Where Do Great Ideas Really Come From? Idea Management Explained

Even the most creative CEOs and Product Managers can’t reach viable new product ideas in one eureka moment. Brainstorming sessions, snapping up good customer suggestions, and waves of inspiration in the shower are only the first step. Idea Management is about not only having a great idea, but taking the truly innovative ideas through to fruition. It’s about bringing organisation and measurement to the creative process to make sure you’re always and only delivering real value to your users and your business.

Effective Idea Management

Here are three key steps to effective idea management:

1. Capturing a promising ideaIt’s very difficult to work with disparate post-it notes, sketches, emails or half-forgotten conversations. It’s not enough for you or your team to have great ideas if they aren’t captured effectively. The first challenge of Idea Management is to create a structured repository of your many ideas; the second is to make it as easy as possible for everyone in your team to submit theirs. We log our ideas to ProdPad easily while we’re on the go, and keep them all organised with a structured system of tags and filters.
2. Exploring the value of an idea
   Once you’ve identified what seems to be a great idea, you need to validate that hypothesis. Before you get to what you’ll build, it’s important to ensure that you’re tackling a real problem. User stories, built on relevant user personas for your customer base, should be able to explain what your users want to be able to do in order to solve a specific problem they have. This value to the user must then be set against the business case for solving it for them; what will you get from the change? If you can happily answer these questions, you can move on to the details of what and how.
3. Implementing an idea in practiceEvery good idea is in competition with another. To decide which ones are great enough to build, it’s important to understand the resources required to bring value to customers. Weighing up effort involved is not just about technical requirements or development hours, but the resources demanded from your entire team. Impact set against effort is the basic equation for deciding if and when an idea is viable to make it to development. We use ProdPad’s priority visualization tools to make those decisions a little easier.

Really great ideas may start in an unimaginable number of different ways. But managing them through to workable product specs needs sound repeatable processes that you can be sure will take your business to success.

If you’d like to learn more about product management best practices, explore the ProdPad product management course here.

Or, sign up for a completely free trial of our product management software.