Product Innovation and Design Thinking

Syllabus

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Class Syllabus Product Innovation and Design Thinking

Featured Instructor: Tom Willerer, Partner at Venrock

Description of the Course

Students in this 4-week course will learn and practice strategies for successful product development, in the context of product redesign. They will work to help an existing tech company improve how well its software products meet the needs of its customers. Through the course, the students will be led through an industry-standard design process focusing on empathy with customers, the definition of product requirements and constraints, and effective ideation and selection of software design solutions. They will prototype and test the selected design solution they build in Balsamiq as time and resources allow, and they will conclude the course with a formal presentation. By the end of the course, students will have learned problem-solving strategies that will help them not only in product design challenges but also in general college and industry life.

Short Bio of Course Instructor

Mr. Tom Willerer is a tech entrepreneur, investor, and experienced developer of digital products. Currently, he serves as Partner at Venrock, where he helps drive the growth of early-stage businesses in consumer technology, leveraging his expertise in

product development.

Before working as an investor, Willerer led engineering and operations teams at Coursera, a major leader in the development of massively open online courses (MOOCs). Prior to that, he was Vice President of Product Innovation at Netflix, where he led product management teams as Netflix grew from 8 million to 40 million subscribers worldwide.

Willerer earned his business degree from Indiana University, and he earned his Master’s in New Media Studies from DePaul University.

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Course Structure

Students will learn commonly accepted steps in the design process applicable to software products. They will learn about the philosophy and background behind the

design process through online lectures from Tom Willerer. They will hone their knowledge and skills by doing analytical work in groups and individually, as well as through peer assessment. The group work consists of practicing methods for customer needs analysis, defining design specifications, design ideation, prototyping and testing a product idea, and sharing a design recommendation through a product roadmap. Individual work consists of written reflections to prompts throughout the course in an online discussion board. At the end of the course, students will have gained a portfolio piece that they can share for professional and academic advancement, and they will have gained real-world skills that they can apply to future careers in product development.

Course Objectives

In this course, students will:

• Analyze customer needs and wants for a software product, by using quantitative and qualitative methods, including interviews and empathy mapping.

• Define a problem to focus on around the product’s functional requirements, specifications, and constraints, by conducting original product research.

• Create potential design solutions using expert-recommended ideation methods and the prototype application Balsamiq.

• Present a product redesign recommendation through a sketch or other visual representation and a verbal presentation.

Course Outline

Week 1: Empathy Building Phase

• Video Introduction: Overview and Course Challenge

• Preparation: The Value of a Customer-Centered Design Process

• Activity: Introductions

• Preparation: Pre-reading on Design Thinking

• Student Team Formation

• Activity:

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• Survey WeChat to Gather Data

• Empathy Map the Client

• Empathize:

• Investigate user data

• Identify a problem to design a solution

• Uncover empathy using mapping of the client’s needs and wants

Week 2: Rapid Ideation Phase

• Video Lecture: Product Development Basics

• Activity:

• Defining the Problem with a How Might We Statement

• Crazy 8’s Iterative Solution Process

• Define and Ideate Phases begin:

• Define the problem using a How Might We Statement

• Reflect on the new potential solutions based on the reframing of the problem

• Ideate eight radically different solutions for your problem

• Share How, Now, Wow feedback on the solutions

Week 3: Prototyping Phase

• Video Lecture: Product Strategies and Testing

• Preparation: Pre-reading on Paper Prototype

• Activity: Prototyping Session

• Designing a Solution

• Collaborative Sketching in Balsamiq

• Sharing Questions and Feedback in chat

• Prototype Phase:

• Multiple Iterations of Designs

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• Fail, fast, Fail frequently, Fail forward

• Show Don’t Tell

Week 4: Testing Phase

• Activity: Assignment One Review

• Testing

• Two Cycles of Feedback Protocol (I like, I wish, I wonder)

• Presentation Prep

• Reviewing presentation slide template

• Answer questions about the final presentation

Grading Policy

Component Percentage of Grade

Empathize Assignment 25%

Define and Ideate Assignment 25%

Prototyping Assignment 25%

Presentation 25%

Please note that you must attend all classes and receive an 80% or greater to receive the certificate of completion for the course

Technology Requirements

Students will need access to the internet and the Canvas Learning Management system.

Empathy Building Phase

In the first week, students will be given survey feedback from WeChat clients. Students will start by building empathy by studying the survey feedback to identify potentials problems that they will use the design thinking process solve. They will use an Empathy Map to identify their clients need and wants. They will focus on

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understanding real customer needs, pains, and delights for the existing product, to inform future design decisions. From there, students will craft a How Might We statement to clarify the problem that they are going to address. Lastly, to truly understand the problem students will put it through a Why, Why, Why activity to figure out the root causes of the issue that could lead to potential solutions.

Rapid Ideation Phase

This phase focuses on generating viable design solutions and choosing one to pursue further. After students have chosen a problem to focus on they will start the ideation process. Using rapid prototyping procedures students will brainstorm multiple solutions to problems. Students will generate a large number of potential redesign ideas for the product function or feature of interest. These ideas should be driven by the previously defined design requirements. They will use multiple techniques to maximize the number of their ideas, including literature/patent review, individual and group brainstorming, and collaborative sketching. These design ideas must be documented with some combination of rough sketches, flowcharts, and written descriptions as a part of the Crazy 8 design protocol. They will narrow down their ideas according to design constraints. Then taking into consideration the feedback protocol of how, now, and wow, they will select an idea to move to the next phase.

Prototyping Phase

By this phase, students will have decided on a product update to recommend for

further analysis. This will consist of specific modifications or additions of product functions and features. They will base this decision on evidence they have previously collected that it will best meet previously defined customer needs and that the company can reasonably implement it. The student will build a paper prototype of the newly imagined product. They will also include a product hypothesis that convinces their colleagues that their ideas for updating the product are beneficial to customers and meet all design requirements and constraints.

Presentation Phase

By this phase, students will have completed a prototype of their solution. They will work together to test the prototype in this session. After the testing has been completed, students will compile their work to create a portfolio of their design thinking process. Each student will pitch their idea with a slide deck that includes a slide for their problem, the How Might We problem statement, a picture of their Crazy 8’s rapid ideation, feedback that they considered in the design process, a picture of their prototypes, and reflection slide. Their goal will be to convince their colleagues that their ideas for updating the product are beneficial to customers and meet all design requirements and constraints.

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Final Presentation

Students will customize their final presentation slides by adding evidence of their work through the empathy building, rapid ideation, prototyping, and testing phases. Students will also include responses to the reflection questions on all the slides. The slideshow should serve as a backdrop for a recorded presentation of the student narrating the work they have accomplished in this course. The final video and slideshow should be uploaded to the discussion board.

Academic Integrity

Honesty is an essential aspect of academic integrity. Individual students are responsible for doing their own work and submitting original assignments as per the course directions. Plagiarism and cheating of any kind will not be tolerated.

Plagiarize: “To steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own without crediting the source; presenting as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source” (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, Springfield: G. & C. Merriam Company, 1973, 870).

This includes using information from the Internet without citing the website. Avoid plagiarism by appropriately acknowledging the source of the author’s words and ideas. Cheating: Submitting or presenting an assignment as your own when it was written or created by someone else is not permissible in this class.