Have you faced these situations? 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. Tune in to this episode to learn why the design fog is derailing your project.
Welcome to Quality during Design, the place to use quality thinking to create products others love, for less time, less money, and a lot less headache. I'm your host, Dianna Deeney. I’m a senior quality engineer with over 20 years in manufacturing and product development and author of Pierce the Design Fog. I help design engineers apply quality and reliability thinking throughout product development, from early concepts through technical execution. Each episode gives you frameworks and tools you can use. Want a little more? Join the Substack for monthly guides, templates, and QA where I help you apply these to your specific projects. Visit qualityduringdesign.com. Let’s dive in.
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. 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. Have you ever eaten lasagna right after brushing your teeth with cool mint toothpaste? It’s gross. Or the Cheetos Lip Balm, which just makes me want to shudder.
We are also talking about something different from not responding to changing market needs, such as the BlackBerry device not evolving its physical keyboard when competitors moved to touch screens. 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.
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.
The Danger of Premature Prototypes
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.
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. Last fall I attended his seminar on systematic inventive thinking. I highly recommend his seminar if you get a chance to join him. 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.
Silos and Field Vision
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.
In the design fog, information is lost in translation or siloed within functional groups. This looks like handing off reports, misinterpretations, and a lack of field vision. Field vision refers to the people closest to the customers—the field technicians, salespeople, the people interacting with customers in their use environment—who best understand what the users need.
In the design fog, teams rely on imagination and wild guesses. They try this, now do that, only to have solutions scrapped or picked apart later. Designers may spend weeks creating a clever solution in isolation only to reveal it and have it rejected by the team because it fails to solve the customer problem. I call this the ta-da flop.
Symptoms of Design Fog
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.
Back to reality. Here is what stumbling around in the design fog looks like in practice:
- 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.
Piercing the Design Fog
To Pierce the Design Fog, we use the Concept Space Model and the ADEPT Team Framework.
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. It is also a way to represent 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.
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.
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.
In the next podcast episode, I’ll show you how to use the ADEPT Team Framework to stop jumping to solutions. If you’ve ever been stuck in a concept meeting that went nowhere or watched your team build the wrong thing, you are not alone. Subscribe at qualityduringdesign.substack.com so you don’t miss the framework that stops the cycle. This has been a production of Deeney Enterprises. Thanks for listening.
