Where Product Marketing Meets Design Thinking

Entrepreneurship is a creative endeavor, where creativity is defined as a visionary, inspired, clever, original pursuit. It’s not about art, music, acting, or writing—those are just the creative vehicles we drive. Company building takes creativity to envision and build products that customers love, inspire teams to act together, and unlock the passion of investors, partners and board members. 

This substack section is a for my clients only, a “substack book” of my process, tools, and thinking about product management. It is the living manifestation of my product management process for the “PMM Executive in a Box” process and is intended for sharing and scale as we work together. Enjoy!

The Process

The Design Thinking process applied to product marketing is similar to any creative endeavor, but I’ve customized it for enterprise software product development. It looks like this:

Stanford University is the epicenter of design thinking. Founded by David M. Kelley in 2004, it is built on the idea that creativity is a team sport–engineers, salespeople, support, and executives work together to envision and bring to life.Design thinking applies to building a company and products too. Entrepreneurs use money, employees, and customers to build their creations, whereas other types of artists use canvas, paint, or musical instruments. Take, for example, the design thinking process is built on a bias for action, including,

Design thinking has three phases: Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation. Applied to product creation, it features this: