Where do product ideas come from?💡
Hint: It’s not all on you.
Early in my product career, I thought that to be a great product manager, I needed to come up with great ideas all the time. I thought it was on me to find all the solutions to our users’ problems and that I’d have to be an idea-generating machine to be successful. 🤖💡
But as product managers, we don’t need to come up with all the solution ideas on our own; in fact, that’d be a bad move. Ideas will come from lots of places, and we need to be open to ideas from our teammates, stakeholders, and customers. Our job is to sift through the many, many ideas to find the good ideas that are worth pursuing and throw out the bad ideas.
In this super short, fun video, Mando and I will walk through some common places where you can find great ideas. Stick around after the video for more tips!
First of all, let’s revisit what a product manager’s job is. I like to explain it like this:
A product manager figures out what their team should build with limited time and resources and does whatever it takes to make their product great.
To figure out what your team should build, first, you need to find the right user problem to solve and then the right solution to that problem. This process of figuring out what to build is called product discovery. There’s a lot to it, which we’ve talked about in this post, so today, we’re covering where ideas come from—the sources of inspiration that can fuel your discovery work.
Here are four common places you’ll find ideas:
1. Your cross-functional team
I’m talking about your closest partners, the engineers, designers, and any other folks who are dedicated to the same product area as you. Maybe you call them your “pod” or “squad,” but whatever the name, the point is that these folks are committed to the success of the same product area as you. You’re all experts in that space, and you're continuously working to improve it for your users and the business.
Your partners are probably thinking about the problems in your product area as much as you are, so naturally, they will have great ideas that you should tap into. Listen closely for ideas that teammates mention during team meetings, retrospectives, and casual conversations, and keep track of them.
2. Organized idea-generating events
There are lots of formal ways that companies and teams generate ideas. Here are a few:
Brainstorm sessions. These are events where you use one of the many brainstorming frameworks to generate ideas as a team. They are great to hold during the roadmap planning process or when kicking off a new project to come up with solution ideas as a group. This post from Miro includes tips on how to run a successful brainstorming session and provides templates for different brainstorming techniques.
Design Sprints are a highly structured method used by teams to go from a big problem to tested prototypes in just five days. They’re a great way to generate and validate ideas fast. Check out the book Sprint to learn how to run one.
Hackathons. Lots of companies host hackathons, where employees do rapid, collaborative engineering for a short amount of time, usually a couple of days. This is a great way for technical teams to try out creative solutions. As a product manager, you can look out for hackathon projects that align with your product strategy as ideas to explore further.
20% time programs. Some companies encourage individuals to pursue topics of interest for a fraction of their work time. If your company has a program like this, you can check out what folks are working on and collaborate with them on ideas that fit your strategy.
3. Your business partners
Colleagues from other parts of your company (think Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, Operations, etc.) can offer new and different perspectives on the business and customer needs. This can be a great source of inspiration, and you should spend lots of time with your partners across the business to learn from them.
Many of them will have plenty of ideas that they’d love for you to add to your roadmap. It can get overwhelming, though, if colleagues are cornering you in the hallway and office kitchen to share their thoughts. You’re just trying to grab an afternoon snack, but Sally has a great feature idea she wants you to hear!
To keep things organized and easy on yourself, you can ask each department to have a representative from their team organize a prioritized list of their team’s ideas. Meet with their representative once or twice each quarter to hear them out and discuss their ideas. They’ll be happy you took the time to listen, and you’ll walk away with lots of idea inspiration.
4. Your customers
When you talk to customers during product discovery work, you typically want to focus on them — understanding their world and learning about their problems. (We want to explore the problem space!) But customers have solution ideas, too, and they’ll share these with you in the form of feature requests. They’ll suggest specific features and functionality that they believe will solve their problems.
Feature requests can be a great source for ideas, but you have to make sure you understand the problem that the customer thinks their request will solve to ensure it’s realistic and aligned with your own strategy and objectives. I like to ask, “If we built this feature, what would it help you achieve?” This way, I can get to the root problem that the customer is asking us to solve and find the right solution, which might be their idea or something entirely different.
So many ideas; what do I do now?
Ideas and inspiration for ideas come from all over the place. I like to keep track of all the ideas I hear and review the list often. Having a list of ideas comes in super handy during planning and roadmapping because I’m never starting from scratch.
I like to use a simple spreadsheet to log ideas. For each idea in the list, I keep track of:
The idea itself, usually a short description of the feature
The user problem this idea aims to solve
The expected impact I think the idea could have
Impacted customers — who are the users who have the problem and could benefit from this solution idea?
Any validation or supporting evidence we have around the idea
Who suggested the idea (who/where did the idea come from?)
If you liked this post and want to learn more about solution ideas, discovery, and delivery, check out my online course, Product Management Foundations. We cover designing and validating solutions and so much more.
You got this!
If you’re looking for more product management lessons, here’s how I can help!
📚 Product Management Foundations course. My 9-week training program will set a strong foundation for your product career. It is self-paced and offers optional one-on-one sessions with me.
📺 PM Crash Course (free) is a fun, free playlist of videos that introduces the basics of product management.
📖 Product Influence course. Learn simple influence principles and frameworks to take your product career to the next level.
❤️ Develop Products People Love course on Skillshare. A beginner class on product development for entrepreneurs.
🙋🏻♀️ 1-on-1 coaching. For personalized coaching, book a one-on-one call with me. You can also book time with me on Skillshare!