Cut Through The Design Fog

Early concept development often fails because teams lack clarity and alignment, leading to wasted time and resources. Discover the structured approach needed to cut through the "design fog" and ensure your team is building the right product from the start.

In this episode:
• The Concept Space Model defines the fundamental questions teams must align on before diving into technical details.
• The ADEPT Team Framework provides a five-part method for effective co-creation and structured ideation.
• Learn how brainwriting and ensuring common understanding lead to actionable design inputs.

Do you want next steps? Are you ready to pierce your design fog? Here is how to get started: 

1. Listen to the free podcast series. Get the list at PierceTheDesignFog.com
2. Read the book, Pierce the Design Fog. It contains detailed templates, facilitation guides, and case studies.
3. Work with me. I help teams implement these frameworks. Visit DeeneyEnterprises.com

Ready to apply this to your project?
→ Schedule a free discovery call: Dianna's calendar

Want insights like this?
→ Subscribe to my newsletter: qualityduringdesign.substack.com

Learn the full framework:
→ Get the Book: Pierce the Design Fog

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 Why Early Concepts Go Sideways
• 0:38 Quality During Design: Host And Mission
• 1:25 Concept Space Model: Focus The Work
• 2:11 Adept Framework: How Teams Co-Create
• 3:47 Discover And Examine Without Groupthink
• 5:06 Prioritize What Truly Matters
• 5:49 Respect Time: Plan Co-Work Sessions
• 6:51 Turn Alignment Into Design Inputs

Transcript

Dianna Deeney: 0:00

Early concept development is challenging because teams lack clarity and alignment. Traditional methods like brainstorming often fail, so we need a structured approach. Not bureaucracy, but structure. A shared process that ensures everyone is aligned before we commit resources to the next step, which is usually engineering development. That's where the concept space model and the Adept Team Framework comes in. The principles behind these are grounded in decades of research and practices of what works. Let's talk more about it after the 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 Vini. 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. Welcome back. We're talking about the Concept Space Model and the Adept Team Framework and how it can help you in concept development. 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've aligned on the fundamental questions. What are targeted benefits? And which ones are we prioritizing over others? What problems are potential that we should avoid and design out? And 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? That's the concept space model. The Adept Team Framework is how to work together, a five-part method for effective team co-creation during concept development. Adept itself means being good at something. For the Adept Team Framework, it's an acronym: align, discover, examine, prioritize, and teamwork. If you just put the concept-space model on a whiteboard, you could draw it out. You will still have problems getting information from your team. We want to actually 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. Adept Team Framework helps facilitators plan and guide coworking sessions, ensuring alignment, idea generation, and prioritization. You can use this Adept Team Framework outside of the concept space model. If you're using other quality tools like a fishbone diagram, a process flow chart, and other visual type team tools, you can certainly use the Adept Team framework in those instances also. So it's a helpful framework for you to be able to use to lead teams through ideation and discovery. What makes it so special and so relevant and actionable is really the middle parts. In the discover phase, we use brainwriting, silent, timed idea generation, to avoid groupthink and ensure all voices are heard. Brainwriting is not unique to the Adept Team framework. A lot of other people use it. I was auditing a project management seminar workshop that had been going on for four days, and there was brainwriting going on in that workshop too. So you may have heard of brainwriting before or have done it. It's not that unusual to do, and in fact, it's some commonly accepted practices. And it works really well with the concept space model and the other templates that are in Pierce the Design Fog. In an exam, you really want to look at the ideas that everyone generated and examine them. But you don't want to examine them for judgment. You want to examine them for common understanding, that everybody has a common understanding of the ideas that were generated. During the examin step, we really do want to come to a common understanding because that'll help us in the next step, which is prioritize, where 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's not difficult. People respond to it really well, but it is a responsibility. People's time is not free. So you want to avoid during concept development just scheduling a meeting without any plan, without any idea of how you're going to get ideas and what you're going to do with them. You want to be respectful of everybody's time and make it productive and fun and meaningful. And 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, for 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. So Adept is a repeatable process that empowers product managers, engineering leaders, and cross-functional teams. How do you get started with this? Well, you start small. You don't 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. Every team faces the design fog. The question isn't whether it exists, it's whether you'll 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're 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's how to get started. You can read the full playbook, Pierce the Design Fog. It contains detailed templates, facilitation guides, and case studies. You can also listen to the podcast series. You can get the book and the podcast series at PierceThedesignfog.com. You can also work with me. I help teams implement these frameworks. Visit DiniEnterprises.com and this has been a production of Dini Enterprises. Thanks for listening.