Unleashing Ideas: Visualize and share concepts with Posters
Inventing and developing great products often starts with generating lots of ideas. Many people have written and talked about ways to do this, yet I've not seen much shared around the next important steps – capturing, sharing, and evaluating those ideas. I’ve been fortunate to have spent considerable time in my career generating ideas, as well as pulling great ideas out of other people.
Let’s imagine you and your team have generated a bunch of ideas. Hopefully several good ones, and likely many not so great ones (if you are doing it right). You've done a good job diverging and now you need to converge and decide which ideas to pursue. You have the good problem of information overload. The ideas might be vague or unclear and understood differently by various people. Selecting the best ideas to work on can be emotional and arbitrary, not data driven, or just confusing and overwhelming.
3 key things need to happen next:
Capture the ideas: Record and document the ideas in a well-defined and concise manner
Share & gather feedback: Show the ideas to others to get their thoughts, feedback, and buy-in
Evaluate & select the best: You can’t work on all of them so you need to select the best ideas to pursue
I have developed a format that is an excellent tool for this process. I call the format posters. I originally called them “1-pagers” but I think poster is a better term even though it's perhaps a bit general and could possibly mean different things in different contexts. I’ve used and refined my poster format to consistently help deliver new and innovative products for many companies and teams.
The poster format is a single page that conveys a single concept clearly and concisely. It should be easy for people to quickly grock. People will often be reviewing several ideas at once, and comparing and discussing them. Clear and concise posters are more efficient at communicating the concepts and facilitate easily scanning and referring to specific concepts in discussions.
Time is scarce and people will likely look through your concepts more quickly than you might prefer. If concepts are long, complicated, or confusing your ideas will get lost. A 2-3 page essay or several pages of images may be complete and thorough; however, this is not the time for that level of detail.
Elements of a poster
Title: Succinct, self explanatory, and easy to recall
Description: A few sentences that fully explain the idea
Visual: An image, series of images, animation loop, or possibly a video. Still images are obviously better for printing but if you’re distributing digitally, animation or video can be useful.
Below is a very basic example of a poster. I used a ChatGPT-like concept for the example because it's well known. For actual concept posters I take care to generate clearer, higher quality images and descriptions. The title here should be refined a bit, but this example demonstrates the format.
Benefits of posters
Ideas are captured and less likely to get lost and forgotten
Posters become a great resource and record
Making posters can generate more ideas and help you hone your ideation and communication skills
The format forces you to make your ideas clearer
I have found posters an essential tool for sharing and consuming ideas effectively. The consistent format also facilitates the evaluation and ranking of ideas. (I’ll write more another time about my concept evaluation process.)
Posters may seem simple when spelled out like this. Most elegant solutions appear fairly obvious when explained. While the poster format is quite simple, creating good posters takes practice and skill. After making a few posters you will discover how valuable an exercise they are and how challenging making good posters can be.
I’ve found posters to be an invaluable tool in getting from early fuzzy ideas to shipping new innovative products. I believe this is crucial now, more than ever, in this exciting time of rapid acceleration thanks to AI.
I welcome your thoughts and references to similar or related tools. If you try using posters, I’d love to hear about your experience and results.
- Andy Dahley
