Design Thinking for Business Analysts

Design Thinking for Business Analysts: a get-started guide to prototyping better products

Learn how Design Thinking can help manage requirements, cut scope creep and get stakeholders on board with our quick guide to Design Thinking for Business Analysts.

Design Thinking isn’t just for design agencies anymore; recently, large organizations such as IBM, Deloitte and various US Government agencies have turned towards design driven approaches in their software development workflows. But instead of focusing solely on design for decorative purposes, large enterprises are using it to disrupt and improve their core work cultures, from engineering to business analysis. In our most recent guestpost for Business Analyst Learnings, Justinmind looks at everything BAs need to know to start Design Thinking for themselves.

Read the full post on Business Analyst Learnings

What is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking as a concept isn’t new. Born in 1960s Stanford, it started to be applied as a methodology to inspire creative action around 20 years later. Design Thinking has since been adopted in an increasingly wide variety of companies, and not just those focused on strict ‘design’. Large enterprises are now using Design Thinking as a way to apply creativity to increasingly complex business problems.

A Design Thinking approach is based around core principles – user-centricity, ideation and prototyping, and a ‘fail forward’ attitude – a willingness to see ‘mistakes’ as an integral part of the process. The end goal? To make people’s interactions with systems more intuitive and engaging.

Why do Business Analysts need Design Thinking?

Long gone are the days when BAs were tasked with following a set of requirements to the letter and producing a solution from the top-down. Nowadays, business analysis and product design is increasingly bottom-up, requiring BAs to apply creative thinking and flexibility to increasingly complicated business situations. A Design Thinking process allows BAs to solve the wicked business problems they face, always maintaining a user-centric perspective and following an understand-explore-prototype-evaluate workflow.

In a nutshell, Design Thinking is a process that applies the creativity of designers to fit user needs with available technology and business demands – good business analysis applied appropriately and iteratively.

Design Thinking: Tackling scope creep, gathering requirements and validating decisions

Find out how Business Analysts can apply Design Thinking methods to tackle common BA pain points – and see the process broken down in detail – on Business Analyst Learnings now.