Design Thinking & Product Development Using AI

Skip to Scheduled Dates

Course Overview

Unlock your potential with this dynamic course, designed for professionals across industries looking to master human-centered design and product development. Whether you are in technology, business, healthcare, or creative fields, you will gain practical tools to deeply understand users, define actionable challenges, and drive innovation.

Discover proven strategies to generate and refine ideas, validate product value, and deliver high-impact solutions that thrive in today’s competitive marketplace. Our curriculum empowers you to balance desirability, feasibility, and viability, while confidently navigating team collaboration, real-world challenges, and iterative improvement, setting you apart as a leader in modern product development.

This course will earn you 14 PDUs | 14 CDUs

Who Should Attend

  • Product Managers
  • UX/UI Designers
  • Instructional Designers
  • Engineers & Technical Leads
  • Innovation / Strategy Teams
  • Business Analysts
  • Anyone involved in product, service, or experience design

Course Objectives

    • Explain the foundational principles and history behind modern design frameworks
    • Differentiate between sympathy, empathy, and compassion in user-centered design
    • Analyze user contexts, behaviors, and needs using qualitative and quantitative methods
    • Define clear, actionable problem statements and align stakeholders
    • Generate, evaluate, and refine ideas using structured ideation techniques
    • Assess the feasibility, viability, and desirability of proposed solutions
    • Apply validation and testing methods to determine product value
    • Identify what to build, what to ship, and when to iterate
    • Understand trade-offs in agile and traditional delivery frameworks
    • Recognize root causes of product and design challenges in modern applications

Course Outline

1. Overview

  • History of design frameworks and origin stories
  • Core foundational principles across applications
  • Modern context: challenges in conventional approaches
  • Case study: cohorts and design challenge introduction

2. Empathy

  • Sympathy vs. Empathy vs. Compassion
  • Understanding users, buyers, and consumers
  • Importance of context and semantics
  • Methods and tools: qualitative vs. quantitative research

3. Define

  • Scoping: avoiding “designing everything for everyone”
  • Managing churn and unproductive debate
  • Alignment: building agreement across teams
  • Framing clear problem statements

4. Ideate

  • Concept generation: high-velocity thinking
  • Avoiding attachment to ideas (“killing your darlings”)
  • Directional vs. exploratory ideation
  • Refinement: reducing variables and focusing solutions

5. Prototype

  • Feasibility: understanding what is possible
  • Viability: designing what should be delivered
  • Identifying the “golden path” (core interactions)
  • Building prototypes at appropriate fidelity

6. Test

  • Desirability: user wants vs. actual needs
  • Validation: identifying what creates value
  • Invalidation: defining what is not valuable
  • Best practices: bias prevention, research methods, sample sizing

7. Deliver

  • Deciding what to ship
  • Production testing: determining “enough” vs. “too much”
  • Agile considerations and competing frameworks (e.g., dual-track, BFFs)
  • Modern context: root causes of product and system issues

< Back to Course Search

Class Dates & Times

Class times are listed Eastern time

This is a 1-day class

Register for Class

Register When Time Where How
Register 09/08/2026 10:00AM - 2:00PM Online VILT

The classes listed are available to all United Training customers and does not reflect, in any way,
the availability or support of technology within the University of Maine System.