Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile: What is the difference?

What is the difference between Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile?

I often get asked what the difference is between those terms. “Is lean startup opposite of design thinking? oh no, maybe it is the same?” and “Ah ok, so you mean agile?” or “I think Agile is a better word for it”. Those are some of the comments I get whenever I talk about one of terms above.

I will hereby try to clarify what these terms relate to, and how they can be integrated with each other.

Design thinking

Design thinking is an iterative process in which we thrive to understand the user’s pain, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, in order to create new strategies and solutions.

Opposed to “Brainstorming”, Design thinking promotes “Painstorming”, in order to fully understand the user’s pain.

The usual Design thinking phases are the following:

• Empathize with your users
• Define your users’ needs, their problem, and your insights
• Ideate by challenging assumptions and creating ideas for innovative solutions
• Prototype to start creating solutions
• Test solutions

According to Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO: “Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”

Lean Startup

“Lean startup is a methodology for developing businesses and products, which aims to shorten product development cycles and rapidly discover if a proposed business model is viable; this is achieved by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning.” — Wikipedia

Globally, 90% of startups fail (Forbes) and the number one reason is market failure: “They make products no one wants.” (Fortune).

The lean startup methodology was born in Silicon Valley in the 90s, but the use…