Ideas are a dime a dozen. You have good ideas, I have good ideas, but you and I both know, we have a cornucopia of terrible ideas.
How do you know which ideas are good? Which ones are worth adding to your product, spending valuable time working on, or quitting your job to pursue?
You ask 10 of your friends and they all say “Yeah, that’s a great idea!”. Should that idea be added to your bucket of “good ideas”? No. Even if one of those friends is someone like Mark Zuckerberg? No.
You ask 10 potential customers and 8 of them say “Yeah, I love that! I would totally use that.” Should that idea now be added to your bucket of “good ideas”? No. But it’s a better start than asking your 10 friends.
You can tell something is amiss about your product. You go through a variation of the 5 Whys and get down to the root cause and have multiple ideas on how to improve your product. Are all of those ideas “good ideas”? No. But you’re getting closer.
You can’t add an idea to your bucket of “good ideas” until it has actually been vetted by real people or customers who are using your idea. Thinking about using your idea is not the same as actually using your idea.
You have to implement your idea to actually know if it is a “good idea”. And that’s where things get hard.
Coming up with ideas is easy. Don’t be fooled by people using the word “ideate” to make it sound like they are doing something much harder. Kindergarteners “ideate” all the time. You can too.
The hard part is taking your idea from your head or from that whiteboard (because we all know that whiteboards are laced with fairy dust. Just try and come up with a bad idea on a whiteboard) and getting it implemented before you run out of money or die of natural causes. An idea takes 3–5 seconds to form, and maybe another 3–5 minutes to decide whether its worth the brain cycles to keep thinking about. But that same idea might take 3–5 years to actually implement and find out whether it can be put into the “good ideas” bucket.
Most people and companies don’t have the time to wait until their grand idea is fully implemented and in the hands of real people and customers. In order to see if your ideas are “good ideas”, before you run out of money or die of natural causes, you have to get your ideas out quickly and cheaply. You also need structures in place to help you listen to the results which allow you to iterate on that idea. Iterating is the act of moving your idea towards the “good” bucket or changing its course if it’s moving towards the “bad” bucket.
The thought of getting your idea out quickly and cheaply is often synonymous with cutting corners and poor quality. It doesn’t have to be. A better way to think of quickly and cheaply is to call them what they are without the negative connotations that often come along with those two words: constraints.
Embrace constraints. Constraints are inevitable. Constraints help you innovate by forcing you to think differently. Constraints force you to focus on the goal and possibly take a few steps back to rethink your approach. Constraints force you to simplify. Embrace constraints.
Break your grand idea up into smaller tasks that are more manageable and easier to achieve given the constraints. Break up your idea vertically instead of horizontally so each task, when complete, can stand on its own. Let me explain.
If your idea is to build a 5-bedroom, 2-story house with a basement, how would you break that up into smaller, more manageable chunks that can each be done in 1 week? Here’s a pretty standard approach:
- Week 1 — Dig the foundation and finish the basement
- Week 2 — Build the skeleton for the first floor
- Week 3 — Build the skeleton for the second floor
- Week 4 — Add the walls and the roof
- Week 5 — Add plumbing and electricity
We tend to break up ideas into tasks that often start with the base, and then add the next layer, and then the next layer. Eventually, this layering of our tasks begins to resemble the big picture idea we originally had. Thinking like that is natural. What happens though if after Week 2 something comes up and you need to re-prioritize what you are working on forcing you to stop working on your house? After Week 2 your house is not actually something you can use as a house yet. In that example above, you can’t really use your house until after Week 5.
So instead of breaking up your idea horizontally like that, slice it vertically. To do that you have to constantly ask yourself what your actual goal is. Why do you need a house? To provide you and your family a temperature controlled environment safe from the elements. Ok, so do you need to start with a 5-bedroom, 2-story house with a basement? No. What if you sliced your idea vertically like this:
- Week 1 — Build a single room, complete with walls, roof, plumbing and electricity (i.e. completely livable but way way smaller than your end goal)
- Week 2 — Add a basement
- Week 3 — Add a 2nd floor
- Week 4 — Add 4 more rooms
Now what happens if something comes up and you are forced to stop working on your house even after Week 1? Nothing! You still have a completely livable house. Yeah it’s not your ideal 5-bedroom, 2-story with a basement house, but at least its still a livable house.
And who knows, maybe the single room is all you and your family actually need. And the simplicity of 1 room means you have less cleaning to do, and for your kids, less places for the scary monsters to hide. Or maybe, after living in this house after Week 1, you realize that you and your family were meant to live on a boat.
It’s better to find all of that out after Week 1 so you can tweak your idea or move in a completely different direction without having spent as much time, money, energy, and resources as you would have with your 5 week project of building out your full-fledged house. What you thought was a “good” idea to start with has now quickly become a “bad” idea. And that’s ok.
Don’t worry if the first slice of your idea is not perfect either or if it’s not everything you had in mind. Focus on quality of this small piece and get it implemented.
“You are better off with a kick-ass half, than a half-assed whole” — David Heinemeier Hansson
What you have done by getting your idea out quickly and cheaply is to figure out in 3–5 days or 3–5 weeks, instead of 3–5 years, whether your idea is “bad”. If it is bad, listen and learn why, make a quick change, and try again. If it is consistently bad, scrap it and move on to another idea. Rinse and repeat.
Eventually your bucket of “good” ideas will begin to look like this.
