New Idea Innovation and Ideation for Product Managers
Do you consider yourself a “creative product manager”? I think a lot of us would probably shy away from that word — our designer friends are creative, our engineering friends are creative, but we are fact driven, right? Most product manager courses and literature discuss discovery and design thinking in detail, but take the brainstorming creative work out of the process (or take it for granted that people know how to do this). Product Ideation (also called Concepting) isn’t just any type of brainstorming, so while some generic “how to brainstorm” advice definitely applies, I think there are enough special considerations that are worth calling out. Concepting and Ideation phases are the key to an effective product development that makes an impact on your business.
Ideation is the step where you decide what you might build to solve customer problems. Importantly, this phase is not the same as discovery. Discovery, as a term, usually encompasses ideation — if you’re doing your discovery right, you’ll be coming up with ideas regularly. But these are your creative ideas as a product person/team, you aren’t taking orders from customers. In my experience working in product, I find that many product folks actually skip this step, and instead just take and test/build a pre-defined idea. While many PMs are aware of not being an “order taker” for sales, it’s much harder to listen to a customer request and not get anchored to a solution.
A few caveats: the ideation process doesn’t generate just one single thing — you can and should come up with many ideas that will address an opportunity (I am preferring the term “opportunity” here as defined by Theresa Torres instead of “problem”). Another caveat is that this process should start as an individual exercise, and come together as a group to hone and clarify and pick a few ideas to focus on. Remember that asking more team members to participate creates better products — however, a bigger group requires honesty and potentially tough conversation (not in a mean way, just in a deep probing way). In order to do this safely, you need to trust your team, have and show respect and courtesy to everyone involved, and participate with open mindedness.
Finally, this is a creative process and you need a creative flow — don’t try to squeeze ideation in during lunch between meetings, it won’t be successful.
Step 1: Aggregation
I recommend that you start with some research findings/fact gathering. This can include answers to questions like
- What are customers asking for
- What are customers complaining about
- What are some hacky ways your customers are using your product
- Where are we losing sales opportunities and/or customer renewals
- Where is the market going and what are emerging trends in our area
- What have other people proposed to solve this problem in the past
- What is our executive team and/or board interested in seeing
Put this all on a whiteboard (or your choice of written documentation) so you can see all of it.
Step 2: Open Riffs
Looking at all the accumulated facts, start thinking about what type of product (or service!) could address some of the areas you identified. There won’t be a silver bullet, so aim for multiple product ideas. List out all the possible ways you can address the opportunity. If you get stuck, talk through it with a teammate or try to explain your idea out loud — verbalizing can help your brain bring concrete definition to ambiguous ideas.
A good place for inspiration can be to look at the “white space” between your existing solutions — what is there currently or what are people doing to compensate for the gap? Another tactic is to look for opportunities between your existing product, the current market, and adjacent markets (see https://medium.com/agileinsider/what-lies-beneath-the-world-of-product-ideation-da2e8bc9da23 for good thoughts on this tactic).
You should think about what ideas would be the best fit for your specific set of customers (whether current customers or hopeful prospective customers). You can incorporate your positioning here — where do you want to play so that your customers are the right fit?
A final note on riffs — your compiled list of ideas might not include the actual implementation or request that came from customers. 🙃
Step 3: Choose a few
Once you have a good, robust population of possible ideas, pick a few (3–4 usually) of your ideas that look most promising. This is where I recommend involving more team members, to properly challenge and stress test ideas that are on the board. This will help ensure your final few are the most stable ideas. Another thing to look for is that these ideas will usually solve multiple problems for your key customers OR solve one big problem. If your ideas are all niche or focus on a small number of customers, it might not be robust enough to make an impact.
Now you can focus on really fleshing out those few ideas. What kinds of interactions could exist? There could be multiple technical or design options to build your idea — pursue a few implementations and “sketch” them out (either in bullet points or in wireframes or however feels natural for you). Walk through how the ideas actually would work in production and how customers would use it (is it in the UI? Or in the API? Can someone customize it? Are options static and universal?).
Step 4: Socialize and Test
Take your 3–4 most solid ideas and start socializing! For each idea -
- Ask customers — would this work for you? Can you imagine using it? What’s missing?
- Ask sales/internal stakeholders — could you sell this? Does it make sense for our pitch?
- Ask executives — does this feel to you like it makes progress towards our goals?
- Ask support/CS — can you imagine our customers adopting this? Why or why not? Which calls would decrease if we launched something like this?
The answers to these questions will further refine the idea or give you an indication if there is a non-starter you didn’t think about earlier (for example, you didn’t realize that most customer contracts prohibit co-mingling data, or your customers rely very heavily on their email alerts instead of logging in to your app). Coming out of this step, you should eliminate any ideas that had non-starters and you’ll be in a good position to start prioritizing your remaining ideas.
You can also start incorporating some testing here — painted door tests can be great at this phase to give you an idea of demand. I recommend Testing Business Ideas for some great ways to test your ideas.
Step 5: Decide on Priority
Based on the research, socialization, and testing up until this point, pick the best performing idea/concept to create your first MVP. You should prioritize your list of a few ideas based on your socializing — if one of your ideas really created excitement, that could be a sign to put this at the top of your list. At this point, I recommend communicating which idea you’re starting with to your internal stakeholders and any key customers — you want these folks to come along on the journey with you so they are bought in.
Step 6: MVP Development and Test
The rubber starts to hit the road here — you’ve already thought about what the implementation could be, so write your Feature Writeup (aka one-pager) and start scoping and sizing the MVP. What are you doing, when, and for whom? Add in wireframes if applicable and helpful. Again, socialize the MVP scope and wireframes with internal stakeholders and key customers to keep people up to speed and get feedback early and often! If you needed a MVP to do your testing, you should do that now — one great way to do this is by having key customers beta test the feature (PMs can use feature flags to do this easily).
Step 7: Iterate
Don’t forget about your other ideas! It’s easy to fall in love with your best idea, but keep your list of riffs handy — more PMs should be trying idea 2 or 3 or 4, but instead they move on to the next shiny thing. If your initial MVP doesn’t work out (or if it works, but isn’t as “wow” as initially expected), try another approach — you’re learning.
One major caveat here — speed is essential to being able to test out multiple theories. If you go slow, you need to pick really well, because you likely won’t have the ability to test multiple ideas (most organizations don’t have the patience or stomach).
And you’ve successfully generated and launched a new idea! Wasn’t it fun being creative? After some practice with this, you’ll be used to ideation and will have a lot of good things to stock your roadmap with. Good luck!
