Design Thinking: The User in Mind

Innovating and developing new and successful products is something every company wants to achieve, whether it’s software or a service. But what goes into an innovative product? How do we create one?

The essentials of this process are keeping the user in mind, asking yourself for whom you are designing, and creating products that are viable, feasible, and desirable. For many people, this is something totally new – using someone else’s needs and desires, leaving assumptions behind, and taking a leap of faith before actually building anything.

In this talk, Hester Hilbrecht will explain what Design Thinking is, why it is important for large organizations, and will explore examples of how it is already being used today.

Presenter(s)

Hester Hilbrecht is an Innovation Manager and Design Thinking Evangelist at the SAP Labs in Palo Alto, where she works with developers on integrating the user’s needs into the development of new products and services.

Hester grew up in Germany where she received her graduate degree in business administration at the University of Potsdam. She was first infected with a love for Design Thinking at the Hasso Plattner School of Design Thinking in Potsdam, where she studied for one year. After that she used these skills at a German publishing company and later, when she decided to move to the Bay Area, she would help infuse developers at SAP with Design Thinking methodologies.

She is also a world traveler, known for her curiosity and interest in different cultures.