Design Thinking means just that - thinking like a designer. This means being curious: asking questions, challenging business-as-usual. This is delivered in five steps for App Innovation and Opportunity Creation.

Design Thinking is a people-centered way of solving difficult problems. At Being Guided, we help challenger tech firms and enterprises to apply digital innovation via the five-step method created by Stanford d.school.

The first step in our Design Thinking method is key: Empathize. Through online workshops, we ensure that all stakeholders engage in exploring each problem to be solved or value to be created with cloud apps.

This is Empathy Mapping. It means engaging buyers and sellers of tech innovations in sessions that encourage openness, receptivity and rapport among all. What follows is trust - and ultimately, truth.

The outputs from Empathy Mapping enable a deeper, more meaningful Define step. Here, all stakeholders work through an Urgent/Important Matrix to prioritise the order of innovation and solution delivery.

From achieving a more truthful, accurate understanding of the problem, the Define step is in the strongest position to ensure a truthful mapping of this problem to the right solution and move to the next step: Ideate.

The Ideate step is hands-on, based on openness and trust realised at the Define step. This is where stakeholders are encouraged to challenge assumptions, from what is otherwise, just business-as-usual.

Ideation means taking the journey from identifying the problem to exploring the solution. At this stage, it is best to prioritise 'breadth over depth'. This will enable the widest range of ideas moved to the next step: Prototype. 

By taking a No-Code First at the Prototype stage with Salesforce Lightning Platform and related AppExchange Apps, we can eliminate the costs and time otherwise required with programming of full stack apps.

No-Code, Low-Code then Code - in that order - means that the journey from Ideate to Prototype may be measured in days and hours. This brings solutions to life in a tangible and real way - for all stakeholders.

New digital innovations and apps should rapidly move from the Prototype step to the Test step, as part of an iterative approach to continuous improvement. This loop may go back to any step to move innovation forward.

Testing means 'show don't tell' - taking Prototypes through iterative but structured User Acceptance Testing (UAT) of solutions. For us, this is typically Salesforce-based Apps - often well ahead of completeness.