Getting your development team to move forward in a cohesive fashion can be hard. Engineers and designers can have different goals and methods during a development project. In this session we will explore ways to embark on design research work that will fuel the product development work down the road, and learn a few things about creativity and our brains. Methods discussed will enable participants to develop rich results from the voice of customer work, and enable the development of strong, robust inputs and requirements. This will help create an understanding of how to effectively work in the ‘fuzzy front end’ of development, and create common ground for team members to work together with a design thinking focus. Armed with these items, participants will be able to be more effective in their development work and raise the outcome level of usability engineering work, and ultimately deliver more innovative results from development work.