Having worked as a software product manager, it was always challenging to explain new

product features to other stakeholders from various backgrounds such as engineering, design,

marketing, sales, and even from other companies. Especially, it becomes much more difficult to

explain only in verbal communication if the product is completely new.

About a year ago, I led a small group of engineers and product managers to build a new

mobile software, collaborating with a 3rd party partner. The most challenging work was organizing

discussions between the two teams from two different companies to come up with product

requirements before actually starting development process. Since most of discussions took place

remotely via conference call system, it was very hard to understand each other. A few weeks later,

I really felt that we needed to use visual thinking method to be more engaged and move faster.

I think visual thinking method, the visualization tool as per the lecture, is very strong in

terms of having everyone be in the same page immediately. The most important fact is that

visualization is not fancy drawing or painting skills, but just a handy tool for everyone who wants

to express their idea in front of others, because the only thing we need is a pen to draw some lines,

and sometimes letters as well. For example, just drawing flow charts and diagrams usually helps a

lot even when I do small group meetings every day. It means that everyone can visualize their

thoughts easily in a few seconds, and I believe most of us already think visually at least in our own

brain.

Therefore, I applied the visualization to my project, meaning that I first outlined and shared

the end-to-end user journey just with a simple flow chart so that everyone in the teams could

understand how the new service exactly would be used from the users’ perspective. The visualization

tool was really helpful for people to understand the concept of the new product, eventually boosting

the collaboration to build more enhanced idea on top of my visualized flow chart. In other words,

visual thinking process is beneficial not only for making the team more efficient, but also for

enriching the entire product design(design thinking) process itself.

A key takeaway from this experience is that the more we apply the visualization tool into

the product development process, the more ideas the team could get to build a better product and

to solve the problem more efficiently. Therefore, I strongly believe the visualization has to be utilized

in the every process of design thinking process from the start to the end; what is, what if, what

wows, what works.

I don’t think there is much objection to use more visualization tool for designing; and thus

I could not come up with any alternative to the visualization. As a result, I would try my best think

out loud visually whenever I feel I need the tool while working as a product manager in the future.

