Pretty much no product manager anywhere has a shortage of ideas. So many ideas. Mountains of ideas. In fact, if you aren't already buried under all the ideas, you will be soon enough.
Someone in sales pops you a quick email listing a new feature idea they had after talking to a prospective client. You bump into someone from customer support in the hall who complains, yet again, about an issue in the internal settings that doesn't work right so they have to do a time-consuming workaround. In your next one-on-one meeting with your boss, they bring up a pet project that the COO would like to do immediately. Engineering is complaining about some tech debt that is slowing them down. Users are giving feedback, competitors are releasing new features, meetings are being called for brainstorming, your product analytics person has noticed an interesting data trend, and on and on and on... And let's not discount the brilliant ideas that you personally have.
So, how do you take that monstrous pile of ideas and turn it into something useful? Good question. Let's dig into collecting and organizing product ideas.
Create an idea board
You need some sort of idea board to keep all these ideas together. My recommendation is to strongly consider Aha; they have all the features you will want for idea management plus so much more! There are also lots of competitors out there too. I've tried a bunch of them and I don't like any of them nearly as well as Aha, but your mileage may vary. If putting money on the table isn't an option for you right now, there are free options like Google Sheets or Trello or Asana.
What you should NOT do is use whatever ticketing/development software that engineering is using. 90% or more of your ideas collected will never make it as far as the engineers, and you are seriously muddying up the waters if you have ideas and actual tickets in the same place. So, stay away from Jira or Azure DevOps or whatever they are using.
Collect your ideas
If you are using a paid option, you will probably have something in the tool to create an idea portal where users can enter ideas themselves. If you are in something free, you'll probably need people to send their ideas to you so you can enter them. Either way, have only a single way of submitting ideas. If someone gives you an idea in any other way, tell them something like, "Interesting idea! Here's a link for how to submit it so I can make sure it's considered."
A few things to be careful about:
Make sure that every single idea gets entered, including yours. Don't try to combine your idea board with your emails and with things you remembered from the water cooler and with sticky notes on your desk, etc...
Do NOT let anyone other than you and maybe your fellow product team members have the ability to edit existing ideas. Instead, give people a way to leave comments on the idea. Trust me on this. If you give people edit rights, you will walk in some morning to find that someone has deleted a bunch of ideas they didn't like, and rearranged all the rest of them.
Be very very cautious about letting customers enter ideas directly into your idea board. This usually sets up the expectation that they are making an order at the coffee shop, so you will now do whatever they ordered. I promise you that they will end up disappointed. In almost all cases, I strongly recommend that customers not have access to the idea board and requests come in through your support personnel (who will file ideas for them) or through some other separate means of communication.
Even if your idea board is internal-only, manage expectations with coworkers about how the idea board is used, that it is not an order form, and most ideas are never used.
Collect the right info
You will have a list of fields that you want filled out for each idea, whether you are using a paid tool or a free one. I recommend keeping the number of fields short, both to encourage people to actually fill it out and to guide their expectations. Here is my recommended list:
Which product or product area are we talking about?
What is the need/problem to be solved?
Who submitted the idea?
Who is interested in the idea, other than the original submitter? (like which clients, internal folks, etc...)
What are some suggestions for possible solutions for the need?
A free-text field for anything else the person submitting it thinks you should know, plus possibly a way for people to upload images to help explain the problem if your idea board can handle images
Some of you are probably thinking that I shouldn't even include a field for possible solutions. You'd be right in a perfect world. In my experience, though, people can't stop themselves from entering solutions and if we don't give them a field for it, they will just overwrite a different field. Besides, having it gives you a chance to keep repeating to users that you solve needs instead of churning out feature requests.
Enhance the ideas
There are a bunch of additional details you, as the PM, probably want to add to ideas once they are submitted. I recommend keeping some of these additional fields hidden from everyone but you and your fellow product people. Otherwise, you won't be able to be completely honest and leave notes like, "This idea isn't feasible."
Some ideas for additional fields:
Status: Possible values for this field include Not Yet Reviewed, On The Roadmap, Releasing Soon, To Be Considered for the Future, Unlikely to Do, and Already Exists.
Idea Type: I always like to tag ideas with how they would make the company money; I like using values of Growth (acquisition of new customers or expanding existing contracts), Retention (reducing client churn), and Efficiency (reducing expenses through reduction of technical, product, or operational debt).
Size: Think of this in terms of not how much engineering work it will take, but how you'll handle the release and what the value of it is to the customers and to the business. Values include Major Release, Minor Release, Small Tweak, and Too Big (meaning, this idea must be broken down some more before it can be considered).
Internal Only Notes: a free-text field for "Current You" to leave thoughts so "Future You" doesn't have to remember the special circumstances around the request, like the fact that sales has already promised this to a client by October 1 or that you checked in with your engineering lead who said that there would be massive costs involved with this idea. This is a also a great place to include an informal analysis - what would be good about doing this idea, what risks would we incur by doing it, and what risks would we incur by NOT doing it.
Custom Tags: Think of these as a way to filter on the ideas later. Maybe you have custom tags for each objective in the company's OKRs or maybe you want to tag similar ideas together under a single initiative name or both. In fact, use as many custom tags as makes sense so you can group ideas together in a variety of different ways.
Review ideas regularly
I recommend every 1-2 weeks that you review your ideas. Make sure all new ideas have their status updated and you add additional data, as needed. Aggressively collapse duplicates down into a single idea. For any ideas that have made it into the actual engineering workload, make sure you cross-reference the idea against the engineering ticket so you can track progress on it. Aha is particularly good at this, and has lots of integrations to do it for you.
Keep people updated
If you have one of the paid tools, it probably includes a way to send automatic notifications to people who submitted an idea or commented on one. This is great for keeping them informed whenever the status changes or new comments are added. If you have a free tool, though, you will still need to manually send updates. It's very critical that coworkers trust you and trust your road mapping process, and a big part of that is communication.
To vote or not to vote?
Most paid software will have a way to open up submitted ideas so users can vote on them. Be wary of this option. It can set the expectation that whatever has the most votes is what will get built next, which means that once again you are setting folks up to be disappointed. On the other hand, it can be a helpful shortcut in the discovery process to find out how many people actually care about a topic. It really all comes down to how well you are able to manage expectations and how useful you find this information.
Hopefully, your mountain of ideas has now been organized and collapsed into a small manageable molehill. If you already have a backlog of ideas, set aside some time every week to tame them until you work through it, as this process can take a while. And of course, you haven't even gotten to the hard part yet, which is turning all these ideas into some sort of roadmap. We'll save that topic for another day and another post!
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