Creating a new product concept from scratch is difficult for many teams and it can be a real time waster (and money pit) as business product owners and developers try to figure out how to get started when no one has a clear idea to start from.

I solve this problem frequently by listening to all voices and creating an initial product concept that everyone can see and respond to. It's fast and you can feel the tension ease as soon people have something concrete to work with. It's the antidote to churn.

This concept was developed in a few days. It's designed for corporate fleet managers who may handle thousands of cars and trucks for their company. They need to have a way to know when problems occur or costs start drifting out of line so they can take action. They are not highly technical folk so you can't just give them access to a BI system and ask them to develop their own dashboards. They need something simple that can work on their desktop when they're in the office or on their phone or tablet when they're out in the field.

I developed this product concept as a "straw man" for the team to look at. It was built around a single scorecard that the user could customize with key performance indicators. When a problem developed, they got an alert. The only interaction required was a simple drill-down to see details.

The entire tool was designed around one simple wireframe:

The user could customize the widgets shown and the key performance indicators using simple dropdowns. The design included a really innovative concept. There was a capability to include a set of rules that produced an interpretive result and explained to the customer how to interpret the data they were seeing, We called this Guided Analytics and the rules were developed by the in-house consulting group. None of the competition had anything close.

Of course, a single wireframe is not enough to get the team on the same page so I created a comprehensive concept document that the developers, architects and product owners could dig in to. You can see the document by clicking the button below:.

I was able to create this concept in a few days. It ended several months of expensive churn and got the team aligned around a concept that they could then develop further.