The best of Design Thinking and Lean Startup for B2C Businesses
I often get called by companies to help them apply Design Thinking for a project that involves creating something for their customers. My 10 years experience in innovation, and mostly the years when I had led the innovation team for an international insurance company, taught me that it is limiting to remain captive in the process and flow of a single innovation methodology. Businesses are uniquely designed and challenged, therefor the innovation process always has to be adept to the needs and particularities of the organization not the other way around.
Most B2C businesses, in order to thrive, require large amounts of customer data and insights, and the internal capacity to generate and test novel ideas rapidly.
To do so, in my experience Design Thinking is not enough. Although Design Thinking and Lean Startup have similarities, there are differences in approach that qualify each methodology for different moments in the customer development journey.
Setting the Ground
Design Thinking is all about empathy with customers. It's a human-centered approach that starts with understanding the user's needs, then defining the problem, ideating solutions, prototyping, and testing. The key here is the emphasis on deeply understanding the customer before jumping into solutions.
Design Thinking phases: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test.
Lean Startup, on the other hand, is more about building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), measuring how it performs in the market, and learning from that to iterate quickly. The idea is to minimize waste by testing hypotheses early and often, using a build-measure-learn feedback loop.
Lean Startup phases: Build (MVP), Measure, Learn.
Design Thinking is often seen as a more exploratory, divergent process, while Lean Startup is about converging on a viable business model. So combining them actually helps create a balance between exploration and exploitation, that gives B2C businesses continuous input for incremental improvements and adjacent developments.
Here are 2 ways to integrate the 2 processes that have been tested over and over again, and worked for B2C clients.
Combo 1: the linear combination of the two methodologies. The process starts with Design Thinking and continues with Lean Startup.
The steps are:
1. Empathize: Continuously gather customer insights through interviews, surveys, observation, etc.
2. Define: Synthesize insights into problem statements or opportunity areas.
3. Ideate: Brainstorm potential solutions.
4. Prototype/MVP: Build a minimal version of the solution to test.
5. Test/Measure: Launch the MVP, measure customer responses and metrics.
6. Learn: Analyze the data to validate or invalidate hypotheses.
7. Iterate or Pivot: Based on learning, either refine the solution, pivot, or explore new ideas.
The approach in itself is not linear, because nothing in innovation is linear. To make it continuous, the process needs to loop back to Empathize after each cycle to capture new insights. Also, Lean Startup emphasizes rapid iterations, so each iteration involves a mini-cycle of Design Thinking phases followed by Lean's Build-Measure-Learn.
Combo 2: the dual track process. Design Thinking and Lean Startup run in parallel. One track focused on continuous customer discovery (Design Thinking) and another on rapid experimentation (Lean Startup). These tracks run in parallel, feeding insights into each other.
The steps are:
Phase 1: Discover (Empathize & Define)
- Use Design Thinking methods to deeply understand customer needs, pain points, and behaviors.
- Tools: Interviews, ethnography, personas, journey maps.
Phase 2: Ideate
- Generate a wide range of ideas to address the defined problems.
- Techniques: Brainstorming, SCAMPER, mind mapping.
Phase 3: Prototype (Lean Startup MVP)
- Select the most promising ideas and create low-fidelity prototypes or MVPs.
- Lean Startup's MVP concept here to test hypotheses quickly.
Phase 4: Test & Measure
- Deploy the MVP to a segment of the target market.
- Collect both qualitative feedback (as in Design Thinking's Test phase) and quantitative data (Lean's Measure phase).
Phase 5: Learn & Iterate
- Analyze data to determine if the solution meets customer needs and business goals.
- Decide to persevere, pivot, or perish (Lean's Learn phase).
Then we loop back to Phase 1 with new insights, starting the cycle again. This way, customer insights are continuously gathered, even as previous ideas are being tested.
Key Principles for Success
Dual-Track Agility: Run discovery (insight generation) and delivery (experimentation) tracks in parallel.
Rapid Cycles: Aim for 2–4-week sprints to maintain momentum.
Cross-Functional Teams: Blend designers, data scientists, and marketers for holistic problem-solving.
Psychological Safety: Encourage risk-taking and learning from failures.