Intertwining Lean and Design Thinking: Software Product Development from Empathy to Shipment

A few years back, everybody in the industry seemed to be talking about how “Lean Thinking” can improve software development. Best practices emerged, books were written and Lean Thinking, associated with agile process frameworks became somewhat of a standard work culture in software development. Now that many people are actually practicing lean and agile development, they have started to wonder about something called “Design Thinking”. When we coach development teams in a large software company, we’re frequently being asked whether Design Thinking is the next big thing substituting lean software development. After having guided several teams through successful projects, our verdict is: Design Thinking is not Lean’s heir; in fact the two schools can be intertwined in many ways and complement each other very well. As we will elaborate in this case study, they share some integral core values and goals, and can therefore be applied in the same project without corrupting each other. As a proof of concept, we combined and utilized the underlying set of methods in order to explore a yet relatively unknown and unusual domain for SAP business applications: Software for professional sailors and their coaches that helps them to optimize their training experience and competitive performance.