Adoption of product innovation (PI) has become essential for sustaining in the global competition. It requires to identify the customers’ needs in detailed manner for satisfying their expectations to achieve the success in long-run basis. It needs to decode the customers’ requirements in terms of products to quantify them through the successful PI. Design thinking is the pivotal tool to recognize those needs and provide with a technical solution for successful PI. The attributes of design thinking are identified as empathy, experimental & learning oriented, diversity, creativity, collaboration, visualization, problem restoration, risk-embracing, instant action, difference creation and prototyping. This paper applies interpretive structural modeling (ISM) for developing a tiered framework to rank these recognized drivers of design thinking for identifying the importance of these human-centric competencies to enhance the PI. This empirical research uses the primary data from manufacturing experts of India which categorizes the drivers in six levels among which empathy is identified as the most vital one followed by visualization and difference creation in level 2, experimental & learning, diversity, collaboration and instant action in level 3, risk embracing in level 4, creativity in level 5 and prototyping in level 6. Finally, the Matrice d'impacts croisés multiplication appliquée á un classment (MICMAC) analysis, a cross-impact matrix multiplication is performed to classify these drivers in four clusters such as autonomous, dependence, linkage and driving clusters based on their driving and dependence powers which signifying the vitality of these drivers for successful PI.