The Pre-Tangible Stage
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 Pre-Tangible Stage. It’s an invisible phase that occurs after an idea or project is framed, when it feels like we ought to have everything we need to jump into design and execution, but in which nothing is actually certain.
It typically takes place here:
It’s called the Pre-Tangible Stage 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 Pre-Tangible Stage 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 a product/market fit feels like product/market purgatory
A lot of work happens, 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 Pre-Tangible Stage is actually a fundamental part of the process of creating anything new that happens in every project. 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 uninspiring.
But it‘s actually easy to traverse. It just takes a different way of perceiving.
Traversing the Pre-Tangible Stage
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 Pre-Tangible Stage by using questions, not answers, as our guide. We run rapid, lightweight experiments directly with users to answer 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 moving through the Pre-Tangible Stage 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 and towards team members working directly with users as opposed to 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 Pre-Tangible Stage.
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 a 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% Confidence, there is absolutely nothing you can do that will get you to more than about 40% Confidence 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 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 Pre-Tangible Stage, 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 confidence, we can simply ask ourselves: What is the lowest-effort experiment we can immediately run to gain just 15% more Confidence?
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.
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 will be affected by the project’s most important existential questions, and to engage with 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 for it, 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 lives.
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. The entire point is to figure out not just that it’s wrong, but how it’s wrong. (See, How Validation Actually Works.)
Then, you and your users can discard and replace your low-effort design together. Good thing you only put half an hour into making it in the first place!
(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 the Prototype Thinking way, see How to Get Accurate Feedback, The Complete User Testing Guide, and How to Recruit (Almost) Any User, in that order.)
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 in user-driven evidence. Sometimes those guesses belong to us, sometimes they belong to people with a more senior title, and sometimes they belong to the people who present themselves louder or more 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 users’ tangible reality.
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 about 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!
In fact, most teams who work this way cut 50-75% of unnecessary work during the Pre-Tangible stage.
As an additional bonus, once the project team has navigated the Pre-Tangible Stage, many of these buy-in conversations will take on a completely different tenor, because all discussions will be driven by evidence. Long, complex discussions will only happen for genuinely complex pivotal decisions, not for design details.
The Tangible Stage Deliverable
So if the Pre-Tangible Stage is simply a project phase, what is the outcome we expect at the end of it?
Quite simply, we want to move from the Pre-Tangible 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 Pre-Tangible Stage 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.
More explicitly, Tangibles are factual things that we learn due to true user interaction — observations that we have qualitatively proven, quantitatively proven, or simply have come to awareness and understanding of 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 Pre-Tangible Stage is:
An overview of the key Tangibles learned that shape our understanding of the solutions pace
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.)
Another common document that serves as a fantastic Pre-Tangible Stage deliverable is a PR/FAQ.
Parting Thoughts
Today, people constantly tell me that in the course of using this approach to tame the Pre-Tangible Stage:
This is the most productively they have ever worked
They save anywhere from 6 months to 2 years of work
They avoid 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 “young 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 Pre-Tangible Stage 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 work to 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 Pre-Tangible Stages 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 Pre-Tangible Stage with your team, ask:
What is our Confidence level? Do the 3-minute assessment.
What low-effort research/experiment can we do to gain just 15% more Confidence?
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 The Illusion of Opportunity Cost to see how ideation affects Confidence.
