From Failure to Success: The Role of Design Thinking in Innovation

Image by K. McCabe

Why did a cutting-edge technology almost fail to take off, despite its brilliance? The answer is simple: it wasn’t solving the right problem—until we used design thinking.

“Teams using Enterprise Design Thinking are 75% more efficient.”

Why am I so passionate about Design Thinking, Innovation, and Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)?

Because life is short.

Why not create amazing things? Why not create great things faster?
And most importantly—why not give more people a voice in business?
Design thinking helps diversify businesses and eliminate bias. It opens the door for different perspectives to be heard.

These tools don’t just lead to faster innovation—they lead to smarter innovation, benefiting people regardless of their role or industry. Design thinking focuses on outcomes, not assumptions.

One of my favourite stories is from my time at Cognifide.

I was tasked with productising IP. More specifically, my CEO told me the aim was to generate revenue from that channel. One of our previous attempts—a "CaaS" (Campaign as a Service)—hadn’t taken off, despite the technology being incredible. I realized later that we hadn’t truly connected with our audience’s needs.

At the time, I didn’t know much about Design Thinking, but I naturally gravitated toward product marketing. I’ve always been passionate about understanding the customer’s needs—advocating from the user’s point of view.

Daniel Priestley, a prolific entrepreneur, once said, “Everyone has a theme.”
Mine? Problem-solving.

At Cognifide, I worked with Adam, the creator of Zen Garden, the platform we were trying to launch. I started by asking lots of questions. Eventually, I understood that there were four distinct personas who would benefit from Zen Garden. The key was figuring out what each of them needed—and how Zen Garden would make their work easier.

From there, we created four versions of our marketing materials—each tailored to a specific persona. At Sitecore Symposium in Barcelona, Adam’s team told compelling stories for each persona. The result? People understood the platform’s value almost instantly.

Even the CTO at Sitecore took notice, and eventually, they acquired the technology. (You know it as SXA.)

What we did was essentially a rough version of Enterprise Design Thinking.

We focused on the needs of the back-end developer, the front-end developer, the agency, and the marketer. The brutal honesty Adam and I shared helped us nail down the exact problems each persona was trying to solve. For example, the library of components was amazing. But why would each persona really care about what we were solving for? There were many logical reasons such as being able to drag and drop, being able to develop faster, being able to give marketers more control. We kept asking why those things mattered. An ‘aha’ moment I remember was when Adam explained that likely most developers would be happy not to have to keep building carousels over and over again. That was one of the key JOBS!! The components would free up developers time to accomplish more innovative (and fulfilling) tasks. There was a job satisfaction angle that hadn’t been part of any of the messaging.

Part of the Zen Garden story became that this platform could help you keep your development team (happy) and free up time they could direct to more impactful work.

It’s funny, I found an old artefact - an old deck of the CaaS that still lives online. It was created before i was at Cognifide. I read through it and noticed something: it has visual appeal, it has a good references, however it focused on features, not solutions. It explained what Zen Garden was but missed the bigger picture—what people were really trying to solve.

Think of a past or current project you have that isn’t getting the level of success you want. Think about the problem you are trying to solve for you and your customer. Write out that problem. And then ask yourself why. And then ask yourself why again. Carry on and eventually you will get closer to the real problem you are solving for. On an enterprise level, of course you want to do this as a team.

As Charles F. Kettering famously said,
“A problem well-stated is a problem half-solved.”

Want to take a deeper dive into how you can apply design thinking in your business? Let’s connect and exchange ideas!