Blank Flipcharts Don’t Make Magic, But Templates Do
In product development, the “fuzzy front end” of concept development often represents both tremendous opportunity and significant challenge. During this critical phase, teams are tasked with defining problems, understanding customers, and generating solutions—all before any engineering begins.
How we navigate this phase dramatically impacts bottom-line results, market share, customer satisfaction, and whether projects even launch at all.
What makes concept development particularly difficult is that teams typically lack something concrete to discuss. Without prototypes or developed products, conversations can become abstract and unfocused. This challenge is compounded when cross-functional team members approach problems from vastly different perspectives, sometimes unknowingly working to solve entirely different issues altogether.
The traditional approach of gathering everyone in a room for open brainstorming sessions has proven remarkably ineffective. Research confirms what many of us have experienced: teams engaged in unstructured brainstorming typically generate fewer ideas, and those ideas are often of lower quality compared to more structured approaches.
The solution lies in using visual models and templates—structured frameworks that guide the creative process and facilitate meaningful team collaboration.
