Design Thinking: The importance of asking the right questions

Parth Amin
2 min readJul 26, 2022

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โ€œIf I would have asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. ๐ŸŽ ๐ŸŽ ๐ŸŽ โ€ โ€” Henry Ford ๐Ÿš˜ .

The process of design thinking starts with empathizing with the users and probing them to understand their pain points. This helps to accurately identify the pain points and define the problem.

There could be various channels through which one communicates with the user but itโ€™s of utmost importance to ask them the right questions in a way that you could deep dive into their thought processes and environment.

Product Managers should avoid asking questions that end in either a Yes or No. Instead, the focus should be to ask the right questions that give a deeper insight into the customer journey and how it could possibly help to identify the actual problem the customer is facing. Many times, a customer is not even aware of the problem he/she is facing, and asking direct binary questions is not going to help. PMs should also avoid stating probable solutions as part of their questions.

For example, if you are a PM at Amazon working on Alexa
โŒ The type of questions not to ask the customer:
โ—พ Have you used Alexa to do โ€ฆ ?
โ—พ Is using X feature on Alexa difficult for you?
โ—พ Would using [..a great solution..] be helpful to you?

โœ… Instead, use the below type of questions to ask the customer:
โ—พ Please walk me through your experience when you use Alexa for โ€ฆ
โ—พ I noticed you said something about using feature X. Could you please elaborate?
โ—พ Would you like to change anything about your overall experience using feature X?

Design Thinking is a non-linear process that involves the following steps:
Empathize โ†’ Define โ†’ Ideate โ†’ Prototype โ†’ Test

You need to get the problem statement correct if you want to design truly innovative or actual solutions that the customer needs even if you know that the customer doesnโ€™t want them. Its the duty of a product manager to ask the right questions, focus on the customer journey, and define the real problem.

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿป Again to sum this up, โ€œItโ€™s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people donโ€™t know what they want until you show it to them.โ€ โ€” Steve Jobs

#designthinking #productmanagement #productmanager #empathy #customerresearch #designthinking101 #productmanagement101

โ€ฆ Originally published on LinkedIn

Check out valuable insights and fundamentals on Product Management on my YouTube channel โ€” Parth Aminโ€™s YouTube Channel

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Parth Amin

10+ Years in Product Management , Consulting and Entrepreneurship | Sr. Consultant at Cognizant | Founder @ thisorthis.ai