3-Part Series
Part 1: Design thinking in the age of crypto (Introduction)
Structured thinkers have an undying appreciation for procedure and logic. I can attest.
The spirit of the startup world is all about experimental design. It comes as no surprise, then, that creativity takes centre stage. What is business building if not working with the reality that change is the only constant variable. Society expects startups to pivot and mould, so structured thinkers should be encouraged to lean into boundless creativity.
Builders in the startup crypto ecosystem all share one thing in common: creative problem-solving. Few might look at crypto wallet providers and trading firms and deduce that they share overlapping business decisions. But design thinking will point out that they do share a fair number of similarities (we will revisit this in Part 3).
Much of the work during my previous banking roles focused on execution. The message communicated was — execute, and you keep the well-oiled machine going. Crypto requires a greater balance between strategy and execution. It seems like in place of a 200-year+ operational history, there are 200+ paths this industry could take and no defined logic for going about things. Creativity is the default logic here, and I genuinely believe harnessing this mentality is the reason why teams across the industry prioritise experimenting things that they think will work instead of yielding to the tried and true.
Builders in crypto draw upon issues of the legacy financial system to discover and invent new, alternative solutions. From the user interface to product functionality, crypto highlights the need for creating user-centric financial services and looking at a problem within a broader context. After all, this space is not mature enough for businesses to operate successfully in a silo. Companies must rely on each other to a higher degree to grow (e.g. OTC firms, exchanges, loan origination desks, mining operators, hence the multiple acquisitions/acqui-hires).
Design thinking is less about bringing creativity into a linear decision-making process and more about ideating — experimenting with the push and pull of new ideas and breaking out of the same patterns of thinking to solve a problem.
This series won’t go through the steps of design thinking; Ideo U has an excellent toolkit for getting you started. In Part 2, I’ll introduce an exercise called “mapping the problem space,” a design thinking concept which, when implemented, can help to crystallise any business building strategy.
Onwards 👉 (Part 2 to be released next week)
