Introducing Concepts

Let me introduce a tool I’ve found useful – Concepts.

Concepts  is a one page specification, in A3 format that represents a product idea of feature. It is enough to enable a prepared conversation with the engineers developing the product. Think of it as a “flexible minimum specification”.

Concept sketch

The idea

The concept owner is a person passionate about the idea, regardless of role, who works to realize the product idea all the way to happy client.

There is no handover.

Concepts

Concepts helps you

  • Treating post release challenges as part of normal design
  • Decrease friction between business and development by setting clear expectations of what should be prepared before entering into conversations with developers
  • Develop a minimum specification, flexible for your context
  • Increasing the value added time of your development team by training business people to arrived prepared with the right questions
  • Increase learning by completing the feedback loop all the way to customer use
  • Sharing the work load of a product owner onto a team
  • Lower waste:
    – preventing ideas with unclear value (hidden in big requirement documents) to enter solution design,
    – less rework  after release “bugs development should have foreseen”
    – avoiding heavy documentation in the early stages of product development when uncertainty is at it’s greatest

Companies have used concepts to:

  • Keep a single thread all the way through to working at client
  • Help product owners spend more time with real users
  • Solve product owner overload scenarios
  • Remove handovers

>> Download the full article

Here are some Concept section examples

(A shortlink: crisp.se/concepts)

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