Thanks Jonathan, I think your article has introduced a lot of really useful debate.

Yeah the results were pretty stark — the ones who chose to do upfront research typically had experienced innovation or UX bods in them, and took the ‘creatives’ along the research journey with them.

The teams who chose not to do upfront research and rely on creative intuition tended to have experienced creative directors and UI designers leading the team — they had awesome creative minds and incredible production skills but often missed the ‘real’ problem.

Team casting makes a huge difference. The innovation unit was in a large design agency, where failure was traditionally unacceptable. You can imagine the culture shock some people had when we were telling them to ‘fail fast’ at the time.

Pleased to hear you’re thinking about running an experiment, I highly recommend it.

Totally get that the article is more about the wasteful nature of some upfront deliverables and the value of getting to a testable product sooner. I think the concern from many of the comments comes the belief, experience and proof that it’s generally a good idea to get more information (even a little) about the problem the people who have the problem before jumping into design.

But in the end, a lot of how you approach a problem comes down to how much quality information you have. Whether you have a lot or a little, a bit more is surely useful, and rarely harmful.