Where Great Product Roadmap Ideas Come From
The fifteen best ways to inspire new ideas, and three to avoid
Published in
2 min readJun 12, 2019
- Talking to customers 👂️
- Talking to employees who talk to customers (e.g. sales, customer support, marketing) 🤗
- Observing your customers, through data and user research 🧐
- Spending quality time with previous data dives and user research 🔬
- Using the product yoursel️f 🕵️♀️
- Thinking in a quiet place 🤔
- Having small discussions with teammates 💁♂️
- Working backwards from your long-term vision 🤩
- Looking into what caused users to churn 📉
- Looking at competitors 👀
- Looking at adjacent markets 😏
- Looking at analogous businesses in completely different markets 🔭
- Creating user journey storyboards 🎞
- Having hackathons and watching the demos 👩💻
- Catching technology shifts 📱
Where great ideas rarely come from:
- Large brainstorms — bad source for big new ideas, but has other benefits such as getting everyone on the team involved in the process 🎯
