Fusion Modeling - Lean, Agile and Design Thinking

29 October 2012, I met Matthias Pohle from Swisscom. Awesome character and very competent in product management and innovation approaches.

We conducted a little lean, agile and design thinking cross-over session from both our company perspectives (see red and blue visuals above) - Swisscom calls this "fusion modeling", i.e. take the methods that help the team in a particular situation and don't be religious about being pure in one single method...

One thing I learned from Matthias was how to include the relevant stakeholders from the very beginning of an product innovation effort. In an approache called "speed creation", these stakeholder are in the project jury...

What Kids and Students have in common...

When teaching requirements engineering, lean and agile development, and design thinking at university, it's always surprising to me how natural the latter approaches are to students. In the same manner, you do not have to teach creativity to little kids - they just are creative and act accordingly.

In this year's Design Thinking and Lean Development class at the University of Mannheim, for instance, it was really a pleasure to teach design thinking in a 3-hour workshop format. As opposed to many experienced developers, the students couldn't wait to transfer the few "theoretical inputs" into practice with their challenge "how to redesign the mobile experience for students on campus" (or "off campus" as alternative challenge). 

Find some highlight results below - story to be continued...