Design Thinking for Startups
A Startup Weekend Introduction to Human-Centered Design
For: Startup Weekend Bekaa
Role: Workshop Facilitator, Service Designer
Role: Workshop Facilitator, Service Designer
Length: 1 hour and a half workshop
Preparation: 2 days.
Key words: Design Thinking, Facilitation, Service Design, User Research
Note: Event pictures are taken by Startup Weekend photogapher
Note: Event pictures are taken by Startup Weekend photogapher
About Startup Weekend Bekaa
After more than 152 countries and 1142 cities, startup weekend, a 54 hours event that supports early stage entrepreneurship, finally came to Bekaa. With the help of local supporters, our team of volunteers leveraged the global reach of startup weekend to impact our local community in Bekaa. Startup weekends are usually community and volunteer led and supported by a variety of organizations that believe in the power of entrepreneurship to drive economic growth. In the case of Startup weekend (Zahle) Bekaa, some of the main partners and sponsors are Google for entrepreneurs, Berytech, Agrytech and the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
Aligned with this heritage and the potential that the region has, the theme for the bekaai version of startup weekend was Agriculture, water and food innovation. Creatives, tech enthusiasts, experts, artists, designers, engineers, problem solvers and business-minded individuals were all welcome to pitch their ideas, find partners, or join other teams that resonate with them. Throughout the weekend, they were guided, supported and mentored to experiment, innovate, create a team and a prototype of their idea, validate their business idea, and receive feedback from experienced entrepreneurs and professionals.
My Involvement
Having just moved to Lebanon, and as a local in Bekaa, I joined the Startup Weekend Bekaa team as a volunteer who is responsible for local outreach efforts to build awareness about the event, the opportunities available in the Lebanese entrepreneurial ecosystem and recruit attendees to join us on that day. Additionally, as a service designer whose most of her experience was in tech and startups, I also ran the design thinking workshop to introduce attendees to human centered design, particularly user research and how it could help them better frame the challenge they are trying to solve.
Having just moved to Lebanon, and as a local in Bekaa, I joined the Startup Weekend Bekaa team as a volunteer who is responsible for local outreach efforts to build awareness about the event, the opportunities available in the Lebanese entrepreneurial ecosystem and recruit attendees to join us on that day. Additionally, as a service designer whose most of her experience was in tech and startups, I also ran the design thinking workshop to introduce attendees to human centered design, particularly user research and how it could help them better frame the challenge they are trying to solve.
The Workshop Design
When I was asked to run and design the workshop, I was only given one hour to introduce students to human-centered design. I had no agency of time assigned to the activity nor the design of the learning experience for the participants, how they will navigate it and how the workshop fit within that.
My starting point was using my outreach work as an opportunity to do Guerilla research and better understand the potential attendees who will be joining us and their level of exposure to startup related practices (lean startup, design thinking, entrepreneurship in general). Also having worked in startups right after graduation and having being exposed to the entrepreneurial ecosystem since in its nascent years and having been through multiple startup incubation and acceleration programs, I had a few insights that I wanted to build on.
The Design Thinking session is the first thing participants have experienced on the first Startup Weekend Full-day after having built their teams. One hour to introduce future startup builders to human centered design is not enough. Yet, I wanted participants to make most out of the session by focusing on problem framing and putting themselves in the shoes of the people they want to build startups for. It was important that I start the session by getting to know the teams and asking them to name the problem they are trying to solve and the people they want to help. Something all of them struggled with.
Having been in the shoes of participants at some point in the past, I do know some of the things we don't know starting out are what is a startup and what are the fallacies relating to the success of startups. Needless to say, I was preparing the ground for the need to understand the people we are designing for and selling them our products/services.
Design Thinking in Lebanon is still a buzz word that hasn't expanded too wide in Lebanon For participants who don't know what a startup is nor what design thinking is, it was important to establish legitimacy by introducing them to which organizations apply and which fallacies it help us stay away from. Most importantly, It was important to keep pushing for the importance of Problem Framing vs Problem Solving.
Again, in the first 20 minutes, it was important to introduce participants to examples demystifying design thinking. One of the misconceptions for many people I worked with in the past, probably most prominently in the nonprofit ecosystem, is that what they do is people centered and respond to people's needs. Yet, what they are usually unaware of is that research is way more than interviews and focus groups, and transforming insights into solutions co-created with stakeholders is where magic happen. Anyway, back to the worshop and play pump project which I find super helpful to give participants a grasp of how "INNOVATIONS" COULD GO WRONG and had the project been people centered, it wouldn't have failed that miserably.
25 minutes into the session, I had to go faster and get the audience to work on their startup ideas using some of the tools that design thinking is most known for. I decided to limit the session to an introduction to value proposition design and how we will use personas and user research to reach the best iteration of the Value Proposition.
As usual, it is very important to use examples to showcase what it is that we are working towards.For the hands-on part of the workshop, we worked on identifying the stakeholders who are struggling with the problem they are trying to solve, developed their personas and used empathy maps to get a better grasp of who they are and later better frame the value proposition.
Even though, the scheduled time for the session was one hour, I managed to extend the session by 30 more minutes to get participants to see in practice what these tools mean to their problem definition and proposed solutions.
Reflections
In experiential events such as Startup Weekend, the design of the learning experience affect how participants will go about developing startup ideas that respond to customer needs. For an hour and a half session to be most effective, the consecutive sessions' design should build on the learning outcomes of the previous stages.
The KPIs for impact that I used for the workshop were
-how many startups actually left the building to pursue user research, and
- how many teams came asking for support or help.
Happily 85% used their empathy muscles and pivoted many times in the search for responding to stakeholder needs.
Finally, from a service design perspective, the event provided a wealth of insights that could be used to improve on the design of outreach, event learning experience, as well as created a wealth of user research that could be documented and tapped on to provide data for future Agrytech, Berytch and Startup Weekend efforts.
In experiential events such as Startup Weekend, the design of the learning experience affect how participants will go about developing startup ideas that respond to customer needs. For an hour and a half session to be most effective, the consecutive sessions' design should build on the learning outcomes of the previous stages.
The KPIs for impact that I used for the workshop were
-how many startups actually left the building to pursue user research, and
- how many teams came asking for support or help.
Happily 85% used their empathy muscles and pivoted many times in the search for responding to stakeholder needs.
Finally, from a service design perspective, the event provided a wealth of insights that could be used to improve on the design of outreach, event learning experience, as well as created a wealth of user research that could be documented and tapped on to provide data for future Agrytech, Berytch and Startup Weekend efforts.
