NPD Phase 0: How to Champion Your Ideation Phase
What is “ideation” in Product Development?
- Ideation is a very initial and critical phase of product development. Product managers (PMs) own the process of generating and curating new ideas — determining which ideas should be promoted into features that will achieve key objectives for the business.
- Well… no product should or will be developed if it was not a “good idea” to develop it, right? For a product to be evolved and become the greatest in a market, PMs need to make sure that they capture hundreds of ideas, suggestions or feature requests from Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in different functions. They would then include these good ideas in their product backlog and prioritize ideas that should be developed further.
Now, imagine you became a Product Manager for a large tech company…
How do Product Managers source ideas?
E.M.U.C Model
E.M.U.C is a model I recently came across in the highly-recommended Udemy course run by Cole Mercer and Evan Kimbrell called Become a Product Manager. It’s a model used by PMs to source ideas before they start designing and developing products with designers and engineers.
During the ideation phase, PMs are usually not only responsible for coming up with ideas, but collecting and organizing ideas from:
[E]: Employees (including a PM yourself)
[M]: Metrics (How users use your products — ex. The average time spent shows that some users only spend one second on a certain app feature so you can redesign it to be more engaging or kill that feature.)
[U]: Users (User feedback from forums or social media)
[C]: Clients (if you are a PM in a B2B industry)
What should PMs keep in mind during the ideation phase?
Below are some of the ideation tips came from the book Originals by Adam Grant (also highly recommended!)
- Thousand ideas over three ideas — For your team to be able to build one unique MVP (Minimum Viable Product) with great potential, you should come up with as many ideas as you can to increase your odds of producing that one Blockbuster idea. Grant suggests that you should not be obsessed about refining a few ideas to perfection because that’s how many people fail to achieve originality. Before Albert Einstein became universally known for his theory of relativity, he wrote more than 200 papers that had little or no effect on the scientific world. When Thomas Edison pioneered the lightbulb, the phonograph, and the carbon telephone, he also invented stencil pens and a fruit preservation technique, and designed a creepy talking doll. Come up with that one MVP and you will be ready to move on to market testing and critical feedback gathering from consumers.
- Assess market readiness — During your idea generation exercise, you should also assess whether it is actually the right time to launch it. You would be able to assess it during market testing, however Grant points out that four-third of startups today fail due to premature scaling (making investment on a product that the market is not ready to support). Kozmo, a company founded by a Goldman Sachs banker to allow consumers to choose a Blockbuster movie on its website and have it delivered to their doors, went bankrupt despite raising ~200 million USD due to their brash promise for one-hour delivery. Netflix observed and then got off the ground with its online movie streaming service. The assessment of market readiness including the state of technology is very crucial and you can learn whether to observe to be a settler or take a risk to be a first-mover.
- Anticipate some of the problems your audience may spot — In a venture capital market, the job of the investors is to find out what’s wrong with the venture or its products. If a passionate startup entrepreneur only promotes all the reasons why they should invest on them, investors would naturally be skeptical and try to find potential long-term risks of investing them — or in some cases, intuitive investors may be swayed by a presenter. When your team finalizes the selection of the ideas to push for development, put yourself in the shoes of investors (or Engineering Project Managers or Finance in a large tech corporate) and list up all the what-if situations such as negative market reactions or impactful product bugs so you can be ready to show how you would mitigate and respond to these risks.
Term:
MVP (Minimum Viable Product) = a version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort
Source:
https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/product-management/what-is-the-role-of-a-product-manager
https://www.prodpad.com/resources/guides/product-management-process/idea-management/
