R&D teams are under pressure to deliver innovative products at speed—without sacrificing quality, alignment, or customer focus. Unfortunately, precious hours are often lost to manual tasks, siloed feedback loops, and slow decision-making.
Fortunately, AI tools for product innovation can help you cut through complexity. Mural’s AI-powered collaboration features are purpose-built for cross-functional product teams, helping you accelerate alignment and keep the customer at the center of every decision. These tools are seamlessly incorporated into the interface you already know and love, and they're designed to enhance your product innovation 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.
- AI-powered stakeholder mapping: visualizes your entire innovation network, so you can connect the right people at the right time.
- 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.
Want more specifics? Find out below how these AI tools for product innovation can accelerate your workflows.
Strengthen and streamline R&D workflows with these 12 Mural AI features
1. Speed up idea generation and concept development with Generate
Use case: R&D teams know an idea never begins in its final, perfect form. It needs to be tested, refined, and tinkered with. You need to brainstorm multiple alternatives and potential iterations, which can be tough when staring at a blank screen.
How Mural AI enhances: Mural AI’s Generate feature doesn’t replace your creativity, it empowers it. By simply using a natural language prompt, you can quickly and easily generate a stream of relevant, innovative concepts geared to your unique needs to spark your inspiration.
Outcome: Innovative, workable ideas you’re ready to pitch to your team and start building into a proof of concept.
2. Visualize your entire innovation network with AI-powered stakeholder mapping
Use case: Today’s R&D workflows are complex, with multiple internal and external stakeholders influencing product innovation. Identifying and keeping track of every key person and team is time-consuming and can lead to missed input and time-consuming reworks down the line.
How Mural AI enhances: The AI-Powered stakeholder mapping feature visualizes your entire innovation network. It helps you connect with stakeholders and identify subject matter experts whose knowledge and needs will define your product’s success.
Outcome: A quickly accessible central source of truth that defines responsibilities, capabilities, and contact information for all team members.
3. Organize product roadmaps with Summarize and Cluster
Use case: In a fast-paced R&D environment, you may have multiple projects happening simultaneously. You need a product roadmap that prioritizes and tracks all these projects across multiple teams.
How Mural AI enhances: When each team holds their own daily standup to recap their progress, Mural AI’s Summarize feature can describe objectives, project status, and even challenges. With a simple prompt, Mural can create a comprehensive summary in seconds. The Cluster feature can then collate all of this information from different projects and teams into one place.
Outcome: Team members leave their standup fully aligned on action items, blockers, deadlines, and next steps.
4. Prototype faster with Build a Mural
Use case: After you’ve secured approval for your new concept, you need to prototype it. Spending time searching for the right prototyping template or starting from a blank page can cause delays.
How Mural AI enhances: Build a Mural will take relevant info from your product idea and auto-populate your mural with the best template for your project.
Outcome: A template customized to the specific demands of your project so you can hit the ground running at the prototype stage without delay.
5. Streamline cross-department collaboration with Summarize
Use case: In a product development workflow, the R&D team and the marketing team have different objectives and priorities. Your R&D team speaks in one language (technical jargon, wireframes) and the marketing team speaks in another (messaging, branding, customer testimonials).
How Mural AI enhances: The Summarize feature can take all the key information from the development team and give the marketing team a high-level overview of the most important takeaways from your project.
Outcome: No more time wasted combing through lengthy email threads to catch up on conversations outside your team and come to alignment.
6. Analyze customer feedback with Classify
Use case: You’ve conducted an external focus group or run a usability exercise, and you have tons of feedback. Customer insights are varied and vast, which makes them difficult to parse.
How Mural AI enhances: The Classify feature can analyze all the feedback and immediately bucket it into positive, neutral, and negative sentiment.
Outcome: An actionable list of which features are adoption drivers, which are turn-offs, and what still needs work to guide your roadmap.
7. Turn competitive analysis into opportunities with AI Chat and Summarize
Use case: Doing thorough competitive market analysis 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.
How Mural AI enhances: AI Chat can save you hours of product research. Using natural language prompts, you can ask clarifying questions about competitive data, run scenarios, and get ideas for how to improve your own product. The Summarize feature can then turn all of these insights into a concise analysis.
Outcome: Huge volumes of competitive research distilled down into a readable digest, complete with insights you may have missed on your own.
8. Align your team on feature optimization with Classify
Use case: As your product development progresses, you’ll want to gather insights from your team that will help you optimize feature development. Feature market analysis can certainly help, but you also need to synthesize your team’s feedback and make it actionable.
How Mural AI enhances: The Classify feature can sort your team’s feedback into positive, neutral, and negative, so you can see what’s working and what isn’t at a glance.
Outcome: A product roadmap fine-tuned to deliver the improvements most likely to move the needle for your customers.
9. Automate your workflow with Asana two-way sync
Use case: If your collaboration platform and your project management tool do not automatically sync, you may still need to enter data in each of them manually. This can cause communication breakdowns that slow down your go-to-market.
How Mural AI enhances: Mural’s integration with Asana, powered by Workato, enables a two-way sync between Mural and Asana. This automates your workflow so all specs and updates flow easily between the two platforms, ensuring every detail stays accurate.
Outcome: Information in Mural now directly mirrors live progress in Asana, and this workflow optimization ensures everyone is aligned on the latest timelines to prevent delays.
10. Improve usability reports with Summarize and Cluster
Use case: When you’ve moved to the testing phase for your product, you need to gather feedback from multiple channels, including surveys, in-app feedback, bug reports, and customer interviews. It's a lot of information to sort through.
How Mural AI enhances: The Summarize feature can create a high-level summary of your most important insights from all your different feedback channels. The Cluster feature can then group these insights based on their content.
Outcome: Super-clean usability reports that inform your dev team’s Jira queue and accelerate troubleshooting.
11. Create a single source of truth with Summarize
Use case: Keeping all of your documentation and knowledge organized in one place is time-consuming and difficult. But you need a single source of truth to avoid duplicate work and keep everyone aligned.
How Mural AI enhances: The Summarize feature can make knowledge sharing way less tedious. You can increase visibility with your team and other teams 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, and easily searchable documentation for every stage of your development process.
12. Quickly align on project goals with Summarize
Use case: Before you kick off a project, you need to make sure your team knows why you’re doing it. Getting everyone aligned on objectives increases enthusiasm, accountability, and the quality of work.
How Mural AI enhances: The Summarize feature can make dense, jargon-filled OKRs and cross-team goals easier to understand. This ensures all team members know how they can contribute to the project’s success.
Outcome: More efficient, more enthusiastic, and goal-focused work from your team.
Ready to see it in action? Reach your next product milestone with Mural AI and experience how fast aligned, customer-obsessed R&D can move.
