Build an agency using no-code and design thinking

What is it:

Design Off The Boat is an All-Women Crew for All Women Founders. We build social impact tech smarter with Design Thinking, faster with Design Sprints, and better with No-Code.

Maker Insight:

Just because we can build fast with No-Code, it doesn’t mean we should overlook the design processes that go into creating products that not only affect users, but entire ecosystems.

What did I learn:

1. Design thinking what is it? Ever since I was introduced to design thinking in my early product days I have been a believer in the process.
"Design Thinkers draw connections and break them apart. They ask the questions needed to frame the problem correctly. They transform what we know into tools and what we don’t into opportunities. I could tell you the IDEO and Google definition and talk about its steps: map, sketch, prototype, iterate."

"It is powerful to be able to have a common language and a very accommodating structure to communicate with. This is your primary weapon in shifting the social norms and we’re here to help you navigate this space!"

2. Design sprint
"A Design Sprint is a way of focused and inclusive collaboration that replaces 100 meetings worth of work in 5 days. Design Sprints allow us to deliver higher value in less time, prioritize challenges, conduct qualitative research through proven creative problem-solving methods that encourage new ways of thinking."

Brain storming doesn't work. In my experience, what I thought the most interesting about design sprints is it gives you the framework to consider everyone's perspective, giving a larger voice to smaller voiced/disenfranchised stakeholders. Maybe a better way to say that is it empowers bottom up vs top down problem solving.

Top stakeholders still have veto power, but it really allows visibility to see the best place to attack a problem and the best starting point to do that.

3. No-code - who can stand to benefit the most from it? If you're on a budget and no/low technical skills this can empower you to create a solution for your problem.

"Within this decade, most of the things on the web will be built without code. The No-Code movement has given us the ability to build and iterate with less time, cost, and risk involved. No-Code or Visual Development tools are apps that build apps, software that builds software. It is not the absence of code, but the optimization of it, by placing common features and flows into neat little boxes that can be used modularly to build a platform.

Gone are the days that you need to spend thousands of dollars to hire a team of developers and designers for months to build a prototype for a solution that you have not yet been able to validate. Often with No-Code, it only takes a few weeks to launch a product – when the conditions are right, the time is cut down to a few days. We then take this and test it with the target market. If it fails? Then you learn but you never lose."

Love this insight and experience from Sisa and her team. One of the benefits from no-code is because the cost to create lowers, the opportunity cost to try something new becomes much less of a risk to try. This is a great thing for democratizing creation.