Early in my career as a product manager, I had the great fortune to learn Design Thinking from Hisham. While today the phrase seems an overused cliche, Hisham's instruction and mentorship ensures it is not so for me. He taught me the real, practical value of customer-centered development - of building from the customer up - and that insight has proven invaluable. More importantly, Hisham deftly guided me as I applied this insight to my everyday work. I credit much of my product success to Hisham and the CDI methodology he taught me.
Hayden Padgett Product Manager at Capital One
helping organizations develop products & services people love
a human-centered innovation partner
We care about driving sustained business results, speed, and attracting & engaging top talent. That's precisely what we tuned our design thinking and lean innovation methods to do. To us, they aren't buzz words we just throw around to sound cool; implemented correctly, they are the most effective strategic weapons an organization can deploy.
We like to be partners, not merely consultants. This means we care about your long term success, way after our work is done. It means we are thought partners. It also means we will chart the most efficient course to your desired outcomes.
At the heart of everything we do is our Customer-Driven Innovation (CDI) methodology. The result of 26 years of honing best practices in Silicon Valley, it blends design thinking with business innovation and Lean Startup practices -- creative confidence applied with business rigor. It promotes three key behaviors: empathize with customers, diverge then converge your thinking, and rapidly iterate & measure.
how we do it
We’ll help you apply our proven, pragmatic innovation process to your toughest challenges.
New product/service discovery, strategy or value prop development, customer insights, concept design & testing, internal-facing or external-facing process improvement; our expertise spans it all.
From one-day workshops, to multiple sprints and in-market testing, we believe in skill transfer with speed & results and enabling teams to develop their own innovation-chops. We won't do the work for them; we teach them how to do it and coach them through it. Your team will learn to fish!
Solve
Business Problems
Know your customers better than they know themselves. Rapidly experiment to innovate.
Move at start-up speeds.
Consistent wins are a result of organizations in which customer intimacy, hypothesis-driven experimentation and quick execution are just the way they work day in, day out... not only the way a special "innovation" team works. It's all codified in a handful of principles that inform how executives lead, how managers mentor, and what employees do.
We’ve mastered the art of embedding our lean Customer-Driven Innovation (CDI) practices into large, complex, resistant organizations with a practical, low cost and scalable approach. We don't believe in big bang programs; they cost a lot, then fail. So we do it the CDI way -- start small, measure, learn, iterate and scale.
Embed
Customer-Driven Innovation
Develop the Behaviors
To shift how your team works, it needs to think and act differently. We believe in the old proverb, "tell me and I will forget. Show me and I will remember. Involve me and I will understand. Step back and I will act." That's why our training workshops and coaching are designed to help you adopt CDI principles with a learn-by-doing approach, using your own projects and customers.
Make it Cultural
Building skills and behaviors is the easy part; to scale the practice and make it permanent, you must adapt it to your company's culture, inject it into your management processes, fuel it with a cadre of specially trained champions, and measure it.
For over two decades, Hisham Ibrahim has worked with companies in Silicon Valley to develop products and services people love, while building their internal capabilities to enable these organizations to continue innovating on their own.
His career has spanned software engineering, product management, and innovation with various industry leading organizations including Intuit and Paypal.
Hisham now focuses his energy on what he loves: improving people's lives by enabling companies and governments to solve important problems well. Most recently, his expertise has been sought out by the City of San Jose to help transform it to a model of civic innovation for its employees, residents and businesses.
With his thought leadership and passion for coaching & teaching, Hisham also joined the Haas School of Business faculty at the University of California, Berkeley as an expert in Design & Innovation.