 So, morning everyone. I think it's been a great morning. We had some great session from Ron earlier in the morning. Sumit shared some great stuff about the perspective from design. I'm just going to take the discussion to the next level which is and I'm sure many of you probably have as practitioners come across these two sexiest words of LinkedIn. Design thinking and lean startup. Anyone who has not heard either of them? Okay, you are in the right room then. And we keep hearing about design thinking and lean startup and bunch of stuff there and there's always this kind of thing. People throw that indiscriminately. Why don't you try with design thinking? We are using lean startup and then there are some people who say we do both of them. What does it even mean actually? How do you really decide whether one is better than other and one is suitable than other in a given context there? So these are some of the thoughts that I thought why not we discuss some of them? Are they really friends? Do they really go on together hand in hand or they are foes? They really are orthogonal to each other. Their goals are really orthogonal and there's no way you can really learn from each other. So these are the things that we'll talk in the next half an hour or so and then we'll have time for the Q&A. My name is Tathagat Verma. I am an independent consultant. I work on basically product development organizations with agility, innovation, leadership and bunch of these areas. You can go to my blog, read about it. I'll not fill in with that. So let's get started here. How many of you solve problems here? Can you raise your hand? We all solve problems here. Does anyone would like to share how do they solve problems? Is there like what's your typical problem solving pattern? Anyone? Brainstorming. So you come up with, you basically, brainstorming is used for what purpose? If I can ask you. To come up with ideas, to come up with solutions, come again? Workshops. So what kind of workshops are these? You are looking at various, you're getting all the people in the room and talking about various. It's a group discussion kind of thing. So I'm sure that's probably one part of the whole problem solving, which is like brainstorming is you're coming up with a lot of them. If you could be using the workshop, are there any other things? We need to understand the problem very well, right? If we don't even understand what is the right problem, we're probably going to be solving a wrong problem. And we might be world class in solving the problem, but turns out that nobody wants a solution. And I'll talk about it. One of the big challenges that we see, I spent a lot of time with the startups. And one of the big challenges I see with the startup community, at least in India and in Bangalore is we have a, we have a lot of techie startups. You know what that means? I'm talking about that with a little bit of condescending tone here. The techie startups are, oh, I have this great solution, which I can hack together with Hadoop and big data and all that thing. And this is now I have built a solution. Now that is a solution in search of a problem. Which problem can I go and solve now? Have you seen one of those? Do you work for one of those? Okay, I'm taking that as no. The point is, a lot of times we really think that I can, I am a great coder, so I can really build that solution there. But I don't even know what is the problem I'm trying to solve here. So I very rightly said, unless we really calibrate what problem we want to solve, our effort might be futile. And we'll see. I mean, there are, there is, there is hard numbers to actually tell us how a lot of these startup die because of that kind of thinking there. Okay, anyone else? Anything else that you do when you solve the problem? Five Y might be a great way to do a root cause analysis. Why is that happening? Why is that happening really? The, you know, there is a the more popular management style is not a five wise, it is five who's, right? And that's why it makes a lot of sense, because most of the time, the leaders and managers are like, who screwed up? Okay, so who really slept on the job? Who did not do their job? So five wise, you don't realize the importance of five wise until you have been in a very toxic environment where the only questions are five who's, right? And that's when we so five wise is a great thing. It depersonalizes it. It's, it's, it's like taking the people and personality away from it and really focusing on what the problem is, which is the key part of that anything else anyone else? Come again. Fishbone diagram could be another way to really understand the cause and effect there. Fair enough. Mine mapping could be a great way to kind of, especially if it's a very unstructured kind of information, we are dealing with kind of give a visual language to it. So that might be the one come again. trial and error trial and error is a great idea. Actually, there's nothing wrong in that. A lot of times we look at it with a lot of contempt. But a lot of times trial and error might actually be a great way to get started there. We have just been able to refine some of the trial and error approach with some of these ideas that we'll talk about anything that we missed out. User empathy maps, prototyping, right? So a lot of these are all of them are right answers, by the way. And we'll try to understand how we actually put them. So I'm going to talk about these two ways in which we do that. Let's start with the first precursor to that. Now the problem is when we are trying to solve unknown, unknown kind of problems. None of them is really laid out on the table, as in like tuck, tuck, tuck, step one, two, three, four kind of a thing. Quite often, the problems really resemble what we call as a design squiggle. And a design squiggle essentially means that when we are starting with the uncertainty, the pattern is really very chaotic in nature. It doesn't really follow a very linear pattern of problem solving. So there is no way you can really say that you do a step one, step two, step three, step four kind of a thing. Think of it this way. How many of you know how to make a cup of tea here? Pretty much everyone, we kind of know the recipe. Step one, take water in the kettle, put it on the gas, turn on the gas, da, da, da, like the step one, two, three, it's kind of clear, right? But suppose you, we are all living in a world where the tea has not been discovered yet. Nobody knows, nobody quite knows how to make cup of tea. And we are all, we have all entered in MasterChef and we are all trying to make our own cup of tea. Would you be having, would all of us be having the same formula here? We would not probably have it, right? We would all have a different formula for making a cup of tea. And over a period of, as a gentleman in the back said, over a period of trial and error, we would stumble upon what is a, what is a better pattern for a cup of tea. But until such time, we would really be, we will be in the woods here. We quite don't know what really is going to work there. But once it is kind of known how to make a cup of tea, then that recipe is kind of straightforward. Now I know even with the same recipe, I can guarantee that 90% of us will actually successfully manage to screw up a cup of tea, right? And it depends on that. I might be making, I might be able, but something goes wrong that day because there's a lot of subjectivity in that. But by and large, the pattern that you are referring to is the ability to come up with a recipe for making a cup of tea versus an ability to follow the recipe are two dramatically different competencies. This, if I take the same, same parlance here, this is what a cook will do. A cook will be able to follow, a great cook would be able to follow the recipe extremely well. But this is not a cook's job. This is a chef's job. A chef would not follow a recipe. A chef would make a recipe. And that is a big difference in the mindset and the competencies needed between us. A lot of times, in fact, the ills of software industry for the last 50 years are that we have taken this, which is like a production method, and we have applied it to software development, which is a design problem. And that's the reason why we have all the problems in software industry. We have not recognized that when we are doing some new creation of an idea or a new creation of a product, we need to solve this problem first before we get to the right side of things there. So we'll talk about these two ways in which how we can manage this uncertainty. How do we really look at this complexity? Let's start with the first one, design thinking. I'm not going to do a primer on design thinking. I'm just going to run over some of the things. I'm assuming most of you are familiar with that. But I'll spend more time in comparing and contrasting design thinking and lean stardom. But essentially, if we see design thinking as a construct has been around for about 40, 50 years. In fact, most people believe that formally as a discipline, it kind of started with a guy of name Rob MacKinn in Stanford University in the 70s. He was in mechanical engineering department and they used to build stuff inside the lab. And that's where it kind of started and there were other people and then David Kelly was a professor at Stanford in the mechanical engineering and David Kelly went out and created IDO and stuff like that. So a lot of work really kind of started because people wanted to develop physical tangible products. It's an important distinction because when we come to lean startup, we'll be able to compare and contrast what are the big differences we're talking about here. I think design thinking is not just a an approach for fixing or solving problems. It is even an approach for finding the problems here. What do I mean by that? Sorry, come again. It's an understanding we need to be able to understand what is the issue we want to solve. Is that even a right problem we are solving? For all we know it could be a wrong problem and we are putting all our dollars in time and energy into that. It's a great construct for poorly bounded problem. Things that are not absolutely clear carved out in stone. How do we do that kind of stuff? Some of you might have heard of this, heard the name of Doug Deets. Doug Deets was a product designer at G Healthcare and for 20 years of his career at G Healthcare, he built the CT and the MR scanners. And one of his life defining moments was when he was standing outside a CT machine and there was this man who came with a six year old daughter and the daughter had like big tears rolling down her cheek. She was scared to enter that room and that room was actually the MR scanner and daddy was telling, hey honey we talked about that at home, you got to go there, they need to scan and this girl was crying. And Doug Deets for the life of him could not understand what was wrong with that because he was the guy who was who had been making these machines for a living and he wanted to believe that we are building machines that are saving lives of people and children. And then he searched more about it and he found that 90% of the children have to be sedated when they get on to an MR scanner table. Any of you been on an MR table? I wish none of you have to get but can you relate to that experience? You are on a cold metallic machine, you are 40 minutes and imagine a six year old child has to do that kind of thing. They cannot lie down, they have to be sedated right? So what Doug Deets was totally unimaginable. He basically did not, he said what is the problem we are trying to solve here? And he basically came up with a new series of GE healthcare machines that are known as adventure series. If you just search for them and find it on the net, just look for the images, you would be blown away by what you see that. None of them resemble, they all look like the Disney theme kind of a thing and if I didn't tell you the background behind it, you would think that this is the latest attraction at the Disney park. That's the way they did that right? So what problem, this was not a clearly crafted problem. You had to literally have to call out the right problem out of this noise and say what problem are we trying to solve here? So that's a great example of design thinking in application here. High emphasis on need finding of users. Need finding is an important part in design thinking. We don't go with the arrogance of saying I know everything about you. We go with the humility of saying I don't really know anything about you but I would like to sit down with you and learn more about how do you what kind of problems do you face. I don't go with the attitude of a salesman. A salesman attitude is I know everything. Let me just go and stuff that with the noise and let me sell something to you. We go with the attitude of an anthropologist. We go with the attitude of an ethnographer. Somebody who is really interested to say okay I just want to have, I'm like a catalyst in a chemical reaction. I don't react with the substance, I just stay there right and I'm not going to have, I'm not even a catalyst for that matter because I'm not accelerating that process. I'm just being a fly on the wall kind of a thing. So need finding becomes a very important thing because the whole design thinking crux is all about what problems do people have. How can we solve it. If Doug Deets did not have the humility to understand why that six-year-old girl was crying. He would never have come up with the solution and G healthcare would never have found created a new kind of way of solving the problem. Insights lead to reframing the problem. We believe that learning will only be useful if we are willing to kind of adapt our own position about what problem we are solving. Because when the, to me learning has a very, learning is a very interesting thing. My definition of learning is learning happens when the reality does not agree with your expectation. Everything else is just BS. You think that if I if I leave it it's going to drop. But what if instead of dropping it, it actually starts floating up in the air. If it drops is there a learning in that? Probably not because in the in the high school you all have read about gravity. But if I leave it here and it starts floating it up. Now that's a learning as Linus Pauling said now that we have a contradiction we have a hope for making progress unless we have a contradiction we cannot make learning. So a learning that only reinforces what you already came in with what you already know in the beginning of this session will be useful if I do not really shake up some of your mental models. Right because you already know them there's no learning involved in that. So in design thinking we believe that any of these things are really all about reframing and how do we really solve what problem we are solving here. And prototyping is a means to really expedite the learning process. We are trying to build the prototype because one of the big things about design thinking is actually the word design thinking is wrong. It tends to give that softy, gooey, touchy, feely thing that hey a lot of people are sitting there in a corner room and they are not answerable to anything they are just doing a bunch of thinking. Hey what are you doing thinking what did you do yesterday we did some more thinking actually. Right and what are you going to do tomorrow we'll do some more thinking right. It gives a wrong impression that design thinking is all about thinking it's actually about bias towards action that's one of the big mindset there. So we are really interested in building something we are really building believe we really believe in making something there. And that's what really is prototyping all about and that gives rise to the learning because unless we really put something see there is a study there was one of the articles in scientific American that said we get about 30,000 ideas every day individually. I mean that's like literally every few seconds we have an idea like why this is like this which should have been purple this attitude should have been Italian Marvel something that bunch of ideas most of these ideas die premature unceremonious death because we don't act on that. Some of these ideas we do decide to act on that and we exchange the ideas we work on them we built something there but guess what if they remain in your mind they are useless. Honestly speaking that is the worst thing to do because the idea dies with you. But if you build something and you put it out on the table and as we say one of the mindset in design thinking is show don't tell. Just leave it on the table just leave it as you're going by and see how people respond to that. Do they look at it with curiosity? Do they look at it with like wow this is something I would like to touch and feel and and probably I want to see what is this all about I want to probably buy that kind of stuff. So that is when you learn from people. Oh is that is this really speaking for itself is it really inviting attention is it making people say I want to pick this item from this island I want to buy this and put it in my shopping cart. That is the kind of learning that you learn from there. And we test the prototypes to validate these hypotheses. So we believe that we don't quite know everything as I said in the beginning we are going with the humility of a learner not an arrogance of a learned and at that point in time we say do we actually understand what we believe we understand and and how do we know that we are so we are validating some of that stuff there and iteration is a lot of times people get it wrong. I think this is this is a uniform error I have seen in the whole agile community a lot of people who start the journey. They think agile means I'm going to now deliver faster. I think agile is actually a way for you to expedite the feedback more than anything else because you want to really calibrate where you want to go and you want to constantly keep realigning whether you are in the right direction and and guess what your direction keep it's a moving target so you have to keep readjusting that so design thinking a similar construct here. So these are some of the stuff and when we represented purely from an from an experiential I think Sumit did a great job in the previous session talking about the whole experience part of that. We often represent that in three circles here in the Venn diagram kind of a thing that we say the core thing is really all about people. Design thinking people are in the center of the equation we don't want to build it for machines if you have to build it for machines we don't need design thinking because machines can actually talk to each other there is no uncertainty in communication there are no vagaries in behavior they can actually they work on protocols which are more finite state machines. So you can when you design for machines you're not really talking about desirability I mean machines don't stop serving you if you're buying from an automated teller machine that they don't like your face or they don't like the shoe that you are wearing right it doesn't happen like that and then technology viability if it is not viable we might be building a pine the sky it might be a great idea but then it is like a it's like from the future we don't really quite know how to how to realize that idea and end of the day we want to make money out of it unless you want to run it like a kingfisher airlines which I hope none of you want to you want to make money out of it and there's nothing obscene about making money the point is I mean look at the whole startup community today two years back there was this all kind of VC money pouring in today in the last one year all the money VC money is dried up and the and the startups have no clue how to really create so there is a focus on unit economics some of you might be following a lot of e-commerce startups there right big bloated profit and loss statement more towards loss than profit to be honest right and that's a big problem so in design thinking what we are looking at is really striking the right balance between the viability the desirability feasibility and the ability part of it so these are just basically kind of focusing on what is important here is there a process to design thinking there is a slight process we don't really call it as a process process as in oh it's an ISO process or a six sigma process but there is a flow and it that flow could be very different in your case than mine but by and large it kind of follows this kind of a thinking we invariably start with empathy unless we really understand about people we don't believe that we should even be solving we don't even know what problem we are going to solve here right then we go into a defined phase of this define actually is a very interesting phase here and just mark the shape of these bubbles here there's a purpose why the shape of these bubbles is if you see empathy is like you try to go as an ethnographer like I said and you go there and really learn about the whole thing and then you try to kind of squeeze that in and say what did we really learn out of it now you might have started out with an initial problem statement which is dramatically different now it has changed by the time you have come back with the real world learning from there and then you again blow it up which is what we call is the divergent thinking and then you come up with bunch of these crazy wild ideas which could be a brainstorming it could be a body storming it could be workshops what have you all the ways of basically looking at it and we know it that not all the ideas are going to fly but the reason why we still do that is because if some of you might have read the original book by Alex Osborne I think you wrote that book in the in the 50s on brainstorming he was the father of brainstorming one of the big things he said which we which we have summarily dismissed in the last 70 years of industrial use of brainstorming is don't reject the ideas prematurely and guess what the brainstorming the way it is actually present in most of the industry is so corrupted and it's not a surprise that it doesn't work right so in fact the idea if you just want to pick up a sound bite there is something known as brain writing which is which has been proven as a better method than brainstorming and that's what has been found to be more effective irrespective of that you ideated and then you come to prototyping and prototyping is simply a mechanism for you to the I think idea calls it as thinking thinking with your hands I think that's the phrase they use they say brains prototyping is thinking with your hands most of the time the thinking is staying in the mind and we don't quite know how to use that how to get around with something like that and then finally we need to test it that's where rubber meets the road the idea is useless if it stays in the lab the idea only is good if it really goes out in the road and fights it out by itself there so that's like a very high level view at least the flow of how a design thinking process kind of works there right now let's keep moving and look at lean startup briefly and see how that works there lean think the lean startup movement kind of started it evolved from building successful IT startup now let me qualify that for a moment how many startups do you think succeed or how many do you think fail let's start with that that's that's a bigger number majority as in you want to put a number to that like most of the people said 90 percent types and that's probably an understatement because most of the startups who probably get funded or who are incorporated that's a number we are talking about I'm sure there's probably 2x to 5x of the numbers that that are like you and I sitting over a beer and saying let's do something and by the time the beer effects are over the startup is also over does that happen to you guys right so that's so now the problem is and when you look at it and there's there are like tons of studies done on why startups fail and consistently they have come up with one single metric on that which is like if you go to the project startup genome which was 2 years back they did to 3000 failed startup they came up with one single reason premature scaling and then there was this study I think done by product hunt which 100 and so what they did was they took 101 obituaries of of the startups so these were like founders like you and I who like they said okay I'm done with that who who else is going to write an obituary of my startup I will do it myself right so they went out and and took to blogging and they wrote it and these guys saw 101 of those obituaries and they came up and said 42% of them said there was no market for the product they were classically exactly what I was telling you earlier this was a problem solution in search of a problem they built some cool sexy stuff that they could not sell they could not find the market another 20% said they ran out of money what does it mean ran out of money ran out of money simply means that you had a product that you could not sell and somebody shut off that the the tap after that like guys now you're on like you do anything I mean you you get to beg borrowers still but there's no there's no money coming in right you're not been able to get it from the customer so what these guys said how do we really turn that around there's a lot of waste in that now waste again a lot of people berate the the term waste I have a little different take on that to me waste is a pattern that is only visible based on the results of what you have done by itself waste is actually a very neutral thing it's an activity now so unless you have walked the whole nine yards and gone to the other side of the bridge and you know whether that activity was successful or not you are not in a position to even qualify whether what you did was a waste or not which essentially means that the pattern of waste can only be curled out after you have walked that path a couple of times right so I know that how do I make a car I can now make a car there and I can say okay these are the things like Toyota kind of a thinking oh this is taking two seconds more this is taking five seconds more that's a waste I know it because that pattern leads to a delay in my overall pattern of car making but if I'm creating Mona Lisa picture for the first time or I've never done that kind of thing or I'm building Twitter for the first time how do I know what's a waste there when I'm actually walking on the forward path not after I'm doing a post-mortem not after I'm doing a retrospective not after I'm doing a five wise as I'm walking can you actually tell me whether I'm actually doing something wrong or not I bet you cannot because waste is a pattern that's only visible after you have walked the journey there so these guys came up with the lean thinking which they said hey we know it the nature of the beast is these will fail that kind of stuff so why don't we really think in this way that we are quickly validating what you're doing so that hopefully it's anything that you make a mistake will not get you short will not get you fired it's only one day lost or two days lost kind of a thing there so waste we will still have there which we will even in a lean startup world know only from the results of it but we will try to minimize it so much so that your runway to the waste is like kind of very small here it offers a scientific approach to entrepreneurship when I say scientific approach if you go back to Francis Bacon I mean like 1600 the whole scientific method that came out resulting in all the scientific discovery was essentially a closed loop system we owe everything that we learned as a human society to basically that closed loop system we took that in 20th century to what we started calling as the Deming cycle PDCA right some of you might be familiar with the plan to check and act it will not even Deming who did that it was Deming's guru Shuhard who basically came up with that today we have a new version of that from Eric Reese which we call as the build measure learn loop essential thinking is still the same you take a hypothesis you find out whether there is data that supports that hypothesis how do you know that you do an experimentation with that and if it works you reinforce it if it doesn't work you change your hypothesis whatever at the very fundamental so it basically now entrepreneurship was considered as a black magic you were like that super cool dude who was born with the proverbial silver spoon who was like oh this guy whatever he or she touches with becomes gold and there was nobody able to deconstruct that you can actually follow a scientific principle to successful entrepreneurship which is what Eric was able to do the startup is actually often called as an experiment if I have to just think on a lighter way startup is an experiment done on others money right you don't do it on your money and it so startup is a grand experiment to know whether there is a opportunity to build a business model like this or not now mind you startup does not seek to answer can we build this product startup seeks to build to find the answer for should we build the product and that's a big difference between these two right and the focus is on learning so we learn from really doing these experiments we start with building early minimum viable products I'm sure that's a vocabulary very common in today's context we tested frequently using the build measure learn loops we validate learning using actionable metrics right so Eric actually makes a differentiation between vanity metrics and actionable metrics what is vanity metrics you don't even you have no freaking clue why people came and bought your product actionable metric you are able to associate cause and effect you say okay I did this that's the reason why there was an uptake in the in the traffic I did this that's why we were like apple is a great case in India three years back apple didn't sell that well in India iPhone especially and they did something which actually led to forex growth that year itself anyone knows what's that no this is much before the three years back kind of a story so they actually came up with EMI like we all know India loves EMI right we can sell anything on EMI in India so when apple came up with that they did not so that's a clearly attributable cause and effect because the product specs are same operating system is same apps are same pricing is same apple doesn't change the pricing but the way they were selling it was and they were able to do so that's an actionable metric it's not a vanity metric like GOK metric you know the GOK metric God only knows I have no clue why this is happening it's a GOK metric right so you build a system of innovation accounting to demonstrate progress now in a stable project the progress can be shown traditionally by number of lines of code number of lines of document number of hours number of pizzas have you heard of the pizza metric it was very common in 90s like if you want to know how much hard the team is working out in a number of pizza boxes outside like that kind of stuff there so but what the lean startup practitioner said when all we are doing our experiments and we are doing these 200 experiments how do we demonstrate the progress because 90% of these experiments are really going to fail there so they came up with this whole concept of innovation accounting where you actually create kind of a funnel and say well how are your ideas really proceeding in your funnel because we still don't know which of them will make money but we still want to really understand how many experiments you are doing how many of them are succeeding and so on and so forth there and that's the kind of a progress and fine tune the model business model using pivots pivot was that interesting concept that came into our vocabulary which was like hey we are pivoting it's like it's almost like you can visualize if you close your eyes you are seeing a pair really dancing a couple dancing a ballroom dancing and they are like pivoting here another direction there so pivoting became that interesting construct for the products to do that and then we said well this is the holy grail you need to establish product market fit and product market fit became this kind of a fuzzy nebulous term but then a lot of people starting from from Anderson and other people have really done a great job in doing a sense of that is when you see money consistently coming into your bank account that's when you have a product market fit end of the day that's what I mean no more discussion about it but how do you get to that point and then you kind of start scaling the business here so this was the kind of a thing and what were the big constructs in lean startups well typically it started with a founder's vision and that was a very common pattern that we saw a lot of times the IT startups really started from a founder's vision I have a vision that the world needs a better search engine right and you got Google I have a vision that the world needs a better social networking Facebook is born they didn't go out to people they didn't go out and say I survey monkey and they didn't go out to say hey what do you want what do you want they didn't go out interviewing people they basically said I have a conviction I have a deep belief that the world has a place even though like when for example MySpace had 200 million people and they were like the king somebody thought of it and said I think there is a place for having a better social network so invariably we see in the lean startup world the conversations kind of starting from the founder's vision here this goes on to then the next thing is about business model like I said a startup is really not about a startup is really all about building a new business which we are saying should this business be built it has to have a business model and this is also a segue into some of you who are familiar with the business model canvas from Alexander Osterwalder right so this is a way it's a visual language for us to see what are the moving parts of the business whether you are a 400 billion dollar or you are a two people business every business you can pretty much represent into those nine boxes here and then we go on and really build the MVPs so what we do is we scull out the riskiest assumptions in the business model canvas and which is what we really would like to validate here with our MVP now an MVP is a very interesting construct because a lot of times again I see people making mistake and saying MVP is what will give me my revenue faster nothing could be further from truth an MVP is something that's going to only make your your feedback expedited I think that's an important part of it okay this only shows that I'm using a legal version of the antivirus which I have no way of sorry I think I need to alright so sorry for that we go to MVP what do we do with the MVP we subject it to a build measure learn loop which means we are putting that into a very close ended tight loop and we are trying to learn whether our hypothesis is holding up or not what do we do after that that results into validated learning because now we know for sure because these are actionable metrics what does that mean I'm able to attribute cause and effect by doing it I go to the next one which is my innovation accounting system my innovation accounting system takes me to the to the eventual question of pivot or procedure which means we have been doing it are we getting the results should we continue down that path or there is a need for us to kind of change the way there and then finally if we have product market fit we have the fireworks right because that's when you really can celebrate we have found out the way to consistently make money that's what is product market fit all about we know the markets we know the pain point we know how to sell we know what the channels we know the pricing structure we know the revenue stream we know how much it's going to take for us to do that key activity key resource and now we can sell them it doesn't need somebody with an extra extra charisma to kind of go and sell that it doesn't mean me to call my uncle who will call somebody's father-in-law to get the business that means personal relations are taken out of the equation it is the merit of the product and the problem the pain point and we have understood that fit very well here and then finally we go get to the point of scaling up so this is like in few bubbles I would say this is what is really the whole lean startup kind of a thing there because you want to scale up only when you have really accomplished the product market fit now these are the two models I just wanted to kind of walk through both of them let's see what are the similarities here at a very high level both seem to have a focus on needs on the user needs slight distinction design thinking really talks about user it doesn't really or human actually even better term for that but in lean startup you would probably talk more about customer I mean lean startup itself came from Steve blanks customer development model so customer is a construct more from a business kind of a thing there but nevertheless they both are really looking at how do we innovate around the needs of people that is really the key part of that they both expect uncertainties we don't expect things will be known to us we think it will be fuzzy we'll have to work around it we'll have to really discover the whole thing there and really keep moving from there so they both focus start early and make stuff none of them is really all about power pointing none of them is really about pontificating on something like I said sat in a corner and saying we are doing thinking we are design thinking they believe in making the stuff there they both believe in building scrappy prototypes none of them say we should get a million dollars on the table and then we'll build this fancy stuff in stealth mode in fact stealth mode is really the uh... the antithesis for both of them they don't want to they believe lean explicitly is all about removing waste from the from the system and it's like instead of really validating something at the end of uh... eighteen months and then saying though that was a bad million dollar that we invested why not try to identify the riskiest hypothesis that we can validate starting tomorrow or next week or next month in fraction of the cost and if the idea is really bad enough then let's kill it sooner than later why do we want to persist with that with the bad pain here so they both kind of look at building the scrappy prototype validate from frequent iterations is common in both of them we are we are trying to uh... establish the learning point and learn and proceed as a common theme we don't want to proceed or we don't want to invest or commit dollars when we have not really been uh... we have not validated whether that's the right direction or not so these are the similarities now let's look at some other dissimilarities i don't want to call it as dissimilarities i prefer to use the term strengths both have their own strengths and that's what let's talk about and another two slides will be done with that so i hope that's visible from the back but sorry about it because that's a busy slide there are about nine categories that i curl out and so let's look at the vision design thinking we are trying to solve a problem in lean startup we are trying to build a business that's a big difference and because solving a problem could be that it's your neighborhood parking problem and you want to solve that problem and you might apply or you might employ design thinking as a mechanism as a means for you to kind of solve the problem you don't have to build a business around that but lean startup is a more structured approach to really kind of build the business around that the kind of problems we solve in design thinking we typically take the category or class of problems known as wicked problem now wicked problems is actually a term that came out in seventy three by a u k uh... uh... uh... social scientist who came up with ten parameters and said social problems don't lend themselves very well to the predictable class of problem for example the outcome is not known i mean some of you for example in india we saw we actually probably created the world's biggest public health program when we achieved success in the polio program and took us what fifty years to get rid of the last known case of polio that's a social problem because we struggled year after year year after year just to get rid of it and a country with one point two billion people how do you make sure all the children under the age of five were given the oral vaccination on the same day because that is the medical science behind it if any child is left behind there's a possibility of transmitting the polio virus through the human excreta so they had to make sure that it had to be done there can you actually sit down in a in a room like this and fancy whiteboard and stuff uh... and say this is how we are going to solve the problem not just just not going to happen there we don't quite know the solution to a wicked problem until we have kind of solved the problem that is that's an element of that sorry but here we are talking about high-tech products which is how it kind of the genesis of uh... lean starter was when eric used to work at imbu that was like one of the examples and then a lot of examples that we see but they all came from a lot of high-tech products even though today lean startup as a as a thinking is being applied beyond what started out with just like an agile kind of started we said it this is like a small project something now we are saying hey does agile work for my for for for my uh... a for my woodcar carpentry work also it's like does it work in education people are trying it out but the genesis of that was similarly here kind of it the mindset is really about problem discovery and need finding you cannot be a good design thinker if you are not really having the right level of respect see there is a there are there are two words in english beautiful words one is judgment not so beautiful word but the second word is discern and discern is a beautiful word because what happens is when we are judging i am i am actually implicitly i'm implicating you actually i'm saying hey that means you are they do you don't know how to do that i'm actually judging you from that but when i'm saying i'm discerning it and saying then i'm actually giving you the right respect as a problem so i'm saying yeah these are the these are the innate difficulties i recognize them i'm not really blaming you and i'm not attributing it to you if people do not know how to use x y z i'm not blaming them for saying they are low tech people i'm saying i respect the fact that these people actually have the problem how can i solve it now right i mean it's very easy for me to say oh why don't we like for example some of you might have heard of this project litter of light litter of light is a wonderful project those who have not heard just do a google on that basically they said there are slums in argentina and philippines and mumbai and and all over the world which don't get a ray of sunlight ever and they said the there are people who are born in darkness and they have never seen a ray of light in those houses and they said how can we solve the problem and they people like you and i will say why don't you give them solar light why don't we give them x y z we give them cheap light and somebody came up with that hey why don't you take a Pepsi bottle put some baking soda put some clear water hang it on the roof and you will have 55 watts of electricity available to them and that's why that is that's a life changer for those people people in in vietnam have persistently had the problem with anemia they had low iron for example and they said how do we solve the problem and traditionally every civilization in the world has cooked in iron and they said hey iron is because of the modernization we are not using iron that much so how do we solve the problem they said let's make a cube of iron or something so people actually put it in the stew that they are doing and they because of the boiling of that the iron will come there sounds an audacious idea but guess what only those audacious ideas have a chance in that world right and they they eventually came up and they came up with this concept known as the lucky goldfish just search for the lucky goldfish that's a so they said Cambodia fish is a lucky symbol people would people would hate putting a blob of metal there but if something is shaped like a beautiful fish they don't mind doing it so they actually built that solution and now people in the vietnam they basically what they do is when they are doing the cooking and stew anything they drop that iron fish easy to clean easy to maintain doesn't rust there and they get all the iron that needed for their diet by just dipping that inside the food being done there so you are not really even you don't even know what problem you are solving until you have really gone there as I said like an anthropologist who goes without any kind of uh... overbearing or any kind of a uh... judgmental attitude and saying okay let's let's understand what are the design patterns that have evolved and and sustained over thousands of years of civilization can they build something around that maybe maybe there is an opportunity in a lean start of world we are really looking more on founders vision I am the boss I am the one who has really got I've got seventy two percent stake in the company I am the one who is doing the hard deal with sequoia so I will I will I call the shots I mean that kind of thinking because I know what problem we want to solve that good or bad that's exactly how we would look at that or a product in hand I have this idea I want to this build this product I don't even know at this point in time whether the world needs that product or not I'll give you an example Amazon great company wonderful products there two years back came up with this idea that we want to build this we want to build this smart phone Amazon fire anyone remembers that probably the most advanced phone ever made for front cameras they actually triangulate into a 3d projection and all they started selling it in May of twenty fifteen for two hundred dollars after one month they were selling at one dollar and nobody was buying it because nobody wanted a one seventy million dollar phone if you read about that thing it's like even the great companies can screw up like that right because they they were focused on building a product which they thought was the right product for the for them there was a product in hand but as a design thinker I would probably want to start with that whom am I solving the problem for what are the issues there do they even need that kind of a thing for all we care they don't need a product like that they need something else there am I willing to change my position there approach the approach is more qualitative in in in uh... design thinking where it is more quantitative in lean startup so we are really focusing on we look we're trying to really talk about more of emotions of people how do they really respond to something how many clicks happened how many conversions happened what is the ctr when i used to work at yahoo one of the big things that yahoo that we would always look at it what is the click through rates or what is the adoption of the page view of the time spent so we're looking at these hard metrics for each of that stuff how much can i measure so i do an experiment i'm saying okay my ctr was one point two seven percent does my ctr go from one point two seven two one point three percent one point eight percent then i know that i have statistically made some movement there that's a big difference in my view from a qualitative to quantitative from intuitive to analytical that's a big shift in in how we look at it the focus is more human centered and users here it is more engineering driven it tends to be more engineering driven because the example that we have seen invariably come from tech world there it doesn't have to be like that it's just i'm just positioning it the way it see the hypothesis tends to be here it seems to be more generative and explorative in nature we really want to see okay what are the possibilities how could we do things differently here what would happen if we did something like that and here we are really looking at validating and experimenting okay if we did this what's going to happen here right that that kind of stuff the inquiry tends to be more ethnographic more open-ended here it is more problem statements and actionable metrics there's a big difference between the ethnography versus actionable metric because in ethnography we are not even saying whether it's good or bad all we are saying is i'm a fly on the wall and i want to really learn about how you do the stuff there you might do what we call as mobile ethnography which is a new thing which is like take my mobile camera with me and keep clicking pictures right and that is actually how i'm summarizing how you really respond to the system there's no metrics it's just recording the behavior here so learning is really here when we learn the learning is really fed into reframing the problem because we have learned it the insights are available what do we do with that learning by itself is useless if we don't act on that how we act on that is reframing the problem and how we act on this in a lean startup world is really pivoting on that so we are kind of calibrating and we are going in the right direction finally in my way if i have to summarize everything else together in one single word i would say the theme of design thinking is empathy to me at the end of it design thinking is simply about empathy there are n number of ways of solving a problem but i think the one thing that it really is is most distinguishing feature is all about empathy on the other hand lean startup came up in the world of IT solutions and speed became a big enabler there and some of you might have read the blue book erics blue book right the lean startup and one of the things he says the most successful people of the company in the future will not be the company that deliver fastest but they will be the learn who learn the fastest so speed is implicitly and explicitly kind of a big big deal in in the whole lean startup world they're right so so this is how i i kind of summarize this uh... things there so let's ask the the the question here is design thinking versus lean startup is that the debate we are talking about or do you think that the narrative is probably design thinking and lean startup what do you guys think do you think there's an opportunity to kind of have them together if you came with the intention that we are going to have a bashing session they are sorry you came to the wrong session right idea was not to really bash and say which one of them right and again where does agile fit into that anyone has any thoughts on that right because one of the big things that actually agile doesn't explicitly talk about in that sense and kind of left us to fend for ourselves is like let's say for example okay scams as you should have product backlog who the health prepares the product backlog where does it come is it like is it like one fine day you get up in the morning and you have a product backlog like how do you even get to that point right so so that kind of a thing there so there are ideas and if i just take and i have shamelessly picked this up from a gardener slide here i think it's it's kind of a very interesting thing because it kind of starts from the design thinking on the left here and you kind of start from some of these ideas of empathizing and then from a concrete time because you are trying to really live in a real world you get into the abstract world of kind of defining articulating the problem ideating on that and then you again come to the boundary where you then you get kind of lean startup mode of thinking where you kind of do the experiments in a bill measure learn loop right so this is the bill measure learn loop that is happening here and you are making iterations in that now and and then basically now whatever is the successful outcome of those i don't want to use the term stories i don't want to use the term backlog but whatever is the successful outcome of the patterns of problem they could be feeding into what eventually becomes your product backlog right so when you are basically looking at new to the world one dot o like totally new new stuff and you are starting on a clean slate invariably scrum will tell you how to start here but actually if you are if you are really doing something for the first time you might want to consider how how do you even get to that point how do you now it's very easy for you to just come up with any orbit list here but how do you systematically validate them how do you kind of go through the whole idea of empathy especially if your products have a very high touch feel kind of thing with the human beings and then how do you systematically validate it so that there is a clear attributable cause and effect between them which is what is probably going to lead you to uh... to the backlog it i won't call it is a backlog to me it's a feeder to the backlog it's actually something that's that's helping you converge into the backlog better okay let me let me recap here i think in my mind it's not about or it's about and i think both of them have a place they have complementary role they might have commonality and overlap of methods but don't let that fool you because i think these are serving different kind of needs in the problem-solving apparatus that we have here design thinking offers great guidance on uncovering human needs and identifying the right problem i think that's to me no no doubt in my mind by doing a a by by donning the hat of a design thinker like that did it for g health care as an example you can actually come to the right point of what problem should we be solving here and identifying uh... that there on the other end in startup can actually help you proceed on the journey by providing a framework for systematically validating the solution hypothesis in very fast because you need to find a way to really say whether okay does it look like a pie in the sky or can i actually is it is it going to work there do i have data to prove or is it just my gut feeling there as a founders uh... vision or hypothesis there and finally to me i think what's going to help you is really an integrated approach it's not about or it's not about saying this is better than this i think the way i look at the toolkit is each one of us should be looking at it and these all these things should be another toolkit and saying okay this problem it can be applied some of these ideas and really solve it better rather than saying oh no my current method does not allow me to talk to the other method i mean if you are if you are getting caught into that trap of saying oh my current method doesn't allow me to talk to other method you should be throwing away that method in my view you should really be embracing the the best of it because you are not paid uh... salary from by the people who created the framework you are paid by salary and lunch by the people who who are buying your solution don't care to be honest what problem of framework do you use they care about the solution you give right with that i think i'll stop here uh... been forty five minutes i don't know how much time i have for the q and a here okay but thanks a lot for a patient hearing i hope it was available thank you if you have one or two questions so actually eric has even in when he talks about it here he has alluded to the fact that they have learned ideas from uh... design thinking as well design thinking just evolved by itself in another world and lean uh... start up kind of evolved around some of the ideas within the it be a startup there they have borrowed design thinking has been a precursor in that sense but lean start up is definitely use some ideas on that so maybe it has some something that i won't know whether it to call it as an umbrella or not but definitely they are they have some commonality uh... i think you had i would say that at some point in time you'll have to if you are a product owner you'll have to determine how do i do my product delivery if nobody's giving you a product backlog ready made you'll have to create your own these are two good approaches to think of some problem might be more human centric point of view and they actually help you to start with design thinking is some of them maybe you're building it tech product like a drop box for example where you believe the technological complexity of the different type maybe want to start with that compare and contrasted i would i don't think there is a one-size-fit-all prescription but definitely some of them would be needed pre-scrum to to kind of uh... do that thing yeah i can do that i think i need to we can probably catch offline thank you once again