Every product team I’ve seen fail had one thing in common: they were very good at thinking about design and very bad at designing.
Design Thinking — the framework with the hexagons and the sticky notes and the empathy maps — has become corporate theater. Teams spend weeks in workshops producing beautiful Miro boards that nobody ever looks at again.
The Bauhaus Knew Better
The Bauhaus didn’t have a “thinking” phase and a “doing” phase. They were the same thing. You learn by making. You think by prototyping. The artifact is the thought.
Walter Gropius didn’t ask his students to empathize with chairs. He asked them to build chairs. And in the building, they discovered what a chair needed to be.
What I’d Replace It With
Three steps:
- Talk to five customers this week
- Build the simplest possible version of what they described
- Put it in front of them and watch what happens
No hexagons required.
The insight isn’t in the framework. It’s in the friction between what you built and what the customer actually needed. That gap — that uncomfortable moment when your prototype fails — is where real product thinking happens.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Frameworks make us feel productive without requiring us to be vulnerable. Building something real and showing it to people is scary. What if they hate it? What if it’s wrong?
Good. Now you know something. That’s more valuable than any empathy map ever created.