How to Own your Product Ideas

Janna Bastow

July 25, 2013 4 minute read

It’s one thing to just enter an idea into ProdPad (in fact, it’s incredibly easy as far as idea management software goes).

But it’s another to come up with the creative idea in the first place.

And yet another to be the idea owner, the person with the vested interest in seeing that idea get turned into reality.

While the ideas you and your team enter in ProdPad can come from many sources, we found that, more often than not, the Product Manager was the primary person in charge of actually entering the ideas.

But since the person who created the idea isn’t necessarily the original author of the idea, nor the person tasked with bringing it to life, we’ve made some changes.

You can now set someone as the idea Owner or Author.

Idea Owner

While someone may come up with an idea, someone else may be better suited to following up and developing the idea. By giving them the role of Idea Owner, you give them the ability to build out the product specs, jump in on the discussion around the idea, and be kept in the loop on any changes to the idea.

So now, as the Product Owner, you can assign ownership of an idea so that you can task the right people with further exploration or documentation to support an idea or kill it.

How do be an effective idea owner:

You don’t need to be the official ‘Product Owner’ to own an idea. Your goal is to help find out if the idea is a truly great one or not, and if it is, get the team ready to deliver on it.
Research where you’ve see this idea in the wild before: Is there something you can learn from your competitors or other great sites? Grab snippets and screenshots to show off how it might work (Tip: you can add these screenshots to ProdPad and comment directly on them.)
Lead the discussion: Get your team involved in the discussion (you can @mention people to get them in the loop)
Build a convincing business case for the idea. What problem are you trying to solve with the idea, and what value would it bring to the company if you solved it? The Specs section will help guide you on these questions.
Ask for help or resources where you need them. Everyone’s got their own tasks to hand and probably won’t realise you need the hand – if you need help with yours, make sure you speak up!
Get others excited about the idea. With the support of others, there’s no stopping your good idea!

Idea Author

In order to work more in line with how your product management process already flows, we’ve made it possible to also assign an idea author. The original field, Idea Creator, captured who actually submitted the idea to ProdPad. However, as the Product Manager, we know that you’re still going to be the one entering ideas a lot of the time, on behalf of others.

If someone else in the company came up with the idea originally, assign them as Author so they can get credit when the idea makes it out the door. It also enables them to edit the product spec, add additional context, and jump in on the discussion.

The goal of the Idea Owner and Idea Author fields are to make ProdPad more in line with the day-to-day product management process of your company.