Visual Thinking — an essential skill in Product Management

Traditional ways of working with many reporting layers, written handovers, and linear structures have been erupted by agile, iterative, and lean approaches — which are the only way to approach an increasingly dynamic and fast-paced environment.

“All these new ways of working have one thing in common; they need a high degree of visual techniques to stimulate collaboration. These techniques improve the speed, creativity and effectiveness of teams as they collaborate in a dynamic environment” (Willemian Brand, 2022)

Luckily, visualization has already found its way into our daily work through methods like design thinking, Kanban boards, user story maps or prototypes. However, there is way more value to be leveraged as soon as all product people start to learn, practice, and apply not only visualizations but visual thinking in their daily work.

Therefore, I believe that visual thinking is a central skill all product managers should have or start to practice.

What is visual thinking?

Visual thinking is a process of learning new information and organizing thoughts by visually processing them. It can be used to make complex information which we see, hear, or read accessible — not only for ourselves but also for others.?

Visual Thinking helps me process information by connecting them with mental models and images in my brain. Mental models are simplified representations that reflect processes and structures in the world which have developed from our past experiences, memories, perceptions, and knowledge. They are an essential part of our daily lives because they influence our thinking, our behavior, and our approach of solving problems.?

Jay Forrester, a pioneer in digital computer development, author, and lecturer, explained it that way: “The image of the world around us, which we carry in our head, is just a model. Nobody in his head imagines all the world, government or country. He has only selected concepts, and relationships between them, and uses those to represent the real system.”

Therefore, visualizing my thought process helps me to externalize those mental images and make them explicit, in order to:

• get access to what I am actually thinking
• analyze my own thinking (and certain gaps it might have)
• and to share my thoughts with others

What’s the value of visual thinking?

Many people who want to start with visual thinking see the value in the output of the process: the visualization itself. And yes, the visualization is great! It helps to communicate thoughts, share information and create a common understanding with others.

However, I think the biggest value lies in the process itself: the creation of the visualization. The creation of a picture enables us to externalize our thought process. This externalization helps to focus on a certain aspect of a topic and, therefore, have less information overload — especially for complex matters this is key! Visual thinking brings me into a state of really deep thinking and concentration......................

To read more about the value of visual thinking, how to make use of it as product manager, and how to get started follow the link to the medium article:

https://medium.com/@juliabastian/visual-thinking-an-essential-skill-in-product-management-c4913a611a07