The Real Reason Your Product Launches Late (It’s Not What You Think)

The design fog is costing your team weeks of wasted work. Here’s how to pierce it in just a few hours…

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Have you been in this situation?

• Your team spent six weeks on a feature that got rejected in the demo.
• Your engineers emerged after months with a prototype that totally missed the mark.
• Your marketing team has been promising features you’re not actually building.

It’s because of the design fog.

We need a shared process that ensures everyone is aligned before we commit resources to the next step, which is usually engineering development. To Pierce the Design Fog, we use the Concept Space Model and the ADEPT Team Framework.

Defining the Fuzzy Front End

We could talk a lot about bad product designs and what causes them. But today we are particularly talking about early concept development: developing an idea we’ve decided to pursue.

What it’s not

We are not focusing on situations where we take on a high-risk project without evaluating the worst-case scenario. There are a lot of articles online about very public mismatches, like Colgate launching frozen entrees (a huge brand mismatch). We certainly need market needs analysis, pricing strategies, technical feasibility studies, and we need to talk to potential customers. All of these are things we need to do at the beginning of a new product development project.

What it is

Today, we are discussing a product idea with market and brand fit that the business has decided to develop. We have a basic product or service idea, we’ve kicked off our new product development project, and we have a cross-functional team.

Now we are in that uncomfortable space between knowing we are building something and knowing exactly what we are building.

What it’s like

🏞 If I were to tell a fantastical story about design fog, I would describe it as a team of plucky adventurers starting an important voyage to save the kingdom. They are together at the start looking at the same map, but then a fog rolls in. They get separated, but they trek on, each confident their group is on the right track. When they finally reach the peak of the mountain, the fog clears. Their team is not with them. They are spread apart on three different mountain peaks. They each made progress but had a completely different idea of where they were supposed to end up.

This is the fuzzy front end of product development. It feels like everyone on the team is starting at the same place, and then the design fog rolls in. Everyone is talking about the same project but seeing a different version of designs and customers in their mind.

The design fog is where most product failures are born.

The Danger of Premature Prototypes

In this stage, there are no physical objects or drawings for us to discuss. Teams can feel uncomfortable in the nothingness of the concept space. We feel like we should be doing something, so we jump to create a prototype—anything that we can talk about.

The problem with this is that we introduce fixedness.

Fixedness is a term I learned from Drew Boyd, who was co-author of Inside the Box. Fixedness is something we want to avoid when designing and innovating, because it goes beyond providing structure for ideation; it defines the idea itself. When we jump to prototypes, we have robbed the team of the opportunity to learn about the user and the product’s true requirements.

The team shouldn’t cede all design authority to one functional group, because any one group doesn’t understand the full picture. Yes, we need designers and engineers to develop and manufacture products, but many other people on the team can be part of the design process, and they should be.

Symptoms of Design Fog

Here is what stumbling around in the design fog looks like in practice. In the design fog, information is lost in translation or siloed within functional groups.

The Silent Assumptions Problem: Your product manager thinks a user dashboard means one thing, your engineer thinks it means another, your UX designer has a third interpretation, and nobody realizes this until week five of development.

The Silo Effect: Marketing is crafting messaging based on features that engineering doesn’t know about. Engineering is making technical decisions that will limit functionality that sales has already promised. Everyone is moving forward, but not together.

The Premature Precision Trap: Teams get incredibly specific about technical details—which database do we use? Which framework?—while remaining vague about user needs and business value. This is what I see happening with many new AI solutions in industry. We have this new technology, so what product can we develop with it? Many teams and entrepreneurs fall into this trap where they focus on the technology and do not connect it to customers.

To recap, when we are stumbling around in the design fog:

• Teams work in silos.
• Requirements are vague.
• Customer experiences are forgotten or not defined at all.
• There is no risk analysis until it is too late.

All of this results in wasted time, misaligned teams, late-stage failures, delayed launches, and derailed projects. If it’s derailed enough, it becomes canceled projects. This is not from a lack of effort; it is a lack of shared understanding and co-design work early in the development process.

We need a structured approach. Not bureaucracy, but structure.

What to Focus On: The Concept Space Model

The Concept Space Model is what to focus on. Most teams align on the wrong things during concept development. They discuss technical architecture, feature lists, and implementation details before they have aligned on the fundamental questions.

The fundamental questions that should drive your concept development are:

• What are the targeted benefits, and which ones are we prioritizing over others?
• What potential problems should we avoid and design out?
• How does a user get from start to finish with our product?
• How do we help our users achieve their desired outcome with our product?

The Concept Space Model is a systems representation. It is a combination of:

• The yet undefined product
• The use environment
• Targeted customer experiences

This model allows us to innovate and design without confining the product itself with prototypes. It is a way to bind our idea-generating activities without introducing fixedness. This model represents the customer when they use our product, when our product fails or breaks, and when it works well. It helps us focus on what we need to develop for the user.

How to Co-Work: The ADEPT Team Framework

The ADEPT Team Framework is how to work together. It’s a five-part method for effective team co-creation during concept development. The ADEPT Team Framework is a systematic approach to sharing knowledge and focusing on the concept space. It helps a team:

• Target customer experiences and prioritize them.
• Facilitate co-design, getting the team involved in concept development.
• Ideate features and offerings linked to the customer.
• Develop information that engineers need to better define design targets and requirements for the upcoming detailed work.

Adept itself means being good at something. For the ADEPT Team Framework, it is an acronym:

Align
Discover
Examine
Prioritize
Teamwork

If you just put the Concept Space Model on a whiteboard, you could draw it out, but you will still have problems getting information from your team. We want to co-work and create together, and that means we need to be intentional about it. Someone on the team needs to facilitate and lead the rest of the group through this ADEPT Team Framework process in order to have the types of co-work sessions that you need for concept development.

The ADEPT Team Framework helps facilitators plan and guide co-working sessions, ensuring alignment, idea generation, and prioritization. You can use this framework outside of the Concept Space Model. If you are using other quality tools, like a fishbone diagram, a process flow chart, and other visual team tools, you can certainly use the ADEPT Team Framework in those instances also. It is a helpful framework for you to use to lead teams through ideation and discovery.

Brain Writing and Common Understanding

What makes the framework so special, relevant, and actionable is really the middle parts. In the Discover phase, we use brain writing: silent, timed, idea generation. This avoids groupthink and ensure all voices are heard. It works really well with the Concept Space Model.

In the Examine step, you really want to look at the ideas that everyone generated and examine them. But you do not want to examine them for judgment. You want to examine them for common understanding, ensuring that everybody has a shared understanding of the ideas that were generated. During the Examine step, we really do want to come to a common understanding because that will help us in the next step, which is Prioritize. In Prioritize, the team is either prioritizing what next steps to take or prioritizing some benefits or customer experiences that the design should focus on.

When you take this on, it is not difficult, and people respond to it really well, but it is a responsibility. People’s time is not free. You want to avoid just scheduling a meeting without any plan, without any idea of how you are going to get ideas and what you are going to do with them during concept development. You want to be respectful of everybody’s time and make it productive, fun, and meaningful.

The ADEPT Team Framework with the Concept Space Model and the other templates and models that are in Pierce the Design Fog are designed just for that: helping you and your team develop concepts and design together during concept development. After co-working with ADEPT, the result is shared understanding translated into design inputs that guide engineering. ADEPT is a repeatable process that empowers product managers, engineering leaders, and cross-functional teams.

What an ADEPT cycle looks like

Let’s say we want to explore with our team how to deliver a targeted benefit to our customers. Meaning, there’s a benefit to using our product that we want to ensure is implemented in our design.

1. Align
   The facilitator brings the cross-functional team together to establish a common starting place. They set a visible goal for the session: to define how a “quick assembly” benefit translates into design. The team agrees on a specific Benefit Statement: “Customers can assemble the bike stand within minutes of receiving the box so they can use the product quickly and feel a sense of accomplishment”.
2. Discover
   To avoid dominant voices and groupthink, the team uses brain writing—a silent, individual activity where everyone writes their ideas on Post-it notes. They identify “drivers” that make this benefit possible:
   Feature Drivers: Using visually matched assembly joints, including tools in the box, and limiting the number of screws.
   Impact Drivers: Creating an assembly video and designing the shipping box to hold parts during the build.
3. Examine
   The team shares all the notes by placing them on a whiteboard or other shared surface, grouping them into an Affinity Diagram, if needed. Instead of allowing for debate, the facilitator summarizes the findings to ensure every team member has a shared, clear understanding of what each idea means.
4. Prioritize
   The team uses prioritization methods to decide which ideas are most important. They assess the “quick assembly” impact as high-impact, meaning customer satisfaction will increase the better this feature is implemented. They assign it a high priority rating of 4 out of 5, signaling that the design must focus heavily on these drivers.
5. Teamwork
   The session concludes with clear results and action items. The team captures the work via photographs of the whiteboard and assigns follow-up tasks, such as researching the specific “snap force” required for assembly joints. This shared knowledge is then formally documented as design inputs for the engineering phase.

Result: Engineering received clear requirements, and the team shipped a product customers praised for easy assembly.

Piercing the Design Fog

This concept development work does not take weeks, especially when a team uses the Concept Space Model and the ADEPT Team Framework. It takes a few hours over a handful of days. It is a strategic way to work together on developing a plan so the team is not stumbling around in the design fog.

🏞 Back to my fantastical story. Our team of heroes sees the design fog rolling in, so they decide to use a rope to connect their belts and light their torches before they start their journey. That is what the ADEPT Team Framework and Concept Space Model are: the rope and torches to pierce the design fog. The ADEPT Team Framework is the rope that ensures no one wanders off a cliff alone, and the Concept Space Model torch reveals the hidden pitfalls and the clear paths that lead the crew to the top of the right mountain peak.

Getting Started

How do you get started with this? You start small. You do not need to transform your entire organization overnight. Pick one upcoming project and commit to spending one to two focused sessions on structured concept development using ADEPT.

Key Success Factors

• Leadership buy-in: Leaders must see this as essential work, not overhead
• Protected time: Schedule dedicated sessions without interruption
• Facilitation skill: Someone needs to guide the process (this is where external help often pays for itself)
• Visual documentation: Make thinking visible and shareable. The templates and models in Pierce the Design Fog do this for you.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

• Rushing the Align and Examine phases to get to decisions
• Failing to follow-up and follow-through: document and share outputs
• Using the framework once, then abandoning it when urgency strikes

Every team faces the design fog. The question is not whether it exists; it is whether you will pierce through it with intention or stumble through it hoping for the best. Your team is already spending time in concept development, whether you realize it or not. The question is whether you are spending it productively or just spinning in the fog. The ADEPT Team Framework and Concept Space Model give you the map. The rest is up to you.

Do you want next steps?

Are you ready to pierce your design fog? Here is how to get started:

• Listen to the podcast series. Get it for free at PierceTheDesignFog.com, or see the list, below.
• Read the full playbook, Pierce the Design Fog. It contains detailed templates, facilitation guides, and case studies. Get your copy.
• Work with me. I help teams implement these frameworks. Visit DeeneyEnterprises.com/services.

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Pierce the Design Fog Introductory Series