When you’re in product research and development, your company counts on you to have all the ideas — and all the answers. Little do they know, when you pull back the curtain on product development, there’s a lot more debugging, wheel-spinning, bottlenecks, and unanswered questions than there are eureka moments and fun times noodling with prototypes. Using AI tools for product innovation and product management can help you tighten up ideas and processes, efficiently use resources, and rev up your speed to market.
Incorporating AI tools for product innovation can, at worst, feel like a cop out, and at best, require a little bit of a learning curve to use them effectively. Fortunately, Mural AI tools are seamlessly incorporated into the interface you already know and love. Additionally, they’re designed to enhance your workflow and help you bust through time-devouring roadblocks, not co-opt and blandify your great ideas (AI does get a bad rap for that).
At a high level, AI tools can help you in myriad ways, including, but not limited to:
- Automating repetitive tasks
- Optimizing resources
- Summarizing complex information
- Breaking through creative roadblocks
- Giving you a bird’s eye view of complicated flows and systems
- Enhancing collaborations
Now, you can boost product innovation with Mural AI. Mural AI can enhance your workflow without clunky, unnecessary features, or a new, confusing interface. Mural AI features that can help you optimize flows, facilitate idea generation, and enhance collaboration are:
- Generate: A feature that enables users to generate ideas, questions, hypotheses, opportunity statements, and more from simple, natural language prompts.
- Build a Mural: A feature that enables users to describe their desired activities, outcomes, and/or parameters to have Mural AI automatically build a mural from the appropriate template.
- Mind maps: A feature that enables users to automatically build out mind maps from a word, phrase, or statement using Mural AI.
- Summarize: A feature that automatically creates concise summaries of text in murals.
- Cluster: A feature that creates groups of sticky notes based on content.
- Classify: A feature that enables users to sort sticky notes as positive, negative, or neutral based on their emotional content.
- AI chat: A chat box where users can interact with Mural AI using natural language prompts.
- AI hub: The centralized hub for accessing Mural’s AI features.
You can learn more about these exciting features here. Let’s get into some of the ways Mural AI can help with R&D-specific tasks and projects.
Speed up idea generation and concept development with Generate
Use case: When you have an idea for a new product or feature, it rarely comes to you in its perfect, actualized form. You may have to tinker with an idea, or even scrap it and start over before you’re ready to start building. This concept poster template helps you brainstorm and shape your ideas.
How Mural AI enhances: Product innovation AI tools aren’t here to steal your thunder — they just keep ideas flowing when your own brain gets stuck. With Mural AI’s Generate feature, you can quickly and easily generate and refine new ideas and troubleshoot problems with existing concepts based on a simple prompt or question. Outcome: An innovative, foolproof idea (or several ideas) you’re ready to pitch to your team and start building proof of concept.
Outcome: An innovative, foolproof idea (or several ideas) you’re ready to pitch to your team and start building proof of concept.
Organize product roadmaps with Summarize and Cluster
Use case: When you have several products in development at once, you’ll need to map, prioritize, assign, and track all of your projects. This product roadmap template can help you organize projects and deliverables, track key results, and keep your team accountable.
How Mural AI enhances: Teams can use the Summarize feature to succinctly describe project objectives and give high-level debriefs of what they’re working on. The Cluster feature can quickly collate projects based on personnel, goals, areas of focus, deadlines, or any other key information in your mural.
Outcome: AI tools for product development workflows make standups WAY quicker and easier, and project management is simpler than ever.
Efficient prototyping with Build a Mural
Use case: Your idea has been approved and added to the workflow, and now it’s time to get into building your prototype. Mural is already a great place to sketch out low-fi prototypes, with plenty of templates to map user experience and engineering requirements. We recommend using this rough & ready prototyping template to get started.
How Mural AI improves: Prototyping can help speed up development by up to 50%, but you don’t want to spend more time looking for a mural or starting from scratch. If you’re not sure which prototype template to use for your idea, Build a Mural will take relevant info from your product idea and auto-populate your mural with the best template.
Outcome: A clean, orderly prototype to show your proof of concept.
Streamline cross-department collaboration with Summarize
Use case: As a product developer, you know you can improve product innovation by enhancing team collaboration and alignment. While teamwork makes the dream work (and the product work), different teams often speak different languages, often making cross-functional communication a touch-and-go operation. Collaboration tools for product development often aren’t shared across organizations, putting the onus on your team to increase visibility.
How Mural AI enhances: Get your point across clearly and concisely with the Summarize feature. Mural AI can take key information from your notes, briefs, and roadmaps to give other teams a high-level overview of what you’re working on, how it impacts them, and what you need from them.
Outcome: Seamless communication among teams, leading to on-time deliverables and a faster go-to-market.
Capture and share insights easily with Classify
Use case: Whether you run external focus groups or usability exercises within your own org, getting feedback from others is crucial to shape and perfect your product. Data shows that prioritizing customer feedback — and acting on it — makes you 2.5 times more likely to have a successful product. However, insights can be vast and varied, making it a challenge to construe from them a way forward. Use this customer insights template to get the most out of focus groups.
How Mural AI enhances: The Classify feature can scan all feedback and insights and bucket it based on negative, neutral, and positive sentiment. You can quickly and easily identify the features people love, the ones they’re “meh” on, and the ones that need some workshopping.
Outcome: You’ve identified which aspects of your product are adoption drivers, which are turn-offs, and which you need to tinker with. This allows you to create a roadmap for your team to improve your product.
Turn competitive analysis into opportunities with AI Chat and Summarize
Use case: In research and development, you always have an eye on the market to identify what’s working and improve upon it within your own org. Doing thorough market research can reduce the risk of product failure by 50%! Sometimes, though, you may be missing a critical “why” that the numbers just can’t answer. Use this competitive analysis template to start unlocking opportunities for your organization.
How Mural AI enhances: AI chat can give you answers and solutions you might otherwise sink hours of research into. Using natural language prompts, you can ask AI chat clarifying questions about competitive data, run scenarios, and get ideas for how to improve your own product. You can take this info and, with the Summarize feature, get neat, concise, and actionable competitive analysis.
Outcome: You know where and why your competitors are succeeding (or failing), and can make your product competitive in the market.
Optimize feature development with Classify
Use case: Like we discussed way back in the ideation phase, you’re not likely to nail product innovation on the first go. Optimizing your features is the most fun part of the process (right?)! When it’s time to gather insights to help you nail your feature development, you can use this Product Alignment template to troubleshoot issues and propose solutions with your team. Plan, track, launch, and promote features with this comprehensive feature market analysis template.
How Mural AI enhances: Get a finger on the pulse of how your team feels about certain features — and the development of said features — with Classify. Classify will gather feedback from your team and sort it into positive, neutral, and negative, so you can quickly identify where your team is succeeding and where they’re getting hung up.
Outcome: Your team is aligned on how to move forward with feature development — what to fix, what to scrap, and what to promote.
Simplify testing plans with Summarize and Cluster
Use case: Congrats on moving your product to alpha mode! Testing is exciting and confusing — you’ll have a lot of feedback coming through a lot of channels, and not all of it is, uh, “pristine.” You’ll want to make sure you have a plan to deploy testing and gather feedback so you get the best possible insights. You can gather feedback in this mob testing template to get a high level overview of bugs or hangups.
How Mural AI enhances: Instead of manually combing through feedback and bug reports, you can use Summarize and Cluster to summarize insights and group them based on content.
Outcome: Super-clean usability reports that give you a clear idea of what to put in your Jira queue and troubleshoot with your dev team.
Enhance documentation and knowledge sharing with Summarize
Use case: Who hasn’t had to journey into the bowels of their archives to find something you never thought you’d need again? Scrupulous documentation is important for the product development process. Ideas or notes from past stages are likely to come up again, whether you need them for yourself, your team, or another team. Plus, documenting the “how” of your development process can help you iterate on or improve upon it in the future. Mural is the perfect aggregation tool for all your wayward docs.
How Mural AI enhances: We’ve gone over some of the ways the Summarize feature can make knowledge sharing way less tedious. You can increase visibility with your team, other teams, and your future self by keeping neat summaries of your work at every stage of the development process. Just plug in the what-why-how, and Mural will give you a high level summary to make archiving easier.
Outcome: Neat, organized, easily searchable documentation for every stage of your development process.
Quickly align on project goals with Summarize
Use case: Before you kick off a project, you want to make sure you and your team all know why you’re doing it. Getting everyone aligned on objectives increases enthusiasm, accountability, and the quality of the work from your team. This applies to all parts of your company, but for R&D, it’s important everyone knows how the product meets the business’s goals before they start working on it. You can use this project kickoff template to get your team aligned before kickoff.
How Mural AI enhances: The Summarize feature can make dense, jargon-y OKRs and cross-team goals easier to understand so all team members know how they can contribute to the project’s success.
Outcome: More efficient, more enthusiastic, goal-focused work from your team.
Boost your workflow optimization with AI. It can lead to better, more efficient outcomes and less resource drain. Embrace the future of work with Mural AI. Let's innovate, optimize, and grow together!
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