At the d.confestival Holger Rhinow (Hasso Plattner Institute) and Jan Schmiedgen (codify) hosted a session on the state of Design Thinking at the intersection of other agile approaches. The session attracted over 90 highly engaged practitioners and researchers, most of whom have great expertise in the subject.

Holger first shared a few experiences from previous projects in which he and other colleagues integrated design thinking into existing agile landscapes within organizations. He observed that Design Thinking complements other approaches during the innovation process, which was affirmed by most practitioners in the audiences.

In order to create innovations, teams must account for the fact that they need to address at least three different dimensions: the desirability, the feasibility and the viability of a future solution. During the discussion the practitioners agreed on the notion that most agile approaches focus on just one of these dimensions. Therefore, it could be highly beneficial to combine different approaches in order to cover all dimensions throughout the innovation process. All agile approaches share the idea of enabling teams to learn about one or another dimension. In fact, learning is a key aspect that agile teams strive for while creating value.

Design Thinking is especially useful in understanding the appeal of an undeveloped solution. Design thinking teams are able to learn more about humans and their needs in the early stages of an innovation project. Small teams create prototypes for qualitative tests and thereby identify what is desirable to human beings. They are agile as they constantly reevaluate their ideas and reconsider the initial problem.

Lean Startup allows teams to learn more about the viability of a given idea. These teams – often founders – apply Lean Startup to ascertain business risks associated with novel ideas. Teams create metric-driven business experiments to discover potential business models for their ideas.

Scrum – the most popular agile framework – allows teams to iteratively develop novel solutions by breaking down a larger product vision into small increments.

The notion of focusing on one or another dimension by applying different approaches accentuates the complementary nature of the most prominent agile approaches in innovation projects. In real-life projects, we can see that teams often integrate even more approaches or a few methods from a particular approach. They may also switch between different approaches. The actual innovation process appears to be messier than what was discussed in our panel. Nevertheless, the results showed that most organizations nowadays rely on the notion of integrating agile approaches in their innovation efforts. Results show that agile teams can become a powerful resource for organizations that aim to create novel user-centered solutions.