”?

I’m a huge advocate for “solving the right problems in the right way”. Here’s what I mean.

On September 9, 2020 I was invited to speak at 12Coffee, “a not-for-profit speaker series consisting of 12 bi-weekly virtual coffee chats between students and a guest industry leader. You can watch the talk and Q&A here!

Due to popular demand, I started with a high-level overview of Design Thinking.

Design Thinking has become popular in the past 10 or so years. It’s a way of applying a designer’s mindset to problems that previously didn’t take that approach.

I’ve included a definition and highlighted a few words that I think are important.

Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. Involving five phases — Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test — it is most useful to tackle problems that are ill-defined or unknown.
— Interaction Design Foundation

The first word to emphasize is iterative. I described it as a rough draft of a paper at school, if you’re lucky to have a friend review it, you can make a bunch of changes then give it to your mom to proofread. Making more changes before submission. Each of those rounds would be considered iterations. We work iteratively in a lot of the newer ways of doing business, including Agile Scrum…