Modern product design has become a collaborative activity of crowd intelligence, which inevitably brings an unprecedented increase in design conflicts. The accurate identification of key design conflicts can significantly reduce costs and speed up the design process; on the contrary, it will not only cause a lot of iterations but also become a major hidden problem for product quality. In order to accurately identify the key design conflicts, designers must identify the causes and consequences of the conflicts. With the support of causal discovery, the paper aims to identify the causes and consequences of design conflicts through the perception of the design conflict formation process and achieve the accurate identification of the key design conflicts. First, a deep survey relating to current studies on product development and conflict identification is conducted. Second, the proposed causal discovery-based design conflict detection approach is presented. Finally, the authors draw a conclusion and point out the direction for future research.