GPT Prompt Guides

Analogous Inspiration

Product Management User Experience

It’s a very divergent activity that allows teams to explore and is a perfect activity for AI Assistants — brainstorming new ideas quickly.

By examining how different domains solve similar problems, one can discover unique approaches and strategies that can be adapted to their own context. This cross-pollination of ideas encourages out-of-the-box thinking and helps to break away from conventional solutions that might be limiting progress.

Additionally, analogous inspiration often brings fresh perspectives and insights, which can lead to breakthroughs and improvements that would not have been possible within the confines of one’s own field.

AI Assistants are great for giving you a list to start with. Since the application has indexed content from thousands of domains, it can draw similar analogies that are useful for this exercise.

Let’s get started.

Start with the Domain

I like starting as wide as possible on analogous inspiration because I want to keep a very open mind. This fosters a broader perspective when you draw inspiration from diverse fields, leading to more creative and unique solutions. It also helps in identifying patterns that might not be apparent within the narrow scope of your specific domain.

It also reduces the risk of producing derivative work, ensuring that your solutions are fresh and original. By exploring a wide array of inspirations, you build a rich repository of ideas that can be synthesized and adapted to create groundbreaking innovations.

Now we can start with a big prompt, and we’ll continue to use the Customer Relationship Management example.

Prompt

List twenty applications that are in domains adjacent to customer relationship management in a table.

Add Context

Adding context, like user personas and tasks, to analogous inspiration is essential because it grounds abstract ideas in practical, user-centered realities. User personas represent your target audience, illustrating their goals, needs, and behaviors.

Integrating these personas ensures that the ideas you derive are applicable to the people you’re designing for. You can translate contextual inspirations into actionable insights tailored to your audience.

Tasks provide a concrete framework for how users interact with your product. You can see how innovative concepts from different fields can enhance or streamline user experiences. This method bridges the gap between inspiration and implementation, making sure that creative ideas are not just interesting but also functional and effective in real-world scenarios.

This transforms inspiration into a strategic tool, driving solutions that are both imaginative and focused on a similar task at hand.

We’ll add some general personas here and let the AI Assistant come up with the tasks. Note, we’ll also include our preferred table format here.

Prompt

List twenty applications that are in domains adjacent to customer relationship management with personas similar to sales managers or business development representatives and their tasks in a table.

Add Feature

When I do analogous inspiration, I like adding the feature at hand. Doing this ensures that the inspiration is directly relevant and actionable. This approach maximizes the efficiency of your inspiration process, allowing you to focus on ideas that can be considered for your design.

Also, including this helps in communicating your ideas and the related mental models more effectively to stakeholders. It illustrates how specific inspirations help solve the design challenges you are addressing. I wouldn’t go much further than adding this feature in order to keep an open mind, so I usually stop here in this divergent task.

Let’s go down to the feature level in the prompt by adding “managing accounts.”

Prompt

List twenty applications that are in domains adjacent to customer relationship management and managing accounts with personas similar to sales managers or business development representatives and their tasks in a table.