Everywhere! Users themselves, colleagues, market research, competitors, randomly
in the shower. Generally, I like to consider each idea seriously and work
through a few questions to help decide if they are worth building:
1. What, fundamentally is the problem this idea is meant to solve? How worth it
is solving that problem vs. others I know about? Does solving this problem
create opportunities or risks in any form that I should think about?
2. Is this a problem I need to solve now, in 6 months, in 2 years, etc.? What's
the risk of just putting it off?
3. Has this idea been validated in some form already? What's the "why" behind
this being an idea? Is there a good hypothesis around it?
4. If it hasn't been tested yet, is there a low-cost iteration of this idea
that my team could build and test quickly? What (rough swag) impact or
learnings could a low-cost iteration yield?
This feels like a lot of questions, but I've gotten good at answering them
quickly with a few driving assumptions to help keep myself moving. This is
really hard early in one's product career, and potentially when you're working
in a very new job or problem space - but as you ramp up, you start to be able to
answer them faster.
User Insights
3 answers
Director of Product, Fulfillment, ezCater | Formerly Wayfair, Abstract, CustomMade, Sonicbids • August 14
Group Product Manager, HubSpot • October 9
This is a two-part question. Let me first articulate how I like coming up with
ideas for new opportunities, followed by how I like to make decisions about what
to build. Hopefully, you don’t mind that I’m thinking about “opportunities”
because it might not always be a feature that’s the right solution.
I should start by saying that there isn’t one right approach to coming up with
ideas. In my experience, I’ve had success ensuring that there are:
1. Insights from the four lenses: Customer, Business, Market, Technology
2. Effective methods to facilitate ideation
At the core, you have to have a deep understanding of the underlying user pain
point you’re trying to solve through a thorough investigation of the Customer by
talking to customers and product usage. You might actually learn very quickly
that the user problem is around discoverability or activation, not necessarily a
feature gap. Ideally, the customer impact is so deep that it translates
effectively into Business impact. The Market context is critical to help
understand how your user will experience the product within the broader
competitive landscape and the direction an industry is headed. Finally, the
Technology lens offers insight into what capabilities could be used as part of a
solution.
Preferably, these four lenses come together through cross-functional ideation
that has the right participants (e.g. PM, UX, Eng, and even folks go-to-market
teams). In a hybrid world where we’re working across time zones, I’ve enjoyed
having the opportunity to ideate together synchronously and asynchronously.
In terms of decision-making, the ideation process should lend itself to initial
layers of prioritization. I won’t go into prioritization frameworks here, but
there are many out there. They do tend to distill back to impact and effort and
sequencing. At HubSpot, depending on the type of decision we are trying to make,
we may use a “driver, approver, contributor, informed” DACI model used by other
companies we admire like Atlassian.
Director of Product, Splunk • January 9
Ideas can come from many places. They include customer feedback calls, customer
troubleshooting sessions, customer submitted ideas (at Splunk, we have an idea
submission portal called ideas.splunk.com), conferences (at Splunk, we host
.conf where we have the opportunity to meet many customers in person), ideas
from your engineering team (they generate some of the best ideas), and ideas you
dream up yourself.
Once there’s a list of ideas, we typically do a full re-prioritization at annual
planning. Throughout the year, we also slot in new ideas and do minor
re-prioritization as things change.
1 answer
Group Product Manager, Google Assistant, Google • August 31
Be your customer as much as you can. Try everything you make multiple times in
different scenarios. There's a reason companies like Starbucks and DoorDash have
programs in place that put their corp staff on the ground - it opens your eyes
to things that you might not have otherwise spotted.
I'm also a huge fan having a regular forum for your teams to interact with your
customers. In the enterprise setting these can be Early Access Programs that
have select customers try out new products ahead of time for unfiltered, early
feedback. In a more consumer world you can build the scaffolding for communities
of users to come together. For example, when I was working on Google Maps, we
had a high touch relationship with some of the top Local Guides that contributed
to our map through UGC. Hearing their pain points and wishes helped shape our
roadmap.