A digital artefact of our design thinking process — from sticky notes on a wall to three locked product concepts. This board documents every decision, iteration, and pivot along the way.
Why: Before designing anything, we need to deeply understand what Brett actually struggles with — not what he says he wants, but the underlying frustrations. Empathy-first design prevents building solutions to problems that don't exist.
We clustered 20 raw pain points into 6 themes from our first client meeting. Pink post-its = Brett's side (creator). Each sticky is one pain directly from the interview.
Why: A product only works if it solves a real problem for real people. We can't just design for what Brett wants — we must understand what his potential audience actually struggles with when consuming news and analysis.
28 pain points clustered into 6 themes. White post-its = audience side (consumer).
Why: The magic happens where Brett's pain meets audience pain. If we only solve Brett's problems, we build something nobody wants to use. If we only solve audience problems, Brett won't invest. Intersections are the only viable product territory — where both sides win.
We found 6 intersections. Orange-badged ones were selected for concept development. Each intersection became the seed for a "How Might We" question that frames the ideation.
We have 6 intersections but only need 3 concepts (minimum per I2P brief). C1 was always Brett's original ask. For C2 and C3, we paired intersections and then — crucially — split content territories to prevent overlap.
Why: Design Thinking says diverge before converging. The goal is quantity, not quality. Wild ideas are encouraged — the best solutions often hide in ideas 40–80, after the obvious ones are exhausted.
Why this exists: During our ideation rounds, we noticed a pattern — many of our ideas were essentially the same concept but delivered through a different medium. A "daily drop" via email vs. audio vs. push notification vs. physical card are four different products, but the core idea is identical. We realized we were conflating what we deliver with how we deliver it.
Why: Design thinking is not linear. After session review, we discovered our Path 1 HMW questions were creating overlapping concepts. The team applied a differentiation test: "Can you explain each concept in one sentence and they sound like completely different products?" They couldn't pass.
After two passes of divergence-convergence (Path 1 → Path 2), 78 ideas have been redistributed into 3 genuinely distinct concepts. Each targets a different content territory, a different user moment, and a different depth level.
#1 — Willingness to pay: Brett wants to monetize, but we have zero evidence his audience would pay. No intersection exists for monetization — it's purely Brett's wish, not a shared pain.
Generated independently using multiple creative lenses: "What Would X Do?", reverse assumptions, analogy-based, tech-forward, wildcard.
Rapid-fire review of 20 AI ideas. Votes:
Triggered by #8 Argument Club. Like video games with branching outcomes — give the reader a situation, let them choose A or B, then show the implications. Example: "If lung volume were 12L instead of 4L, you could stay underwater 15 minutes." Interactive cause-and-effect that makes analysis stick through decision-making, not passive reading.
Triggered by #15 Earworm and discussion of mnemonics ("Donkey Bridge" in German). The insight: don't design retention mechanisms (flashcards, quizzes). Design content that's inherently memorable because it's surprising, visceral, or story-driven. Retention should be a side effect, not a feature.
Generated independently using multiple creative lenses: "What Would X Do?", reverse assumptions, analogy-based, tech-forward, wildcard.
Rapid-fire review of 20 AI ideas. Votes:
Triggered by #14 Spatial Audio Dinner Table. The idea: create AI personas with distinct personalities (like MasterClass experts) and have them DEBATE each other about a topic. Brett moves "from table to table with coffee" as moderator. Could run 24/7 as a livestream. Combines Brett's human curation with AI's scale. Content is generated continuously, Brett just picks which debates are worth having and adds his real voice when it matters.
Triggered by #3 Rogan Table. Chris's insight: don't script it. Just film Brett doing what he already does — scrolling, filtering, getting excited about articles. The raw process IS the content. Then clip it. His personality shows through the selection, not the performance.
Triggered by #20. Something tangible: cards, a book, conversation starters, a QR to a Brett voice memo. Shipped quarterly. Gets left on coffee tables. Colleagues notice it. Word-of-mouth vector that digital content can't replicate.
No followers, no email list, no social presence. Every C3 idea that assumes an audience already exists is dead on arrival. The concept must include a bootstrapping mechanism — how does person #1 find this?
Kalina spotted this: "Every model we think of is only B2C." Corporate gifting, industry morning briefings, team subscriptions — these are distribution channels that don't require Brett to be famous first. The gap analysis flagged this too.
Kalina's pushback. The design thinking divergence phase is done. Time to converge hard. Concepts must be specific enough that Brett can see the first 3 months of action, not just the vision.
He'll reject anything that assumes community he doesn't have. Concept 1 is what he somewhat wants. Concepts 2+3 are what we believe he should do — but they need a realistic path from zero, or he'll dismiss them.
After brainstorming 78 ideas and reviewing them rapid-fire in session, we hit a wall: our concepts didn't sound like different products. They all orbited "Brett delivers content to curious people" — the only difference was the delivery mechanism. Kalina called it: "I don't like concept 3 at all. It doesn't sound different to me than concept 2."
The root cause: our original HMW questions were too specific in framing, which made the concepts inherit the same DNA. We returned to the Define phase, re-examined our 6 intersections, and created sharper HMW questions that force genuinely different products.
Same team ideas, redistributed into genuinely different products. C2 is light, surprising, gamified — designed to make you interesting at dinner. C3 is deep, compounding, prediction-driven — designed to make you smarter over weeks. Different content territory, different user moment, different product experience.