The Design Fog is Derailing Your Project

Your team spent six weeks on a feature that got rejected in the demo. Your engineers built a prototype that totally missed the mark. This misalignment is the design fog, and it’s where most product failures are born in the uncomfortable space of the fuzzy front end.

In this episode:
• Learn why jumping to prototypes introduces fixedness, robbing your team of the chance to define true user requirements.
• Understand the symptoms of the design fog, including the silent assumptions problem and the premature precision trap.
• Discover how the Concept Space Model and the ADEPT Team Framework act as the rope and torches you need to pierce the design fog and align your team in a matter of hours, not weeks.

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ABOUT DIANNA
Dianna Deeney is a quality advocate for product development with over 25 years of experience in manufacturing. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, which helps organizations and people improve engineering design.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And The Problem Setup
• 1:12 Defining The Design Fog
• 3:12 Fixedness And Premature Prototypes
• 5:02 Silos, Assumptions, And Ta-Da Flops
• 7:04 Recap Of Failure Patterns
• 8:22 Concept Space Model And Adept Framework
• 10:09 Rope And Torch Metaphor Plus Next Steps

Transcript

Dianna Deeney: 0:00

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. After this brief introduction, 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, Diana Deaney. 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 qualityderingdesign.com. Let's dive in. We could talk a lot about bad product designs and what causes them. But today we're particularly talking about early concept development, developing an idea we've decided to pursue. What we're not talking about is the situations where we decide we're taking 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. This was a huge brand mismatch. I mean, have you ever eaten lasagna right after brushing your teeth with coal mint toothpaste? It's kind of gross. Or of the other one that I learned about today was the Cheetos Lip Balm. That one just makes me want to shudder. We're also talking about something different from not responding to changing market mismatches. An example of this is like the BlackBerry device not evolving their physical keyboard when a lot of their competitors were moving to touch screen. We need market needs analysis, pricing strategies, technical feasibility studies, and we need to talk to potential customers. All of these are things that we need to do in the beginning of a new product development project. Today we're talking about a product idea with a 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. And now we're in that uncomfortable space between we're building something and we know exactly what we're building. It's the fuzzy front end of product development. It feels like everyone on the team is starting at the same place. And then enrolls the design fog. Everyone is talking about the same project, but seeing a different version of designs and customers in their mind. And the design fog is where most product failures are born. In this stage of product development, there are no physical objects or drawings for us to discuss. The 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, like anything that we can talk about. The problem with this is now 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. It was over two days. It was very fun and empowering. I highly recommend it if you get a chance to join him. Fixedness is something we want to avoid when we're designing and innovating. Because it's beyond providing structure for the ideation, it's defining the idea itself. When we jump to prototypes, we've robbed the team of the opportunity to learn about the user and the product's true requirements. Also, 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 we need engineers to be able 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 really a lack of field vision. Field vision is what I refer to when I'm talking about people that are closest to the customers. They're the field technicians, the salespeople, the people that are interacting with the customers in their use environment, and best understand what the users need. In the design fog, teams rely on imagination and wild guesses. A crapshoot of try this, now do that, only to have them 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. And I call this the ta-da flop. If I were to tell a fantastical story about design fog, I would describe it as a team of plucky adventurers starting on an important voyage to save the kingdom. They're together at the start looking at the same map. But then a fog rolls in. They get separated. But they're encouraged, so they trek on, each confident their group is on the right track. When they finally reach the peak of the mountain, the fog clears. But 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's what stumbling around in the design fog looks like in practice. We have the silent assumptions problem. Your product manager thinks 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. We have a silo effect. Marketing is crafting messaging based on features that engineering doesn't know about. Engineering is making technical decisions that will limit functionality, sales has already promised. Everyone is moving forward, but not together. And 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. What product can we develop with it? Many teams and entrepreneurs can fall into this premature precision trap where they focus on the tech and don't connect it to customers. So to recap, what happens when we're stumbling around in the design fog is that teams work in silos. Requirements are vague, customer experiences are forgotten or not defined at all. There's no risk analysis until it's too late. And all of this results in wasted time, misaligned teams, and late stage failures, delayed launches, derailed projects. And if it's derailed enough, it canceled projects. This is not from a lack of effort, it's a lack of shared understanding and co-design work early in the development process. To pierce the design fog, we use the concept space model and the Adept Team Framework. Now the Concept Space Model is a systems representation. It's a combination of the yet undefined product, the use environment, and targeted customer experiences. This model allows us to innovate and design without needing to confine the product itself with prototypes. It's a way to bind our idea generating activities without introducing fixedness. And it's 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 to focus on what we need to develop for the user. And 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. It helps with co-design, getting the team involved in concept development, ideating features and offerings linked to the customer. And it helps the team develop information that engineers need to better define design targets and requirements for the upcoming detailed work. This concept development work doesn't 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's a strategic way to work together on developing a plan so the team isn't 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. For today, if you've ever been stuck in a concept meeting that went nowhere or watched your team build the wrong thing, you're not alone. Subscribe at qualityderingdesign.substack.com so you don't miss the framework that stops the cycle. This has been a production of Dini Enterprises. Thanks for listening.