Getting Started on Product and Service Design

Getting Design Right Part 1: Getting Started on Product and Service Design is the first in a six course series devoted to the Getting Design Right program. Here we examine the first step in this process: define the problem. This initial step involves identifying the product concept; establishing the mission, boundary, and context of the product or service; and identifying functional requirements for the product or service.

This course should give you the confidence to initiate design projects and to enrich design concepts with important details critical to the design process. For those of you who are managers or interested in becoming managers, the course makes clear the kinds of work products you can expect at the earliest stages of design. It also provides the tools and explanation needed to develop those products.

This course is grounded in systems thinking and requires both detail and abstraction. It will teach you to consider details carefully and to abstract from those details in order to create design requirements. It provides widely applicable exercises that you can use to develop your teams' system-thinking skills. In addition, it is unique in its behavioral emphasis, focusing on end users and on what the system will do for them. This is a customer-focused design process.