April 24, 2020
Feature Ideation
Ideate: How To
Understanding Your Stakeholders
Stakeholders include customers, suppliers, contractors, and employees…more than just customers. That’s the big thing here. As a product owner, you need to create a system of ideation emanating from all stakeholders.
While there are many ways stakeholders can give you ideas, let’s start with the most direct: it should be easy for stakeholders to pitch you a new idea. While some filtration of feedback may be necessary if you have a lot of customers, for suppliers, contractors, and employees, you shouldn’t be putting up obstacles such as making them fill out a long-form. Instead, actively solicit feedback, have a product person talk directly with them, and work with them to understand their concerns. Have weekly meetings with stakeholders to initiate communication. Use forums and surveys to gather ideas from customers. Enable your development team to put ideas directly into the backlog or if they are small to just do them.
Understand Your Competitors
You should also always be on the lookout for companies that are not competitive but have feature overlap. Some of your best ideas will come from these companies. They often don’t have the same customers but solve a similar type of problem. You should pay particular attention to companies that share a similar business model as you do. Think Airbnb and Uber. These companies are not competitive at all. But both have the “sharing economy” as their underlying business model. I used to work at a company called Crowdfunder. That company had a two-sided marketplace, Entrepreneurs and Investors. While we had many competitors, some of the better ideas came from looking at other companies that had either entrepreneurs or investors as customers. Also, two-sided marketplaces were of interest. These companies were not competitive, but had feature overlap. That overlap was key. I used to tell my product managers that if they weren’t stealing 90%, they weren’t doing their jobs right.
Brainstorming New Ideas
Often brainstorming sessions are can be useful. They open up communication and get people thinking of new ideas. Including some or all of your stakeholders is great.
Methodologies:
- Break up into groups of 3-4
- Give a time set to come up with a set of ideas
- Teams pitch ideas
- Second refinement session
- Final pitch session
Rules:
- Place people with similar alpha levels in the same groups
- Make sure good friends are not in the same group.
- Mix backgrounds in each group
- Each group picks a spokesman to pitch the ideas to the group
- Make sure that everyone is familiar with the current backlog/ideas
- No judgment
- Teams can steal each other’s ideas between the first and second pitches
Refinement
After you get an idea, you always need to refine it. Here is the process I use to improve the ideas and get them feature ready.
Erosion Dilation
These terms come from image processing. Erosion is the reduction of pixels around the edges while dilation adds. This is the most similar analogy to how an initial idea should be refined. The iterative expansion and contraction of an idea will help you understand the core of the idea and where it could lead.
Erosion
The erosion portion of the iteration can be looked at as a descope of the feature. The correct frame of mind is important. The first step is to put yourself in a desperate frame of reference. You must cut the idea to its essence, then cut even more. If your life depended on doing it faster, what would you do?
Descope checklist:
- Do we have to make it small? Can we make the first version big?
- Does it have to be fast/real-time?
- Does it have to be tough?
- Does it have to be pretty?
- Does it have to be cheap?
- Does it have to be scalable?
Dilation
The key here is not to add other features. That’s the easy thing to do. You need to stay focused on the particular one you have. What you are doing here is improving it. That one thing. You want to improve it in layers, adding one thing at a time, seeing it get better. How far can you go within the bounds of the feature?
This process is iterative, and you need to go through it several times to get the best result. Make sure you include other people also, so you can have the best feature possible.
Written by Scott creator of Valtrace.
