 Hello everyone. Hi, I'm Joy and today I'm going to talk about design thinking mindset now before we deep dive into the topic I'd like to introduce myself. So I'm a product lead in in checkout products in PayPal A big background. I did my electronics engineering from an IT surat. I started as a technologist. I played various role like technical lead architect Then moved on to the engineering management. And that's when there was a lot of curiosity while I was building a lot of products That why do we build products? Whom do we build it for? What do we what determines what feature goes in first? What are the prioritization process? And that's where I kind of started experimenting with the product management and finally moved into product management I also did my MBA finance, but that's just to gain more knowledge Alright, then let's go straight into the today's topic Now in order to understand the design thinking mindset, let's go through some of the contextual topics so that it is easy to flow through and get an understanding So what is the product design? We'll understand that. We'll also know what is design thinking What are the challenges faced in design thinking? Then we'll see if we have a design thinking framework or a pattern which is available and easy to use And finally the design thinking mindset. Right. Great. So let's understand what is product design A product design in a nutshell is about clearly defining a problem space Understanding what is a problem out there Then identifying the market opportunity And once you have done both of these, then clearly developing a proper solution for that problem space and the market and then validating the solution And this is a nitrating process and you keep doing that So this is a very high level definition of product design Now where does the design thinking comes into picture? So if you have to define design thinking, it's actually a foundational process to product design It actually brings a very human centric approach to innovation A product development is a lot of logic and algorithm where you build the logic part of it But design thinking brings the human factor to it The human face of it Understand the user perspective And it's also very highly iterative process It also favors a lot of experimentation And favors most towards incremental development Rather than a full-fledged one big bang solution So now we have defined what is the product design And what is design thinking? There is definitely challenges to design thinking process Let's understand what are the challenges for the design thinking process One of the big challenge for design thinking is that it's a creative process And the creative process is highly non-linear processes We don't have a start or an end and it can basically go in waves The other problem is that there is no single person who has an answer to all So how do we kind of get a collective thinking together to achieve something? So it needs a lot of collaboration It also needs to enable a lot of divergent thinking and convergent thinking Divergent thinking actually is good for out-of-box thinking and bringing something which is new and innovative And convergent thinking is bringing a convergence or a kind of focus to something which you are going to deliver So these are all very much challenges faced by everyone Every product organization which are trying to kind of embrace design thinking in their product development And now we will kind of see the core main topics for today Which is what are the design thinking patterns or framework which we can embrace to get something going And then finally the mindset for the design thinking What is the design thinking framework? On a high level, right? I mean everybody is aware that there are five core constructs We need to empathize with the user, basically understand our users, understand their needs, their aspirations We need to understand the problem space that is defined the problem space very clearly We need to brainstorm across cross-functional teams, right? And to be able to really get to the right solution We need to build prototypes to get user feedbacks and then validate the solution And again, there is no clearly defined steps where you can once start can end it But yes, we can define a framework where the overlapping process There is a space for the creative thinking and overlapping processes So how do we empathize with the user? The some of the tools which we have at our disposals are foundational research Now when you are building a product from scratch, this is a very, very important aspect You need to do a foundational research which is basically get an understanding of ground reality of your user base Your problem statement, what are the needs, aspirations, what is the demographic of the users And clearly get into the customer persona, customer insight and get clear understanding of that That's the very, very first space And again, as I said, in the design thinking process, it's a collaborative process You don't do everything alone, right? Although the product manager is at the center of everything But you have user research, you have designer You have content, you have lead, architects and engineering team Now everybody plays a different role for every aspect of it Now when you are talking about the customer empathy and the customer user need Then your core person who are responsible for this are your designers as well as the user research Now designers map the end-to-end journey Of course product is at the center of it, but then designers and the researchers work together to map the end-to-end journey And get the consumer feedback Now once we have got the foundational research and understanding of the consumer needs Then comes defining the problem Now the problems can vary, right? I mean you can go defining all sorts of problems So you get into a problem discovery phase where you just try to understand what are the different problems that the consumer is trying to having in their mind And then you have a problem distillation process where you define a well-defined problem and what is the objective of our product which you are going to address And then get a one view of all the research findings and get a clearly well-defined problem switch which we are going to tackle And at this point of time then it's clearly a good logical space for moving into the ideation phase Ideation phase is where all the creative thinking happens You brainstorm, you understand the problem, you try to brainstorm what are the possible solutions It's still you are not defining the solution but you are basically ideating Here is where we need to kind of inculcate both the divergent thinking and the convergent thinking Divergent thinking is to bring the best solution out so that there is no out of box thinking And convergent thinking is because we need to get a high level narrative of what we are trying to build And why we are building it and for whom we are building it These three things are very very important Why we are building it, for whom we are building it and how we are building it And then you get the entire team aligned towards it so that everybody works towards one goal And the next important phase is the prototyping phase So here actually you basically map out all your concepts You build sketches, monks, visuals, map into journeys And this is also a place where you do an evaluative research Now you did in the start of the process of foundational research to get an overall understanding Evaluative research is getting a feedback of your prototypes and marks And see between like you might kind of narrow it down to four or five different options But evaluative research may help you to narrow it down with one or two options So that's an important aspect here And finally then when you roll out the product, you obviously roll out the product through an A-B test mechanism It always has to be an iterative development You validate your concepts and within those one and two options you test them And when you test them you find the winners and then kind of keep iterating on them So that's a high level framework or a pattern Again, various different companies have a different way of addressing it And this is one of the ways with which we have been trying to address it And you can probably take the best practices from here Now let me move and tell you a small story about customer centricity and design thinking mindset Now this is an enhancement which I enabled in PayPal for one of our products And I would like to share the story while I talk through the different design thinking mindset So that you can relate to them and see how it helps So I'm a lead in the PayPal checkout products Now in the PayPal checkout products enables you to either sign up to use PayPal To pay for your subscription services or to pay for your goods and services while you are buying goods or services from the e-commerce website So all you do is first time, you click on PayPal, you get redirected to the PayPal website, you log in You select your payment method, it could be a debit card, it could be a credit card And there are little terms and conditions that you agree to pay with this card for your subsequent purchases And then you are done And every subsequent purchase if it is on the e-commerce site where you are purchasing it Then you just click PayPal button and your payment is done Of course you are identified on the merchant website And if it is a subscription services then you don't even come to the website I mean then the money is pulled in on a recurring basis from your wallet Now that's the product, what we have Now what is the problem in this? So in this whole sign up process where you are going to the PayPal website and selecting your debit card and credit card There is a small caveat Small caveat is if you have a balance which is money in your wallet Then we tend to charge that first And that's written in the terms and conditions but this is not very evident And so this whole project is about addressing that problem And we will talk through this on various aspects through the mindset and see This is the end product which is basically this is the sign up process where you select your either bank or credit card or debit card And what we introduced is a toggle and this is the end product Now I am going to talk about the various steps we went through to get into this end product And what are the different mindsets which you need to embrace as a product manager And also embrace as a team to get the best out of your product So the core aspects are you have to focus on the human values You have to bring clarity to the problem statement Show as much as possible through marks and designs Embrace experimentation always allow changes through experimentation There has to be a bias towards an action And be mindful of the process which is basically your release process Your cross functional dependencies and have a lot of hyper collaboration We are going to focus on each of these aspects one by one and get an understanding for them First focus on human values, right? How do we focus on human values? Again as we saw in design thing pattern framework that you basically start everything from user You start with the customer, so again we also started with the customer So we did a lot of customer research to understand how our existing product is doing What is whether the consumers understand what they are signing up for How they are signing up for how they will be charged in subsequent payment experiences etc And one thing which came out two things which came out One thing came out very clearly was one that there was set of consumers who wanted to get a choice They used to so the balance which is available or the money which is available in their wallet They want to treat it as a savings account, right? They treat mostly as a savings account and they were not very happy of the fact that For every subsequent payment be it subscription or for any purchase on e-commerce site Where you do a one click checkout fast checkout We are going to take money from the balance because they think this is their treat money They want to keep this money and use it in some big purchases or use it as a savings account So that's one of the aspect The other aspect was there was also not much clarity in terms of balances Some people read the terms and conditions and they didn't they they get it But again there was employees which also gave the feedback that Hey while we don't you use balance first but we don't want to use the balance first Who would prefer to use whatever the payment method you have saved first And then we also got a lot of customer support data We got the customer support data about the call volumes What people are calling and one of the interesting aspect which came in that call is that Some of the consumers are calling and saying that hey why are you not using balance Which is totally counterintuitive because we have been using your money in the wallet But the consumers don't get that feeling that that we are using that So once we understand get the understanding of the problem We have to bring clarity to the entire project So how to bring clarity is defined the problem statement In this case there are two problem statements one clear comprehension of on usage of balance Which is the money in your wallet and second giving a choice of usage of the money in your wallet So that's clearly defining the problem statement because it it brings an alignment for the entire team And the second is success criteria and what is the success criteria in this Once somebody has chosen PayPal and chosen this product to use How do we make sure that we maximize the conversion people don't drop off because of the lack of choice or lack of comprehension So these are the very very important aspects and these these are very foundational aspect For any design thinking of the product enhancements Now let's move on to the next point right Once you have defined it then we need to show it We need to show it through various test options, various experiments and everything We have to embrace experimentation because because it's only through seeing the mocks and feeling it is you will get the real feedback from the consumers So create multiple experiences evaluate and test them In this case since it was an incremental change we didn't go for evaluative research But if you are doing a foundational change to your product you're changing revamping the entire Look and feel of your product or bringing a very new feature which does not exist Then it's a good idea at this point of time to go for the evaluative research But this all has to be mapped with the end-to-end customer journey And of course embrace experimentation nothing in the product should go without getting a data or insight from the customers Every change has to go through every test where you understand your existing experience And also test your new experience to get a good insight from the change which you have brought forward And those are very very important aspects because otherwise you will not know what change you brought Was it more helpful in improving your product Which kind of did not do well and by the way when you do a test many of your experiments will fail And that's that's good because you don't say it's fail it's about learning learning what didn't work So it's very important that once we have defined the problem once we understand the customer need We kind of do a good job of bringing various experiments as well as do an experimentation to bring about those changes Now let's go on to understand what are the next steps One of the important aspect is we have to be biased towards action Now what does it mean let me explain When we define the problem we got the experiments everything ready and we're ready to roll in We hit the roadblock right and this happens everywhere Although the chain seems simple but it had cross-functional dependencies it had the dependency with our core payment engine Where they had to change the order in which they had to do the payments It had dependency on PayPal.com where once you should be able to change those settings at a later point of time And getting all those release cycles and everything kind of again another important aspect is be mindful of the process What are your app release cycles what are the database changes when the other services are going to go And kind of drive it as an entire project And once you get everything together you realize that it's not it's probably going to be three months down the line Four months down the line when you are going to realize this change Now engineering is a precious resource and you cannot like two to three person for two three months It's a lot of investment you have to show ROI At this point of time it's all hypothesis right because you have got the user research you have got the data back But but still everything In spite of doing all those things it you might still not get the results So how do you kind of test your hypothesis very very important aspect So what we did as a team is we broken down the project into two parts The first part was very easy test the comprehension of the user Basically do some incremental changes where we can get We can communicate the comprehension that balance will be used first and it's a half project right But it was very easy to do there was no cross functional dependencies It was all within the checkout team which we could do the changes roll out quickly Do all the variations did all the test and get a result within one or two sprints And within a month all the results and you know what it helped It showed that we kind of improved by hundred and twenty one and fifty bits Which is a huge number right if you take the amount of traffic which we did And this kind of gave confidence that yes we can continue we should continue to invest in this path And bring out the full solution because there is going to be a set of users who are still dropping off And and and that's very important and and therefore finally when and last but not the least Is hyper collaboration you have to collaborate not only with your and in the box team We call it in the box where you have a designer content engineering architect right And researcher all working together towards one common goal And product being the fulcrum of it right product being at the center of it and bringing this change Finally when we brought the full change with the option and toggle it gave us another twenty thirty bits So overall we gain like one fifty one eighty bits of changes And and it was a very highly successful product So long story short this is this is how we went through this journey of bringing this change in our product And I hope it is useful for all of you all of you have a nice day. Thank you very much