Teaching Design-Thinking and Lean to $1M Entrepreneurs
Giving elite small business owners the tools to deliver breakthrough innovation.
Demonstrated Competencies:
Workshops & Conferences
Year Completed:
2016
Event:
Infusionsoft Elite Forum 3-Day Summit
Presentation Format:
8-hour workshop with exercises based on real problems in each entrepreneur's business
The Story
Infusionsoft offers an exclusive program for small businesses who generate over $1MM in annual revenue with the purpose of helping those businesses accelerate their grow to $10MM. In this program, owners and their employees gain access to workshops, networks and educational content from industry-leading experts. As a senior leader at Infusionsoft I was tapped on numerous occasions to lead sessions on everything from product strategy, hiring and, most recently, a workshop dedicated to Design-Thinking and Lean as the vehicles to delivering breakthrough innovation in their business.
Design Thinking is a methodology used by designers to solve complex problems, and find desirable solutions for clients. A design mindset is not problem-focused, its solution focused and action oriented towards creating a preferred future. Design Thinking draws upon logic, imagination, intuition, and systematic reasoning, to explore possibilities of what could be—and to create desired outcomes that benefit the end user (the customer).
As a compliment, Lean is about maximizing customer value while minimizing waste. Simply, lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources. The two create a powerful duo that helps businesses focus on testing new ideas, validating worthwhile opportunities, and delivering value to the market as fast as possible. Given that I’m deeply passionate about design and teaching others new skills to help them succeed this was an absolute golden opportunity to help entrepreneurs work smarter and see the amazing power of rigorous thought and intentional design.
“Design thinking can be described as a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”
My training on Design-Thinking came from several great Product leaders at Intuit (makers of Quickbooks and TurboTax) where the tenants of Design-Thinking are a bit more nuanced and simple.
Instead of the standard Stanford d.school approach of:
I teach Intuit's Design for Delight:
This isn’t exactly easy stuff for the typical entrepreneur. Most people don’t naturally think of continuous improvement as a go-to strategy. Especially for the entreprenuers who’ve found success through brute force sales tactics or doing “Big, Up-Front Design.” Teaching newbies to be rigorous and objective with their thinking is quite a humbling experience for both the student and the teacher! Thankfully, I’ve delivered many of these training sessions over the years so I’ve learned a thing or two about teach the material successfully.
The key for this session, other than my amazing training partner who is superb at facilitating workshops, is to having an action-learning approach. The highlight of the event for many of the small business owners was to take an existing business problem that they were already grappling with and flipping the process to leverage design-thinking to generate potential solutions to solve the problem with a commitment to rapidly test those solutions. This is where I take them through my Experiment Loop Map:
Results
NPS Survey Score
70
The company plans to make this workshop a permanent fixture for both employee and customer training
