Design Thinking is useful
Design Thinking can help teams understand users, generate ideas, build prototypes and learn through iteration. Those strengths are real.
The limitation begins earlier: the process often accepts the framed problem as the place to start.
Symptoms become requirements
What users describe is important evidence, but it is not always the underlying cause. A visible frustration can become a feature request before anyone asks what drives it.
Once an assumption becomes a requirement, each iteration can make the wrong direction more convincing.
When another prototype is not enough
Prototyping creates clarity when uncertainty sits in the solution. It creates less clarity when uncertainty sits in the problem itself.
At that point, making another version may only refine the symptom.
Independent perspective
Teams become close to their decisions for good reasons. Context creates expertise, but it can also make familiar assumptions hard to see.
An independent review steps outside the current direction and asks what actually needs to become better.
Root-cause thinking in a KURN review
KURN examines the visible problem, the assumptions beneath it and the product direction they create.
The outcome is not more ideation. It is a clearer question, explicit tradeoffs and one direction worth pursuing.