The Intangible Zone

Between the idea and the execution lies an uncharted land of speculation that can trap a project team for years. Here is the roadmap for systematically crossing it every time.

A typical project I work on begins with talking to a client who is filled with both purpose and frustration.

“We did strategic planning / performed customer research / funded our startup!” they begin. “We have this super cool idea to run with… but it’s been over 6 months and we haven’t figured out what the thing to build actually looks like.”

They are in what I think of as the Intangible Zone. It’s an invisible phase that lies after an idea or project is framed, when it feels like we ought to have everything needed to jump into design and execution, but actually nothing is certain.

It typically takes place here:

It’s called the Intangible Zone because during this time, there are a lot of concepts but it’s difficult to find anything stable to grab onto. Tantalizing visions of cool ideas mask pitfalls of fundamental existential doubts. Our best execution instincts seem to lead us in circles.

You can tell you’re in the Intangible Zone when:

• Discussions/debates over design directions go for hours and often repeat themselves from week to week
• You understand the downsides of building the wrong thing but can’t seem to figure out how to build the right thing
• You’re dying to be productive, but feel stuck and busy at the same time: it seems like there are tons of potential things to do but none of them come next
• Your search for product/market fit feels like product/market purgatory
• A lot of work product gets created, but limited meaningful progress
• Conversations seem to involve repeatedly agreeing on the general principles rather than progressing the specifics
• You feel like you’re still waiting to understand how to do a good job

The Intangible Zone is actually a fundamental part of the process of creating anything really new that will come up every time. No matter how much experience we have, we always have to go through it. Often, getting trapped in it can feel frustrating, tiring, tedious, or uninspired.

But it‘s actually easy to traverse. It just takes a different way of perceiving.

Traversing the Intangible Zone

The most essential and powerful thing that any team member can do to penetrate the haze is be the first person to say, “We don’t know.”

We navigate the Intangible Zone by using questions, not answers, as our guide. We run rapid, lightweight experiments directly with users on all of the deepest existential questions, until we uncover a roadmap built from Tangible results.

We call this process Prototype Thinking, and bring clients through it every day. The complete Prototype Thinking process is an end-to-end toolkit for getting across the Intangible Zone to a validated design solution.

But the heart of the journey lies in just a few basic principles. It works like this:

0. Use the Confidence Measure

Begin with this 3-minute exercise.

Ask yourselves: On a scale of 0% to 100%, how confident are you that your current best guess is the right answer?

In other words, if you had to design the whole thing right now, how confident are you that you will have gotten it right? 10%? 30%? 80%?

Please note that this does not mean how confident you are that you’ll be able to get there someday, only how confident that your current best guess is correct.

Have each team member answer this individually and privately, then share your answers and aggregate into a single number. This is a rapid gut check, so don’t worry too much about getting a precise result. (If the spread between team members is wider than about 30%, then most likely either someone misunderstood the question or your team is misaligned on scope. When aggregating, bias lower, toward team members working directly with users, and away from executives.)

Also note that team members don’t have to agree with each other (or themselves!) about what the best guess actually is: if two team members with diametrically opposed ideas are both 40% confident about their idea, your Confidence is 40%.

If your Confidence lies somewhere between 10% — 60%, you are in the Intangible Zone.

The number you just got is your Starting Confidence. We will come back to this exercise again and again to evaluate our progress.

1. Aim for only 15% Confidence improvement

The single most important thing to know about Confidence is: You can only improve your Confidence about the project by 10–20% at a time.

No matter how hard you work, how well you plan, how smart you are, what tool you use — If you are at 20% Confident, there is absolutely nothing you can do that will get you to more than about 40% confident in a single stride.

This is the heart of why teams get stuck — because we are taught not to execute until we are 90% confident. This imperative to only bring a polished answer, to shoot for an “A”, is drilled into us in every task since grade school. As a result, we can spend weeks, months, even years subconsciously looking for the way to go from our starting 20% straight to the 90%. We automatically assume that we’re not done trying until we have a plan that feels like it can get us there

But that strategy simply doesn’t exist.

Instead, if you are in the Intangible Zone, your only meaningful strategic goal is to figure out how to improve your confidence by just 15%.

After each 15% jump, you can re-evaluate your entire understanding of the project, and then set another goal to go up by just 15% again.

2. Only apply effort commensurate to Confidence

Once we realize that our only goal is to get to about 15% more confident, we can simply ask ourselves: What is the lowest-effort experiment we can immediately run to get to just 15% more Confident?

The key here is to put in a level of effort in creating the design and test that is commensurate with your Confidence. If you are about 20% confident, don’t spend more than half an hour on it — because whatever you build will immediately get thrown out anyway. At 50%, it might be worth investing half your workday. If you are 80% Confident, then it’s worth the time to create an in-depth design mockup, because chances are the variability lies in the details at that point.

(Check out more about how to build low-confidence experiments in a future article here.)

3. The only thing that can increase Confidence is direct interaction with users

All right, so we’re ready to increase our Confidence, in small increments, and are prepared to spend limited effort on it! How do we actually do it?

The only thing that can legitimately increase your true Confidence is a direct, authentic reaction from users. (Also known as User Testing)

No planning, no discussion, no executive calls or expert consults. The only way to increase Confidence is to go directly to the humans that the most important existential project questions refer to, and engage their direct, authentic reactions about those existential questions.

This means that if you want to know whether people would use a thing, test a scenario in which they have an option to not use it. If you want to know if they would pay, make up some prices. If you want to know what features to include, give them a way to easily envision what the package alternatives would really look like and mean for their daily life.

Get to the heart of the issue, with the people it’s really about.

But remember: if your Confidence is low, what you put in front of them will almost certainly be wrong, and that’s okay. You and your users can discard and replace your low-effort design together.

(We call this the practice of building User Intimacy. For in-depth techniques on how to build, test, and dynamically evolve low-confidence designs with users, see future articles!)

4. Avoid activities that build False Confidence

As long as we are getting authentic reactions directly from users, we are staying on track.

However, while we’re in the weeds, it can be very easy to get distracted by speculative ideas that are rooted in guesses, rather than user-driven evidence. Sometimes those guesses belong to us, sometimes they belong to people with a more senior title, sometimes they belong to people who present them more loudly or articulately or attractively.

We call this sensation of getting caught up in speculation False Confidence.

False Confidence is jumping to a belief in order to feel emotionally more secure about a project’s direction, without building a deep understanding of the tangible reality of the users.

Now, this is something we all do, so we just need to be mindful of it. In fact, the early stage of a project should typically be filled with False Confidence, because believing in and feeling excited about our opinions propels the project forward.

However, as the project goes along, here is a list of extremely tempting and extremely common False Confidence Activities that are likely to take us off-track:

• Pouring effort into making a more beautiful design based on a “favorite idea” that hasn’t been validated
• Adopting the opinions of senior leaders or people with influence
• Extensive discussion buy-in raising among other project team members who also have not tested with users
• Extensive planning, ideation, and detailing without testing

See the common theme here?

The good news is, these False Confidence activities often comprise a majority of the busywork around a project, especially in larger organizations. So tabling them until your solution is validated will actually reduce a lot of work!

As an additional bonus, once the project team has crossed the Intangible Zone, many of these buy-in conversations will take on a completely different tenor because everything will be driven by evidence.

The Post-Intangible-Zone Deliverable

So if the Intangible Zone is simply a project phase, what is the outcome we expect to have at the end of it?

Quite simply, we want to move from the Intangible to the Tangible. The key transformation of this phase is to leave the mode where we are designing from Intangibles, and switch to designing from Tangibles.

To capture this difference, imagine that someone asks you to come up with some ideas for placing two ends of an instant teleporter in a billionaire’s fancy new home. Hm, can it help to go from the bottom floor to the top? Might it be valuable to instantly run from the front door to the kitchen? Or maybe from an office area to a living area?

Now, try to come up with some ideas for placing the two teleporter ends in your own home. Go ahead– think about this for a moment.

Immediately, there is no guessing about how a hypothetical person might move through a hypothetical space. You know exactly how you use your space, and which locations would be remotely reasonable. You don’t need to make a list of likely priorities to research or make a feature tradeoff chart, because your mind automatically integrates dozens of factors when thinking about tradeoffs.

Your mind is working in a completely different way. This is Designing from Tangibles.

We leave the Intangible Zone when we are comfortable with the solution space like the familiarity of our own homes — able to sit down and come up with ideas born from understanding rather than from guesswork. (Learn more about understanding and ideating from Tangible data in future articles.)

More explicitly, Tangibles are factual things that we learn due to true user interaction — observations that we have qualitatively proven, quantitatively proven, or simply come to awareness and understanding from exposure.

For example:

• If we think that people are likely to want something, that is an Intangible — if we observe people dive into the thing again and again in our testing, it becomes Tangible.
• If we learn the language people use to think about the problem we’re tackling, that’s Tangible
• If we think chaining our cabinet doors together could prevent our toddler from accessing the snacks inside, that’s an Intangible. If we discover our toddler now uses the chain to swing from, that’s a Tangible.

There is nothing wrong with Intangibles; they get us moving and are often educated guesses. However, Tangibles form the building blocks of our actual solution.

From a deliverable standpoint, a great output from traversing the Intangible Zone Phase is:

1. An overview of the key Tangibles learned that shape our understanding of the solutions pace
2. A high-Confidence broad design outline using these Tangibles

(In the teleporter analogy, this would be 1 — a map of your house with key movements and space usage explained, and 2 — the correct answer for where to put the teleporters.)

At Prototype Thinking Labs, we use this reporting template that will exist in a future article.

Another common document that serves as a fantastic Intangible Zone deliverable is a PR/FAQ (← this link works).

Parting Thoughts

Today, people constantly tell me that in the course of using this approach to tame the Intangible Zone:

• This is the most productively they have ever worked
• They save anywhere from 6 months to 2 years of work.
• They avoided a 6- or 7-figure mistake for large companies, and about a year of lost runway for startups.
• Meetings are now fun and happening!
• Team members now amiably compete to say, “I don’t know” and “let’s test it” on all their other projects as well

From this list, it’s honestly the last one that makes me happiest.

As a former high performer, I spent most of my career consumed with the pressure of trying to be right. The skill of saying, “I don’t know, let’s test it” is one I could have used much earlier in my own life.

(Indeed, no team I’ve worked with has ever been more inefficiently stuck in the Intangible Zone than I myself was when I first started solo consulting.)

These days, I get to feel this sense of proud liberation every time I realize I can just stop traffic, disengage from the mess, and articulate the thing that I don’t know.

From work, to relationships, to family, to personal projects — on a weekly basis it turns my own Intangible Zones from a place of pressure and fear into a journey of patient adventure. No matter how messy the situation is, if it’s important to me, I know I can cross it– 15% at a time.

Getting Started

To immediately start crossing the Intangible Zone with your team, ask:

• What is our Confidence level? Do the 3-minute assessment.
• What low-effort research / experiment can we do to go just 15% more Confident?
• What are our biggest uncertainties right now? What Tangibles are we missing?
• Is this conversation leading to getting more Tangibles, or is it leading to False Confidence?

Check out our Confidence Toolkit (future article) for more detailed roadmaps, tools, and facilitation guides.