Design Thinking and Agile way of Software Development

There is a lot of buzz around Design Thinking in Agile circles. It seems lots of Agilest are sold to the idea of Design Thinking for software development. Even SAFe has bought in Design Thinking in its fold.

As an Agilest, I prefer to look critically instead of part of the crowd; try to steer away from the herd mentality. Let’s try to understand what is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is a methodology to design a product with close interaction with stakeholders (customers. consumers, financiers, etc.) in an iterative manner. Once product design is fit for the purpose, it goes into production and rollout.

Does this super brief description pose questions? For me, it certainly does.

In the core of Design Thinking, thought is about designing a physical product or a service. Once a physical product or service is designed and accepted as fit for the purpose, the design phase is over. In software development especially in Agile way of working, the design phase never ends. Design is an ongoing endeavor. Here is no mass production of software.

In my point of view, Design Think is a very good tool if you are working under waterfall assumptions – requirements are pre-determined (sic!), designers and coders are two different sets of people, etc.

In the Agile way of software development, Design Thinking may be useful to conceptualize the solution.  Even here, testing of the concept using Design Thinking remains an illusion. In my view, instead of Design Think, the Lean Startup model is better suited for Agile way of software development. Lean Startup model takes into account the iterative nature of software development which is in the alignment of reality.

Am I missing anything!!!