How I visualize ideas together with AI these days

This edition of the Full-Stack Product Leader was sent March 2026

Hi there!

White board sessions is the work tool I miss from the pre-covid era. I miss being able to quickly visualise an idea and work on it together fast and sloppy.

The tools I've been left with have not truly supported me, especially since I'm not a designer.

slide decks are fast if what you want to do fits into the template
text is text
voice and hand gesture is too unreliable for deeper more complex concepts
whiteboard tools like miro and figjam are getting so much better, but can stil be slow.
I've had numorous people share their (ugly) excalibur drawings, but it's never been somtehing we can collaborate on since they are stuck in that tool and i dont use it. and frankly it's not been blessed in the company stacks

Now that stuff is getting faster, I've had success with using mermaid script to quickly display flows and concepts in a portable way. It's may it way easier for me to collborate and feedback with AI for a much lower cost than feedbacking on a generated pic (I'm never gettign those are hours back)

What is mermaid?

a nifty script for creating different types of charts. it looks like this:

mermaid script and rendered flowchart in notion

You write the mermaid code and a chart is generated

It's supported in many different tools like notion, figjam, obsidian (anything that can render markdown normally)

If you are like me working with claude code (but make it leadership OS) you can view it in Obsidian, VS code/cursor etc since it's not generated in the terminal.

Now this of course does not replace a good whiteboard session. However, together with AI, mermaid lets me create boxes fast and it's easy to

a) feedback quickly

b) port them between tools and collab better with AI.

What I use mermaid for

Flowcharts for opportunity solution trees, user journeys, PRD logic, decision trees
Quadrant charts for Eisenhower, impact/effort, any 2x2

Examples of great applications:

I had AI generate the user journey they picked up out of an interview transcript (hello possible automation 😎)
I've reasoned with Claude about opportunity solution trees and impact maps
I've included mermaid styling colors in my brand guideline to generate diagrams branded as Lixor 💅🏻

Example of opportunity solution tree generated from mermaid in fig jam (Claude did clearly not read Teresa Torres book on the topic)

Example of getting your tasks visually plotted

What I tried that did not work:

Generate a Wardley map, you can’t use mermaid for this (if you dont want to use Claude for this you can go to https://onlinewardleymaps.com/)
Create slides in google slides: I asked nano banana to create a slide with shapes based on a mermaid script but it could only generate an image

Next up I'll explore using Gantt charts for my yearly planning so I can get the benefit of my current overview with nice colorful boxes in Figjam and be able to collaborate with Claude on it.

Have you tried it? What do you use it for? Give mermaid a try here and let me know what you think.

I read every email.

TTYL