Before Edmunds.com embraced design thinking, it was a culture of “guru-dom” where product ideas were generated by executives, and the execution was left to their teams. Now, interdepartmental teams are brought together to figure out how to solve vetted challenges together. The company’s leadership team learned the power of employee buy-in.

In the past, most customer feedback came in word form, either via the web site or in focus groups. Now Edmunds.com gains insights by proactively interviewing customers in their native environments and watching how they use the website.

This means Edmunds.com is now much more focused on developing new solutions based on real car shoppers’ needs, whereas before its team suffered from the “curse of knowledge” – where someone who knows a lot about a topic takes for granted that others do, too, leading to confusion.

Read full article » blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/design…

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