Design Thinking

About the speaker

Gaffar Sharif is a dedicated, passionate professional with maritime experience seeking career growth opportunities to utilize his skills in supervision, administration, and coordination. Meticulous in scheduling, he ensures smooth operations by liaising across departments. Leveraging strong organizational capabilities, he effectively coordinates complex tasks and fosters positive team environments with enhanced collaboration. As a creative thinker focused on constant improvement, he develops new ideas and solutions with an emphasis on empathy and design thinking. Gaffar brings a diverse, well-developed skillset in leadership, strategy, and operations to continue advancing his career at an aligned organization.

Synopsis

In this interactive session, our speaker, Gaffar Sharif, unpacks the what, why, and how of design thinking - an innovative methodology embraced by top companies to develop customer-centric solutions.  He traces the evolution of this human-focused creative process and breaks down the five key phases - Empathy, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. Gaffar emphasizes immersing in the customer journey to pinpoint real root causes before rushing to solutions.

Gaffar also explains effective techniques for problem definition, including root cause analysis, to get to the heart of the issue. Defining the actual problem through the customer’s eyes sets the foundation for targeted ideation and testing later. He shares tips on crafting the right problem statement focused on real unmet user needs.

Gaffar shares idea-generation techniques like brainstorming and mind mapping to expand solution possibilities. He recounts examples of global brands that solved monumental business problems by going back to the basics and focusing on human needs.

In a bonus segment, Gaffar provides hands-on recommendations to instill design thinking across teams and organizations. He makes a compelling case for using this structured creativity framework to gain a competitive edge with new products and initiatives.

Watch the full OdinTalk video to learn how to unlock creative problem-solving for breakthrough growth and impact.