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Jason Cyr Follow
Leading design e=orts for Cisco Cloud Security—I love solving problems and building things like
software, design teams, and remote cabins.
Jan 12 · 5 min read

Design Thinking at Cisco

I spend a lot of time explaining the value of design — the fact that design
is not about pixels or mockups or wireframes. Design is about <nding the
right problem to solve, and then solving it in the best way possible.

Good designers are problem solvers. Great designers are problem 3nders!

This process of <nding and solving problems is referred to as Design

Thinking, and as part of the design transformation at Cisco we set out to
create a design thinking framework would not only be used to up the
game of our already amazing designers, but would also be something to
enable the thousands of engineers who might not always have the bene-
<t of working with a design partner.

The framework explained

The Cisco Design Thinking framework consists of three phases: Discover,
De<ne, and Explore, and two guard-rails: Making thing and validating
with users.
Lets take a closer look at the three phases.

Discover
In the <rst phase of Cisco Design Thinking, your priority is getting to
know your users — with empathy.

By empathizing with users and truly understanding their core needs,

current frustrations, and related pain points, you can uncover the valu-
able opportunities that drive true innovation.

We do this by immersing ourselves in the world of our user through re-

search techniques like interviews and contextual inquiries. We interpret
the information we are capturing through artifacts like Journey maps,
empathy maps, and story boards. We aim to capture the current state of
the world for our user, and then reframe the information in order to
draw insight from it.

We document any opportunities using this standard format:

De9ne
Once you have documented your opportunity, you and your team will
likely identify many problems that will need to be solved. But which ones
matter most to your users?

Your goal in this phase is to prioritize three — or fewer — clearly articu-

lated problems that your solution will address on behalf of your users.
We use a template to capture these problem statements and they get
amended to opportunity statement so that it looks like this:

Once the team has settled on their opportunity and problems statements,
its then time to start creating solutions and for this we get into the ex-
plore phase.

Explore
You have a clear sense of who you’re building for, the opportunity at
hand, and the key problems to be solved. Now it’s time for the team to
start identifying creative solutions.

The key to the Explore phase is to ensure that the solutions developed
explicitly solve the prioritized problems documented in the
De<ne phase.

I think of the explore phase as a continual loop of learning.

• We take a problem and begin by exploring as many solutions are

possible.

• Pick the most desirable solution, and <gure out how to quickly build
an experiment that tests it.

• Run the experiment. Did is pass or fail?

• Continue to iterate on this one till you are happy at which point you
can move onto another problem.

This constant looping of “build, measure, learn” is exactly what the Lean
Startup methodology is all about. There is a lot of overlap between De-
sign Thinking and Lean Startup and even Agile.

In fact the way I think about it is this:

Pulling it all together
All of these pieces of the framework come together and are applied <rst
as a way to develop a high level direction for what we are doing, and
then as a way to accelerate learning through the delivery of the proposed
solutions.

Don’t look at the framework as a progressive linear process, but look at it

as set of tools that you use depending on your current challenge. On any
given project you will Xip around between the diYerent phases in order
to achieve the outcome. The main things to remember are:

• Always make sure you are focussed on the right problem, before
trying to solve it.

• Design thinking is a team sport. Collaboration with cross functional

teams is critical to its success.

• When you are creating solutions, always focus on running fast ex-
periments that answer what you need to learn, or validate assump-
tions you are making.

Supporting the framework

We have created a few supporting artifacts that enable the teams to prac-
tice this new framework. The most impactful artifact has been the <eld
guide. This beautifully designed practical guide contains an explanation
of each of the phases, along with lots of examples. The second half of the
book is <lled with tools and exercises that can be used along the way.
Whats next?
The Cisco Design Thinking framework is already being used by teams
around the globe and is not just focussed on product development. We
have executives, sales, HR, design, and engineering all using it to great
eYect.

Our next steps involve developing a learning framework around CDT

that will allow us to train four diYerent levels of Design Thinkers: Enthu-
siasts, Practitioners, Facilitators, and Coaches.

If you are interested in learning more about what we learned along the
way, please don’t hesitate to reach out or leave a comment on this post.

Also, be sure to check out my previous article about why I chose to focus
on why I chose Design Thinking for my team.