Innovation is a wicked problem; the viable solution is often unknowable until you have found product-market fit. This reality makes innovation initiatives different from extending existing systems and challenging for designers, product owners, scrum masters, and developers to work together, achieve shared understanding, determine how best to reduce risk, generate learnings, and increase the chances of an innovation becoming sustainable.

Many frameworks propose that the best course of action is a product owner creating definition for a team to rapidly build and deploy the solution. But what if a little critical thought with your team could be the key to unlocking employee engagement, productivity, and overall success?

Drawing on over a decade of experiences from startups, early-stage corporate innovations, and mature product reinventions, we will explore tools of problem decomposition and critical thought that help us identify meaningful user-facing and technical problems to solve and achieve shared understanding about their importance and desired outcomes across multiple stages of the product lifecycle.