Visualize Your Thinking
What does it mean to visualize your thinking?
Visualizing your thinking means creating visual representations—like maps, diagrams, and trees—to externalize ideas so they can be examined, interpreted, and shared with others. Drawing requires getting specific and making ideas concrete, which helps sharpen thinking through an iterative cycle of expressing, examining, and refining.
It's easy to consider ideas in your head, but when you sit down to put them on paper, the work becomes challenging. You have to define something before you can draw it. This requirement of specificity helps you think through your ideas and see them in new ways.
Why should product teams visualize their thinking?
Visualizing thinking helps everyone on a team see what's in other people's heads and align around a shared understanding. When teams visualize their thinking, they can:
- Create experience maps to visualize what they individually and collectively know about their customer
- Generate interview snapshots for each customer interview
- Map out the best path to their desired outcome using opportunity solution trees
- Align around specific solutions by story mapping the possibilities
Beyond team alignment, visualization also enables stakeholders to give feedback, share their experience, and co-create with teams. When you visualize potential paths to a desired outcome, it's easy for others to understand your thinking and explore possibilities together.
What tools can teams use to visualize their thinking?
Common visual tools include experience maps, opportunity solution trees, interview snapshots, story maps, and assumption maps. The specific tool matters less than the practice of visualization itself—use whatever works best for your team and context.
Learn more:
- Why Drawing Maps Sharpens Your Thinking
- Show Your Work: How to Justify Your Decisions & Get Stakeholder Buy-In
Related terms:
- Opportunity Solution Tree
- Experience Map
- Interview Snapshot
- Collaboration
Last Updated: October 25, 2025