Utilizing Double Diamond Framework in Product Management
What is product management? The description from r/ProductManagement from Reddit sums it up beautifully (albeit not as descriptive as some would like) "Product Management is the art and science of building the right product for the right people. It encompasses understanding what to build, why to build it, and how to position it." Simply said in my own definition product management can be seen as a way of defining the correct problem to find a workable solution in hope that the solution will help our product grow. As we got the intro of the main topic out of the way let's dive into a deeper explanation of product management and understand the need of having a great framework to find the right problem to solve and the right solution for that problem.
Deep Diving into
Product Management and Double Diamond Framework
Product Management
With the recent boom in startups trying to find their market fit the roles of a product manager are having a boom, you can easily find the role of product manager open on many jobs seeking platforms like LinkedIn, Indeed, and many others job-seeking platforms.
Product manager, this is the fancy job description that the company put on their hiring page. A bit ambiguous yes, because if we take it as literally as possible this would mean that we would "manage" a product, what would it mean to manage a product? Simply said as the previous statement already sums it up pretty nicely "Product Management is the art and science of building the right product for the right people. It encompasses understanding what to build, why to build it, and how to position it."
The reference below will help you if you wanted to know more about product management, all credits are due to the author of the paper and I believe you can find many supporting articles online
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6802984
Problem-Solving and Being a Product Manager
Being able to solve a problem is a very important skill to have in being a product manager to prevent the wasted effort of doing things that would result in a product that will not be received nicely by the public. To prevent all that it is mandatory that every product manager can define which problem to solve.
Design Thinking Meets Double Diamond Framework
Before further discussing the double-diamond framework, let's touch a bit about design thinking. A set of procedures refers to how a product designer designs a product.
Design Thinking in Depth
A fine example of why design thinking is important citing from one of the websites that can be found online says "Design teams use design thinking to tackle ill-defined/unknown problems (aka wicked problems) because they can reframe these in human-centric ways and focus on what’s most important for users."
Double Diamond Framework
Double diamond is a framework typically used in the design thinking process, it is one such model that'll help you find the right problem to define by broadly defining the problem first and then working their way to focus on the problem that we need to solve.
The same thing is being done on the solution side, by starting to work on the broad side of the solution by defining all possible solutions to a problem and slowly working to find the most sensible solution, and that's basically it. A more refined solution cited from Wikipedia would be "the name of a design process model popularized by the British Design Council in 2005 and adapted from the divergence-convergence model proposed in 1996 by Hungarian-American linguist Béla H. Bánáthy. The two diamonds represent a process of exploring an issue more widely or deeply (divergent thinking) and then taking focused action (convergent thinking)."
And that folks are a quick introduction to design thinking hope the introduction to the double diamond framework would give you a better look on how you will solve problem.
