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Payroll software with automated tax payments and filing.

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Robotic process automation software to automate high-volume, rule-based tasks.

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Low-code IoT platform and solutions for connected businesses.

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Business formation service to launch and grow your businesses.

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Privacy-friendly application analytics solution.

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Comprehensive CRM platform for customer-facing teams.

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Simple CRM for small businesses moving from spreadsheets.

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Build online forms for every business need.

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Live chat app to engage and convert website visitors.

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Bookings

Appointment scheduling app for consultations with customers.

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Digital signature app for businesses.

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RouteIQ

Comprehensive sales map visualization and optimal route planning solution.

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Thrive

Complete loyalty and affiliate management platform.

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Cloud Contact Center Software for businesses.

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Unified platform to deliver top-notch customer experience.

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All-in-one social media management software.

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Create, send, and track targeted email campaigns that drive sales.

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Forms

Build online forms for every business need.

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Survey

Design surveys to reach and interact with your audience.

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Sites

Online website builder with extensive customisation options.

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PageSense

Website conversion optimization and personalisation platform.

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Backstage

End-to-end event management software.

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Webinar

Webinar platform for webcasting online webinars.

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Marketing Automation

All-in-one marketing automation software.

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LandingPage

Smart landing page builder to increase conversion rates

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Publish

Manage all your local business listings on a single platform.

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SalesIQ

Live chat app to engage and convert website visitors.

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Sign

Digital signature app for businesses.

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Thrive

Complete loyalty and affiliate management platform.

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Voice

Cloud Contact Center Software for businesses.

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LeadChain

Sync, manage, and convert leads across channels seamlessly.

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CommunitySpaces

Online community platform for individuals and businesses to grow their network and brand.

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Marketing Plus

Unified marketing platform for marketing teams.

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eCommerce platform to manage and market your online store.

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Desk

Helpdesk software to deliver great customer support.

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Assist

Remote support and unattended remote access software.

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Lens

Interactive remote assistance software with augmented reality.

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FSM

End-to-end field service management platform for service businesses.

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SalesIQ

Live chat app to engage and convert website visitors.

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Voice

Cloud Contact Center Software for businesses.

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Solo

The all-in-one toolkit for solopreneurs.

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Bookings

Appointment scheduling app for consultations with customers.

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Service Plus

Unified platform for customer service and support teams.

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Books

Powerful accounting platform for growing businesses.

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Invoice

100% Free invoicing solution.

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Expense

Effortless expense reporting platform.

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Inventory

Powerful stock management and inventory control software.

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Billing

End-to-end billing solution for your business.

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Checkout

Collect payments online with custom branded pages.

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Payroll

Payroll software with automated tax payments and filing.

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Solo

The all-in-one toolkit for solopreneurs.

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Practice

Practice management software for accounting firms.

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Sign

Digital signature app for businesses.

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Commerce

eCommerce platform to manage and market your online store.

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Finance Plus

All-in-one suite to manage your operations and finances.

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Email and Collaboration

 
Mail

Secure email service for teams of all sizes.

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Meeting

Online meeting software for all your video conferencing & webinar needs.

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Writer

Word processor for focused writing and discussions.

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Sheet

Spreadsheet software for collaborative teams.

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Show

Create, edit, and share slides with a sleek presentation app.

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Notebook

Beautiful home for all your notes.

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Cliq

Stay in touch with teams no matter where you are.

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Connect

Employee experience platform to communicate, engage, and build positive employee relations.

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Bookings

Appointment scheduling app for consultations with customers.

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TeamInbox

Shared inboxes for teams.

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WorkDrive

Online file management for teams.

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Sign

Digital signature app for businesses.

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Office Suite

Powerful collaborative work platform for teams.

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Office Integrator

Built in document editors for web apps.

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ZeptoMail

Secure and reliable transactional email sending service.

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Calendar

Online business calendar to manage events and schedule appointments.

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Learn

Knowledge and learning management platform.

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Voice

Cloud Contact Center Software for businesses.

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ToDo

Collaborative task management for individuals and teams.

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Tables

Work management tool to connect people, processes, and information.

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PDF Editor

Collaborative online PDF editing tool.

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Workplace

Application suite built to improve team productivity and collaboration.

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People

Organize, automate, and simplify your HR processes.

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Recruit

Intuitive recruiting platform built to provide hiring solutions.

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Expense

Effortless expense reporting platform.

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Workerly

Manage temporary staffing with an employee scheduling solution.

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Payroll

Payroll software with automated tax payments and filing.

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Shifts

Employee scheduling and time tracking app.

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Sign

Digital signature app for businesses.

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People Plus

Comprehensive HR platform for seamless employee experiences.

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Security and IT Management

 
Creator

Build custom apps to simplify business processes.

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Directory

Workforce identity and access management solution for cloud businesses.

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OneAuth

Secure multi-factor authenticator (MFA) for all your online accounts.

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Vault

Online password manager for teams.

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Catalyst

Pro-code platform to build and deploy your apps.

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Toolkit

Complete resource for any admin-related lookup queries.

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Lens

Interactive remote assistance software with augmented reality.

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Assist

Remote support and unattended remote access software.

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QEngine

Test automation software to build, manage, execute, and report testcases.

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RPA

Automate manual, tedious, and repetitive tasks easily.

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Analytics

Modern self-service BI and analytics platform.

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Embedded BI

Embedded analytics and white label BI solutions, tailored for your needs.

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DataPrep

AI-powered data preparation service for your data-driven organization.

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IoT

Harnessing IoT analytics for real-time operational intelligence.

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Projects

Manage, track, and collaborate on projects with teams.

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Sprints

Planning and tracking tool for scrum teams.

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BugTracker

Automatic bug tracking software for managing bugs.

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Solo

The all-in-one toolkit for solopreneurs.

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Developer Platforms

 
Creator

Build custom apps to simplify business processes.

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Flow

Automate business workflows by creating smart integrations.

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Catalyst

Pro-code platform to build and deploy your apps.

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Office Integrator

Built in document editors for web apps.

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ZeptoMail

Secure and reliable transactional email sending service.

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QEngine

Test automation software to build, manage, execute, and report testcases.

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Tables

Work management tool to connect people, processes, and information.

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RPA

Automate manual, tedious, and repetitive tasks easily.

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Apptics

Application analytics for all apps.

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Embedded BI

Embedded analytics and white label BI solutions, tailored for your needs.

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IoT

Build, deploy, and scale IoT solutions for connected businesses.

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DataPrep

AI-powered data preparation service for your data-driven organization.

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Low-code IoT platform and solutions for connected businesses.

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CRM Plus

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All-in-one suite to manage your operations and finances.

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Comprehensive HR platform for seamless employee experiences.

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Application suite built to improve team productivity and collaboration.

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Unified marketing platform for marketing teams.

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All-in-one suite

Zoho One

The Operating System for Business

Run your entire business on Zoho with our unified cloud software, designed to help you break down silos between departments and increase organizational efficiency.

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With over 2000 ready-to-use extensions across 40+ categories, connect your favorite business tools with the Zoho products you already use.

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What is design thinking?

Design thinking is both an ideology and a process for resolving complex issues. Initially used by designers, design thinking has been adopted by innovators from all industries as a formalized method for harnessing people's creative power to overcome tough obstacles. This approach fosters core ideas like empathizing with users, challenging assumptions, developing new ideas, and redefining existing problems. It's best suited to tackle problems that are abstract or ambiguous.

What is design thinking?

1. Empathize

Engage with and observe your target audience, and try to empathize with their experience. Understanding your users is the first step to solving their problems.

2. Define

Understand and isolate the pain points that you want to address. Define a single problem that you're aiming to solve with your product or service.

3. Ideate

Brainstorm all possible angles and solutions. Record any and all ideas. Don't overthink about the feasibility of an idea. This phase is more about quantity, so there are no bad ideas.

4. Prototype

Build a basic version of your chosen idea. This forces you to test-drive the solution and get it validated by beta users.

5. Test

Observe how users interact with your prototype and collect feedback.

It's important to note that these stages don't have to be sequential. They can occur at the same time or even multiple times throughout the overall process. This method is designed to be creative and flexible.

Test

Agility and Design Thinking: They go hand in hand

When we go over the five phases of design thinking, it's easy to think that it's identical to the agile approach. Both stress the importance of the end user's perspective, prototyping, multiple iterations, and small feedback loops. However, the agile approach focuses primarily on building the best possible solution—the 'how' part. Design thinking is better suited to finding the right problem to solve, answering the 'why' part.

With one method for problem-finding and one for problem-solving, incorporating the best practices from both into a single workflow could greatly increase the efficiency of the solutions we deliver.

How can agility and design thinking work together?

Every team works differently, and many create their own workflow with practices borrowed from frameworks that have worked well for them in the past. The amount of design thinking you incorporate into your workflow can depend on the nature of your work or the teams you work with. However, here are some examples of how agility and design thinking can come together.

How can agility and design thinking work together?

Design Thinking + Scrum

If your team is already practicing Scrum, transitioning to this approach should be fairly simple. The idea here is to incorporate Scrum for the prototyping and testing part of the design thinking process. Translate your results from the 'Ideate' stage into actionable work items for your backlog. Use your next sprint to build the prototype and get it through user testing.

Design Thinking + Scrum

At the end of the sprint review and retrospective, if you find that the product has failed to tackle the end user's problem effectively, you can take another shot at the design thinking phase. If all goes well, you can continue planning future sprints and refining the solution. Introducing design thinking between Scrum sprints acts like scheduling regular checkpoints in your process.

Design thinking + Lean startup + Agility

Design thinking + Lean startup + Agility

While this workflow appears more complicated, it combines three powerful approaches to problem-solving to get the best of each. Design thinking, lean startup, and agility have all created waves of their own in recent years, so learning how and when to take advantage of these methods can help you stay competitive in today's business world.

Design thinking emphasizes on understanding the user's pain points. Lean startup's strengths lie in validated learning—frequently testing hypotheses using customer experiments and making decisions based on objective metrics. Agility advocates repeatedly shipping software in small batches. Each of their principles strengthens their respective parts of the process.

Note: As the number of circles increase in a workflow, it's important to remember that they aren't linear and that, despite the different colors, ideally they should all be done by a single, cross-functional team.

Design thinking + Lean startup + Agility + Growth hacking

Design thinking + Lean startup + Agility + Growth hacking

In this last workflow, we've added growth hacking to the concoction of tools at our disposal. Growth hacking is a relatively new field in marketing which focuses primarily on growing your business. It's largely popular among early-stage startups that need to expand using low-cost strategies.

By incorporating growth hacking, you can create a structure for ongoing feedback from all channels to help the product function, develop, and scale sustainably. A product needs to continue evolving long after it hits the market, which is why this integration could give your product a competitive advantage.

Too many workflows? Here's how to get started

The lean startup movement has been a game changer in the entrepreneurial world, just like how agility was to the software development world and design thinking was for product ideation and problem-solving. Some other methods are growth hacking, business development, and lean UX.

What all of these methods have in common is continuous innovation. They provide a framework for implementing this principle, no matter the industry or business department. It's important and helpful to remember this if you ever get overwhelmed by these complex charts and processes:

Too many workflows? Here's how to get started

Start small.

Start by educating your team. Pick a framework and experiment with low-risk opportunities to see how your teams respond. Encourage cross-functionality. Initially, balancing design and delivery can be tough, but your teams will develop these skills over time. All of these frameworks are nonlinear, and their parts should not be executed by different teams.

When used effectively, these methods can help businesses of any size stay competitive and consistently reach their goals. Even choosing to try one out could generate new levels of innovation in your organization.