Effective Product Ideation & Brainstorming Tips 🧠

Hey, lovely PMs! It’s Areesha :)

“I wanna bring innovative ideas and actionable results! But IDK how! 😭😭" cried a product manager who just got his first PM job.

Yeah, I know who can relate to this 😉

I got YOU, buddy! 😎

Let’s learn about refining your product ideation approach today!

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Is Product Ideation and Brainstorming different?

Product ideation is the exciting stage where you imagine and develop new product concepts. It's all about generating a bunch of ideas from different sources and minds and then filtering them into impactful solutions.

Brainstorming is a popular technique of product ideation where you gather people from different areas and pool a wide range of ideas on a specific problem/topic.

So, brainstorming is the most popular and one of the many ways of product ideation. There are other ways of ideation that I will be talking about in this article.

Exciting right? 😍

Why do Product Managers need an ideation strategy?

You can’t build just anything for anyone as you like. Seriously!

Successful ideas are backed by a strategic product ideation approach.

Here’s why you need a systematic product ideation approach (and not build random ideas that come to your mind) 👇

• Focus and Direction: Without a strategy, you risk chasing random ideas that might not align with your target market or business goals.
  
  You probably figured that out already 👀

• Prioritization: A systematic approach helps you prioritize the most promising ideas based on factors like customer need, market fit, and business impact.

• Innovation: It encourages the exploration of diverse perspectives, leading to more innovative and impactful ideas that are based on insightful customer data.

• Alignment with Stakeholders: Demonstrates a thoughtful approach to product development and builds confidence in your product roadmap.

Steps of an Effective Product Ideation Process

Here’s how to execute an effective product ideation process, step by step.

Step 1: Understand your customers

The first step is to thoroughly know and understand your customers.

Understanding your customers requires developing empathy and compassion towards them to study their behaviors closely.

Identify their motivations/demotivation, likes/dislikes, pain points, core needs, jobs to be done, or even lifestyle sometimes.

How to do it?

There’s no ‘one great way’ to understand everything about your customers.

• Conduct user interviews and surveys. Dive into customer support tickets and social media conversations to understand user pain points and unmet needs.

• Use the Jobs-to-be-done framework to understand what tasks they need to do to achieve a goal or fulfill a need.

  It is like breaking open a part of their daily life and standing in their shoes to discover their unmet needs.

• Create a comprehensive user persona chart of your target audience to represent their major pain points, needs, jobs, and lifestyles in a single person.
  

  

  User Persona Template by Visme

Step 2: Analyze trends, and study the competitors

The next step is to figure out how huge the problem is.

I mean, you don’t want to build a product that serves nobody else but just a few family and friends you know, do you? 🤣

This is why you should look for emerging trends around this problem in the industry. Figure out if this problem is a problem at large or only concerned with a small group of people.

Talk/interview potential customers and understand how many people are facing this problem and how it’s affecting their lives. Figure out what related problems are occurring due to the root problem.

You cannot solve a problem that concerns only a group of 100-500 people. The problem needs to be a common pain point for a good enough population for you to build a fairly large target audience.

After all, you need to pay the bills and achieve your product's financials.

Now, how do you know if a need is an unmet need?

Only if you know nobody in the market is fulfilling it, right?

Yep, you got it! 🔥

Do a thorough competitive analysis and look at emerging technologies and products in the market that serve this unmet need, directly or indirectly.

Look for opportunities you can grab and understand what you can improve about the existing solutions or bring up a new solution altogether to solve an essential unmet need concerning a lot of people.

Step 3: Refine & Validate Your Ideas

You now have some idea of what your solution will look like. It’s still a raw idea.

So how do you filter out the best ones that bring product market fitment?

This is when you’re supposed to validate your ideas against impact.

How to do it?

• Prioritize Ideas: You might have 10-50 different ideas to solve this problem, but you cannot go about validating each one of them. It would take you forever. So, prioritize your top 3 great ideas to validate each one of them.

• Financial Impact Analysis: As a product manager, you need to analyze the potential impact of your idea against real metrics. Use feasibility analysis to figure out if your idea is profitable and highly impactful to customers. Do this for all your top 3 ideas and figure out the one with the highest impact and profitability.

• "Fail Fast" Mentality: Don't be afraid to iterate and adapt based on user feedback. Also , don’t get discouraged if your product seems like a failure. Failing early saves resources in the long run.

• Stay Up-to-Date: Stay in the know with industry trends and new technologies that might unlock new product possibilities.

Check out this Complete Guide to Product Ideation and Discovery here.

Tips for Effective Brainstorming 🧠

Finally, let’s learn how to make brainstorming sessions effective. Every product manager needs to know this! ⚡

Here’s everything you should do before, during, and after a brainstorming session to make it effective. 🚀

Before the Brainstorm

• Do Your Homework: Gather relevant information and materials for the team to consider. This could include market research inferences, customer data, customer reviews, competitor analysis, and industry trends.

• Set the Stage: Clearly define the objective of the brainstorming session. What problem are you trying to solve, or what opportunity are you trying to capture? This will keep the ideas focused and relevant.

• Pick The Right People: Invite a diverse group of people to participate in the brainstorming. This could include engineers, designers, marketers, and customer support reps. The wider the range of perspectives, the more creative the ideas will be.

During the Brainstorm

• Encourage participation: Emphasize that all ideas are welcome, no matter how crazy they may seem. Encourage participation from everyone in the room.

• Focus on Quantity: The goal is to generate as many ideas as possible. Don't worry about evaluating or criticizing ideas at this stage.

• Build on Ideas: Encourage participants to build on and improve the ideas of others. This is where some of the most creative concepts can emerge.

After the Brainstorm

• Capture Everything: Make sure all ideas are captured and documented in a central location. This could be a whiteboard, a digital tool, or simply a piece of paper.

• Evaluate and Prioritize: Once you have a list of ideas, take some time to evaluate them based on their potential impact, feasibility, and alignment with your product goals.

• Develop a Plan: For the most promising ideas, develop a plan for testing and validating them. This could involve user interviews, prototyping, or A/B testing.

Brainstorming should be a fun and creative process. Encourage participants to relax, be playful, and generate wild ideas. 😍

That’s all for today !

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Cya!
Areesha❤️ 

Connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Areesha Shaikh

• Aneesha S

• Twice the Impact PM