Product Market Fit & Design Thinking Workshop, TiECON Atlanta 2020

2020 has been a bit of a strange year so far, but we still made time to actually still do some collaborations. This one is with is with TiE Atlanta at TiECON Atlanta 2020. TiE Atlanta. “Founded in 1998, TiE Atlanta is one of the Top 5 TiE chapters in the world. TiE Atlanta fosters entrepreneurs in all industries, from ideation to exit, by providing access to funding, educational programming, and mentoring by local and global leaders.”

Design Bloc’s role was, as design thinking experts, to introduce human-centered design to participants that have had no prior experience in design thinking. We consider it our mission to teach world-class problem solvers how to be thoughtful problem framers. Our audience included more technically minded entrepreneurs that are experts in their respective industries, but lack tangible experience in human-centered design. So we presented a customer centric approach and the respective fundamental design tools along with tips on how to use and apply them to the group. These tools will allow them to employ and sustain a customer-centric approach, which is essential throughout a venture’s lifecycle to survive in today’s dynamic market.

This workshop introduced participants to the application of design thinking on product market fit validation. Referencing Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur’s Business Model Generation book, the workshop focused on two primary themes: On one hand, empathy was presented as a tool to generate and unpack implicit customer insights. On the other hand, prototyping was presented as an exploratory tool to illuminate assumptions about customer acceptance. During the workshop we performed the following exercises: The How-Why Ladder, Empathy Map, Giving Feedback, and an exercise was created where the participants were asked to come up with rapid ideas for digital gestures to illuminate specific assumptions about the customers. AirBnB and its two primary customer segments (guests and hosts) were used for the examples.

The process for us went a little like this:

1. TiE reached out and asked if we could conduct a workshop.
2. We recoreded a lot of the workshop in their office, since this year's conference was virtual.
3. They edited it, adding slides and other content to it.
4. We then atteneded a Q&A session to answer any questions related to the workshop.
5. Finally we provided the participants with a deck that summaries the topic.

You can find the deck to the workshop here and the link to the video here. For the video use password: tiecon2020 to access it. We hope to hear from you if you have quesitons and look forward to more collaborations with TiE in the future.