I take the design thinking process (which is the only other rigorous design process I’ve encountered before) to be a bit different. You go in with no plan or product, talk to lots of people, and keep your horizon wide open. You don’t have a story— at least, not until you’ve hit a personal need so obvious but so latent that you’re thinking to yourself “I NEED to build this.”. Or at least that’s what the golden standard for design thinking is. Prototyping and iteration also looks different, but one similarity I found was in experimenting with as many low-fi ideas possible before actually exhausting resources to build something. The “story mapping” process almost seemed like the brainstorming or sketching phases in design thinking in that way. Another similarity that struck me was the emphasis on discussion— asking “why” after reaching certain topics, digging deeper into analysing data and honing in on what questions to ask next.
One of the points that really stuck with me from the reading was that stories aren’t made to scale (the point about how two sticky notes could be on the same board while one takes an hour and the other takes a month). In design thinking, you’re not actually planning the steps to build something until much later on in the process, but with story mapping, I think you need to think bout that a little more. With story mapping, I also noticed more emphasis on inter-team interactions and collaboration. Not that this doesn’t exist in design thinking, but I see design thinking as emphasising the interaction between a product (or most of the time, idea) and the user. Prioritisation, team dynamics, and actual feasibility are less important thoughts, and there is less emphasis on execution for the bigger chunk of the project.
