Stop to Think - Design Thinking and Lean Thinking have something in common...

One major finding from the design thinking project described below was the fact that despite the short timeline of three months, it was more than worth spending over week with user research and backlog refinement.

Hence, Design Thinking suggests to spent sufficient time for observing and conducting user research to better understand the underlying problem space, customer needs, and develop some serious empathy and thus better requirements. This enables teams and organizations to build products that are desirable, feasible, and viable in the first place...

Lean Thinking, on the other hand, reserves time to analyse which processes directly contribute to customer values, which ones are non value-adding but nonetheless necessary, and which ones are obviously waste. Retrospectives in Scrum (see for instance Ester Derby's tips & tricks) and other methods, such as A3-based problem solving (see Mike Rother's homepage) give guidelines on how to achieve continuous improvement, i.e. "sharpening the axe" efficiently and sustainably...