Analyse your ideas to create greater value for your users and your business

In this article, we’ll explain why analysing ideas is beneficial and how you can do it.

What is the benefit of analysing ideas within a team?

Perhaps you already have a list of ideas collected, having carried out brainstorming sessions, listened to your users or spoken with stakeholders.

Those ideas are undoubtedly very interesting already but if you take the time to analyse them in a bit more depth, you’ll certainly enjoy a host of further benefits:

• Prioritise ideas: this will give you an orderly list of ideas based on the criteria important to you. At InfoJobs and throughout Adevinta in general, we use value for users, or customers and cost.
• Compare ideas: this will help you see how the most valuable ideas stack up to one another. You may already know which ones interest you but perhaps you’re unsure which ones should be prioritised.
• Create an inventory of ideas: you can put together an aggregated list of the ideas you have obtained during ideation sessions, or those shared with you by other people and teams within the company — Management, Business, Sales, etc.
• Build consensus: reaching agreements in collaborative fashion is a complex task but enables you to make the most of each member’s potential, leading to better decisions as different points of view are taken into account.
• Learn as a team: you can argue the reasons why an idea adds value, while looking for ways to reduce the cost of implementing an idea. This sees the knowledge distributed throughout the team.

How are ideas analysed?

You can make a copy of the Idea Analysis Template and customise it using your information.

1. Ideas: fill these out in column A. To make the analysis more dynamic, fill the ideas out by category or objective to be met.

Fill the list of ideas in column A.

2. User Value: fill this out in column B. This is the value to your users or customers and can be classed as High, Medium, or Low. To answer this question, you should reflect on what your users need. What have you gleaned from interviews with users or customers, your metrics and Customer Service? Use this information coupled with the volume of users who could benefit from an idea to determine your response.

Value for users: low, medium or high.

3. Value to your targets: this is filled out in column C. Here, you should indicate if the impact is High, Medium or Low for your metrics — whether that be more sales, more leads, more brand recognition, etc.

Value for objectives: low, medium or high.

4. Development cost: this is entered in column D and given a greater range of options are normally required here, we have 6 in this case: XS, S, M, L, XL and XXL.

Development cost; extra small, small, medium, large, extra large or extra extra large.

5. Maintenance Cost: filled out in column E. This can be High, Medium, or Low.

Maintenance cost: low, medium or high.

After completing the columns above, you will see the results reflected in the following columns. You do not need to edit anything here, unless you wish to adapt the type of analysis to your needs:

1. Calculation: completed in columns F, G, H and I, which are hidden, but you can make them visible to understand how it works.
2. Total value: shown as a percentage in column J and takes into account both the value for your users (column B) and the value for your company (column C).
3. Total cost: also shown as a percentage, this time in column K, and it takes into account the development cost (column D) and maintenance cost (column E).

List of ideas analyzed

And voila! On the right-hand side of the same page on the spreadsheet, you’ll see a grid that places the ideas in 4 squares:

1. Prioritise: the ideas you should focus on as they have a high overall value and affordable total cost.
2. Reduce cost: the ideas you can review to try and cut down on the costs. They have high total value but total costs are also high and need to be reduced.
3. Increase value: ideas which apparently fail to provide enough value. You could review these to try to increase their impact on clients or on your objectives. They have a reasonable total cost but low overall value.
4. Block: These are the ideas that we recommend dismissing because they have a low total value and high total cost.

How does it work? Let’s see a fictitious case study

Imagine you and your team are working in the dessert creation department of a food company. Lucky you!

Your UX Researcher has found that your customers want to look after their health while continuing to enjoy delicious flavours, while your Data Analyst has found the preferred flavours are chocolate, cheesecake and yoghurt, in that order.

So you have decided that your customers deserve something new. After completing a brainstorming session with the team and discussing the ideas with your stakeholders, you are left with a short-list of four candidates to be analysed:

• Choco & Run: a dessert so light, you can still go for a run after eating it.
• Cheese delight: a slice of raspberry cheesecake.
• Yogu-freez: a low-sugar, healthy yoghurt ice cream.
• Yo-truffle — a truffle yoghurt that might interest high-end customers.

You decide to call a team meeting to analyse your ideas. So, you get to it, starting with Choco & Run.

Before casting votes, you share the information you have regarding the value which Choco & Run could bring to your users and your objectives. Then you share the work that would be needed to launch this new product. The aim is to help those who do not have as much information to form an opinion on which to vote.

And so you start voting:

• Value to users: High. You agree that Choco & Run could be a hit for your customers. It’s their favourite flavour and is also very healthy.
• Value to your targets: Medium. You believe you could achieve good sales volumes as you’ve identified a market segment that would consume it regularly.
• Development costs: S — Small. Luckily for you, you’ve already got a similar product in house.
• Maintenance costs: Medium. Even if you could cut other costs in the long run, cocoa is a relatively expensive product and you don’t want to use a sub-par raw material.

You then continue analysing the other ideas until you have filled everything out.

Dessert ideas analysed.

You’ll then be able to see how all your ideas are positioned on the grid:

Dessert ideas on the value vs cost matrix.

• Choco & Run is clearly the product to be prioritised, so you will start testing as soon as possible. You might just have a hit on your hands!
• Cheese delight: it tastes great but it would be your first cheese-based dessert and there’s uncertainty over manufacturing. You decide to think it over to see if you can reduce costs. Good luck to Cheese Delight!
• Yogu-freez: is a product you could make very easily since you have vast experience in ice creams and yoghurts. But you’re not convinced kids will like it, so you decide to do some further research. Good luck to Yogu-freez!
• Yo-Truffle: Who came up with this idea? It sounds like a terrible idea. Costs are high and you don’t think it will be well received. See you later, Yo-Truffle!

Who is involved in analysing ideas?

Ideally, the entire product team takes part (Product Owner, Developers, Front-End, Data Analyst, Visual Designer, UX Researcher…) and you can also invite the stakeholders (Sales, Business, Marketing…) who are closest to the team to attend the session.

If you need the session to be more focused, you could choose to invite only those who have direct information about the value of the ideas (Product Owner, UX Researcher and Data Analyst) and the cost of carrying them out (mainly Developers).

As a guideline, in order for the session to be effective, it should not exceed 8–10 participants, but everything depends on your ability to debate, speak in an orderly manner and reach consensus.

When should the session be conducted?

This session could be incorporated into one of your Scrum liturgies, such as Grooming, or carried out in a separate meeting.

If its incorporated as part of another session, consider how it will fit in based on the type of thinking used. An idea analysis session uses mainly convergent thinking but also includes divergent thinking:

• Convergent thinking: you focus on each idea one by one, analysing it in detail.
• Divergent thinking: if you please, you can think of ways to bring down the costs of developing the more expensive ideas or increase the value of the less valuable ones.

How long does an idea analysis session last?

We recommend sessions be limited to 1 hour as they demand considerable effort and concentration from the team. If you have a lot of ideas and run out of time to review them all in the time, you can hold repeat sessions to continue analysing the rest.

At what stage of product development does this exercise take place?

You can perform the idea analysis as part of the Ideation and Hypothesis Generation phase of a Discovery process.

And what is a Discovery process? This is the product development phase in which an analysis and investigation is performed with users, customers and stakeholders in order to detect opportunities, generate hypotheses and evaluate them.

The Discovery process has four main stages:

1. Align and capture: this is the stage where we capture opportunities and agree on an approach and objectives with the team.
2. Explore and research: we explore the opportunities we have captured and choose one opportunity that we are going to research further.
3. Ideation and hypothesis generation: we devise solutions for our opportunity, analyse them and come up with hypotheses to be validated.
4. Evaluate: we begin to validate hypotheses by evaluating our ideas.

Discovery cycle. Idea analysis is done in the phase “Ideation and hypothesis generation”.

A few tips

In order to make the analysis more efficient, consider the following recommendations:

• Adapt the calculator to fit your situation: Do you have customers as well as users? Add a Value column to include both. Don’t you want to include maintenance costs? Delete that column. The key thing is that it helps you with your goals.
• Don’t go full steam ahead based on analysis alone. The next step should be devising an experiment or MVP (Minimum Viable Product) using the prioritised idea so you can evaluate your hypothesis.
• Forget the ideas in the Increase Value and Reduce Costs squares if you have a lot of ideas in the Prioritise square on the grid. Only look at these squares if you don’t have enough in the Prioritise section.
• Create sketches of each idea so all team members understand what an idea consists of. You can share or create the corresponding sketch just before starting the analysis of each idea.
• Share your vote on the count of three to avoid people being influenced by others in their response. You can decide on your vote and cast it all at once using your fingers: 1 finger for Low, 2 fingers for Medium and 3 for High, for instance.

Do you have any comment, questions or ideas?

Happy to debate. You can reach me at my email maria.perez@adevinta.com or in Twitter @MariaArrilucea

Thanks for reading.