ANTONELLA is an attractive 28-year old woman who lives in Rome. Her life is focused on friends and fun, clubbing and parties.

She is also completely imaginary.

A New York Times article on how Ford used personas to create the Ford Fiesta: Before Creating the Car, Ford Designs the Driver.

On the other hand, being a Product Manager developing a new product is like being on the front lines and offers the ability to start incorporating Design Thinking elements to some good effect and without the need for top down corporate change. Below is a list of some simple steps that I have been using at Electronic Arts to give Design Thinking a small foothold in our online business.

1. Pop the Why Stack

User research is a key component of Design Thinking. By user research, I don’t mean surveys or market data that results in quantitative data, I am referring to qualitative research. You want to really understand the goals of your users by watching how they use your product and asking open ended questions. A lot of users will request a well thought out feature, but good Design Thinkers will ask “why” they want that feature and continue to ask why until they uncover the user’s actual intent of their actions.

A good example is if a user came to you and demanded that you build them a bridge. Your immediate response should be “why do you want a bridge”. The user might respond, “so that I can get to the other side of the river”. Keep popping the why stack by asking “why do you want to get to the other side”. The user might respond this time with “so I can deliver a message to a person on the other side”. So now the problem isn’t about building a bridge, it is really about being able to send a message to someone on the other side of a river. This is important, because now you can try and solve the right problem.

2. Solve the Problem More than Once

This is the step that really gets to the heart of innovation. Traditional business thinking is all about coming up with one low risk solution and settling the matter there. But the Design Thinking approach is to solve the problem with as many different solutions as possible. Each of these solutions, by no means, have to be doable but the process of coming up with tangible and intangible solutions really opens up the floodgates of ideas. What I have found is that really good innovative ideas have emerged that end up affecting our entire product.

It helps to take a project approach to solving the user’s needs. Form a team of cross-functional members (development, marketing, product, qa, etc) and brainstorm all sorts of different solutions to the problem. Do not limit creativity here, the sky is the limit. Ideo has often sited lofty impossible ideas as launching points for doable innovative ones. To keep it all on track, try and time box the output. This means only allowing a specific amount of time to brainstorm before moving to the next step of refinement. Also, it pays to keep the “Devil’s Advocate” at bay during the brainstorming stage. Nothing stifles creativity more than the words “let me play the devil’s advocate”. After you have come up with a long list of possible solutions, start to narrow them down based on which ideas best meet every one of these categories: Customer Desirability, Technical Feasibility, and Financial Feasibility. Finally, you should be left with a very short list of viable solutions.

3. Fail Early, Fail Often

Development is expensive. Use lightweight methods like wireframes, mockups, and prototypes to get the ideas in front of people sooner. The sooner people can get a sense for how something works, the less it will cost to make changes–and there are always changes. After brainstorming solutions and prototyping them, it is important to try and get the prototype in front of the same users you used for the user research. The key here is to iterate on your ideas with prototypes. Try things out and see if they work or don’t work. Failing early lets you avoid expensive development costs and failing often lets you experiment with new innovative ideas with lower risk.

4. Live Your Brand

Nothing is more unsettling than when you have a solid emotional brand but all of your communications don’t accurately represent it. Whether you’re communicating by email to a customer, showing a power point presentation to an internal marketing team, or posting documentation for your API, all of these need to represent your brand and should look and feel the part. It is important for you to build proper brand guidelines, templates, marketing guidelines, letterhead, etc. that your entire team uses to accurately represent your brand. Any customer touch point, be it internal or external, should clearly articulate the emotions and goodwill of your brand. You should not only be concerned with just the aesthetics, but the voice of your communications, the content, and even the features you build should be checked against “does this accurately represent our brand”.

5. Rinse and Repeat

Don’t decide solutions, design solutions. Use Design Thinking for more than just product features. Try to design solutions for internal processes or marketing strategies. In fact, the more you can use this for any problem, the better the culture will be around it.

Be sure to also read Tim’s article on Design Thinking (PDF 2.9MB) from the June 2008 issue of The Harvard Business Review.