Design thinking is a powerful framework that fundamentally changes how we approach design thinking and problem solving. It’s not just for designers; it’s a mindset for entrepreneurs, founders, and creators who need to navigate complex challenges. Instead of a rigid, linear process, it offers a flexible and human-centered approach to innovation.
In this article, I’ll share how I use this constructivist methodology to develop creative, spontaneous, and effective solutions for my own products and business challenges. We’ll break down the core phases, explore why it’s so effective, and look at real-world examples.
Why is Design Thinking Important for Problem Solving?
Before diving into the “how,” it’s crucial to understand the “why.” In my experience building a SaaS product from the ground up, adopting a design thinking mindset has been transformative. It’s more than a buzzword; it’s a strategic advantage.
Here are the key benefits:
- It Fosters True Innovation: By focusing on deep user empathy, design thinking uncovers unmet needs and pain points that lead to genuinely novel and creative solutions, rather than just incremental improvements on existing ones.
- It Improves User-Centricity: The entire process is built around the end-user. This human-centered approach ensures you’re building a product or service that people actually want and will use, which dramatically increases the chances of market success.
- It Reduces Risk: The iterative process of prototyping and testing ideas early and cheaply means you can validate assumptions before investing significant time and money. It’s better to find out a feature is flawed with a simple Figma prototype than after a six-month development cycle.
- It Encourages Collaboration: Design thinking brings together diverse perspectives from engineering, marketing, design, and business. This cross-functional collaboration breaks down silos and leads to more robust and well-rounded solutions.
The 5 Phases of the Design Thinking Process
Design thinking is often visualized as a non-linear, iterative loop. You can move back and forth between phases as you learn more. Here’s my breakdown of each phase.
[Recommendation: This is the perfect place to insert a custom graphic you create in Figma that visualizes these five phases.]
1. Empathize
The first step is to gain an empathetic understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve. This means setting aside your own assumptions and focusing entirely on your users’ needs, thoughts, and motivations.
- Goal: Understand the user’s experience and challenges.
- How I do it: I conduct user interviews, send out surveys, and observe how people interact with existing solutions. For my SaaS product, I spent hours talking to potential customers to understand their content workflow frustrations before writing a single line of code.
2. Define
Next, you synthesize the information you gathered during the Empathize phase. The goal is to formulate a clear and meaningful problem statement from a human-centered perspective.
- Goal: Articulate the core user problem you are going to solve.
- How I do it: I create user personas and map out their journeys. A great problem statement looks like this: “Busy content managers [user] need a way to quickly analyze SEO gaps [user need] because they don’t have time for manual competitor research [insight].”
3. Ideate
With a clear problem statement, it’s time for brainstorming and ideation. The goal here is to generate a wide range of ideas. No idea is too wild at this stage; it’s about quantity over quality.
- Goal: Generate a broad spectrum of potential solutions.
- How I do it: I use ideation techniques like “Worst Possible Idea” or “Mind Mapping” with my team. We challenge assumptions and look for innovative angles that we might have missed otherwise.
4. Prototype
This is where ideas become tangible. A prototype is a scaled-down, experimental version of the product. It can be anything from a series of paper sketches to a clickable, interactive mockup in Figma.
- Goal: Create a low-cost, testable version of the solution.
- How I do it: I live in Figma. I build simple, clickable prototypes that simulate the user flow. This allows me to test the core functionality without the overhead of engineering, making the iterative process fast and efficient.
5. Test
The final phase is testing your prototype with real users. This is where you gather user feedback to refine your solution. Often, the results of this phase will lead you back to a previous step, like Ideation or even Definition, and that’s the point.
- Goal: Gather feedback to refine the solution and learn more about the user.
- How I do it: I put the prototype in front of the target users from the “Define” phase and watch them use it. I ask them to talk through their process. This feedback is gold—it tells me what’s working, what’s confusing, and what’s missing.
Design Thinking in Action: Real-World Examples
Airbnb: Designing for Trust
In its early days, Airbnb struggled because users were hesitant to book with strangers. Using design thinking, the founders realized the problem wasn’t the website’s function but a lack of trust. By empathizing with users, they identified that high-quality photos were key. They prototyped a solution by flying to New York, renting a camera, and taking professional photos of listings themselves. Bookings immediately went up. This human-centered insight was a turning point for their business.
The Auto Industry: Reimagining Car Buying
The traditional car-buying process is often stressful. A business applying design thinking would start by empathizing with that stress. They’d define the problem as “buyers need a transparent and convenient way to purchase a car without negotiation anxiety.” Ideation might lead to a platform where cars are delivered for at-home test drives. Prototyping could be a simple website for one city, and testing would involve gathering feedback from the first few customers to refine the service. This approach completely rebuilds the experience from the ground up based on user needs.
Beyond the Framework: First-Principles Thinking
To push my problem-solving further, I pair design thinking with first-principles thinking. This means breaking down a complex problem into its most basic, fundamental truths and reasoning up from there.
When I approach a new challenge, I identify and challenge every assumption. I ask:
- What do I know to be true?
- What is just an assumption based on convention?
For example, when building a startup, a common assumption is that you need significant venture capital. A first-principles approach would question that. What is a business fundamentally? It’s providing a product or service that customers pay for. From there, you can reason that the most critical task is getting your first paying customer, not your first investor. This mindset, combined with the empathetic process of design thinking, is incredibly powerful for creating truly innovative solutions.
Conclusion: A Mindset for Continuous Innovation
Ultimately, design thinking and problem solving is not a rigid checklist but a flexible mindset. It’s about staying curious, embracing ambiguity, and focusing relentlessly on the people you are designing for.
By moving through the phases of Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test, you create a structured path for innovation that reduces risk and keeps your work anchored to real human needs. Whether you’re a founder, a designer, or a leader, adopting this approach will empower you to build better products and solve problems that truly matter.