Frequently Asked Questions

Design Thinking Mastery is a hands-on, interactive course that teaches you a repeatable 7-stage methodology for solving complex organizational problems—while simultaneously revealing your own thinking patterns, biases, and strengths.

Unlike courses that stop at ideation, this one takes you all the way through to implementation. You'll work on a real problem you're facing, build actual deliverables, and leave with both a solution and a documented understanding of how you operate under pressure.

This course is designed for:

• Product managers who need to move from feature requests to genuine problem-solving
• Consultants and strategists who want a structured approach they can apply across clients
• Team leads and managers who facilitate problem-solving sessions but want more than sticky notes
• Founders and entrepreneurs tackling ambiguous challenges without clear playbooks
• Career changers building a transferable innovation skillset
• Anyone who has sat through design thinking workshops that felt inspiring but changed nothing

You don't need a design background. You need a real problem you want to solve.

Most design thinking training focuses heavily on the early stages—empathy, ideation, brainstorming. You generate lots of ideas, fill walls with post-its, and feel energized. Then you go back to work and nothing changes.

This course is built differently:

1. Full-cycle methodology. We don't stop at ideation. The 7 stages take you from problem definition through stakeholder mapping, diagnosis, decision-making, prototyping, testing, and implementation planning. You leave with artifacts, not just concepts.
2. Dual-track learning. While you're solving an external problem, the course surfaces your internal patterns. How do you respond to ambiguity? Where do you default to control? What do you avoid? By the end, you'll have a Personal Operating Manual documenting your own growth edges.
3. Built-in guardrails. The course actively warns you about common failure modes: scope creep, solution-first thinking, stakeholder neglect, confirmation bias. These aren't theoretical—they're the traps that kill real projects.
4. AI-powered coaching. An assistant that challenges your thinking rather than writing for you. It asks the hard questions, pushes back on assumptions, and helps you stress-test your work.
5. Real deliverables. Each module produces an artifact you can actually use: problem briefs, stakeholder maps, journey maps, assumption maps, prototypes, implementation plans.

By the end of the course, you'll have:

• A Problem Brief with clear boundaries and success metrics
• A Stakeholder Map showing who matters, who decides, and who might block you
• A Journey Map revealing where friction lives and why
• An Assumption Map identifying what to test first and how
• A Tested Prototype with real feedback from actual users
• An Implementation Plan that accounts for organizational reality
• A Personal Operating Manual documenting your patterns, strengths, and growth edges

These aren't hypothetical exercises. They're built around a real problem you're facing.

The course is self-paced. Most people complete it in 4-8 weeks, spending 3-5 hours per week. Some move faster; some take longer to work through their specific problem.

You have lifetime access, so there's no pressure to finish by a deadline.

Yes. Upon completion, you receive a certificate documenting your completion of the Design Thinking Mastery program.

The methodology moves through seven interconnected stages:

Each stage builds on the previous one. You can't skip ahead—the methodology is designed to prevent the premature solution-jumping that kills most innovation efforts.

Here's an uncomfortable truth: most innovation projects don't fail because of bad ideas. They fail because of the people running them.

We get attached to our solutions. We avoid stakeholders who might challenge us. We mistake our assumptions for facts. We move too fast when we should slow down, or too slow when we should move.

The course runs a parallel track that surfaces these patterns. At each stage, you'll encounter structured prompts that reveal how you respond to uncertainty, what you avoid, where you default to control. By the end, you'll understand your own operating system—not just the methodology.

This isn't self-help fluff. It's a practical recognition that you can't scale clarity if you don't understand your own blind spots.

The methodology works for:

• Product and service design challenges
• Organizational process improvements
• Customer experience problems
• Internal tool and workflow issues
• Strategic planning questions
• Team and culture challenges

It's been applied in technology, healthcare, education, finance, government, and nonprofit contexts. The structure is domain-agnostic—what matters is that you have a real problem with real stakeholders.

Aaron Vick is a technologist, entrepreneur, and author with 25+ years of experience building and scaling companies.

Track record:

• Multiple successful exits to major corporations
• Forbes Technology Council member
• Author of multiple books on technology, innovation, and organizational change
• Background spanning legal technology, AI systems, blockchain infrastructure, and human rights investigations

What this means for you: This isn't theory from someone who read about innovation. It's methodology refined through decades of actually building companies, shipping products, managing teams, and learning what works when the stakes are real.

Learn more: aaronvick.com

After years of watching talented people struggle with the same innovation challenges—and making many of those mistakes himself—Aaron wanted to create something different from the typical design thinking workshop.

The problem isn't that people lack creativity or good intentions. The problem is that most training stops at ideation and ignores the messy realities of implementation: organizational politics, resource constraints, stakeholder resistance, and personal blind spots.

This course addresses those gaps head-on.

Yes. Module 0 (Orientation) is completely free. It introduces the methodology, helps you select a problem to work on, and gives you a feel for how the course operates.

No credit card required. Just sign up and start.

If the course isn't what you expected, contact us within 14 days for a full refund. No complicated process, no hard feelings.

1. Create a free account
2. Complete Module 0 (Orientation)
3. Decide if the full course is right for you
4. Upgrade when you're ready to continue

• A computer or tablet with internet access
• A modern web browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge)
• A real problem you want to solve

That's it. No special software required.

Yes. The course is fully responsive and works on phones and tablets. However, some of the artifact-building exercises are easier on a larger screen.

The AI assistant is available throughout the course to help you think through challenges. It's designed to coach, not to do your work for you.

Ask it questions about your specific problem, get pushback on your assumptions, explore alternative perspectives. It draws on the course methodology to give contextually relevant guidance.

Free users get 20 AI interactions per month. Full course access includes 100 interactions per month.

No design or innovation background required. The course assumes you're smart and motivated, but not that you've studied this material before.

If you have prior experience with design thinking, you'll find this course goes deeper into implementation and self-awareness than most introductory programs.