Where Great Product Roadmap Ideas Come From

The fifteen best ways to inspire new ideas, and three to avoid

Lenny Rachitsky

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Jun 12, 2019 · 2 min read

1. Talking to customers 👂️
2. Talking to employees who talk to customers (e.g. sales, customer support, marketing) 🤗
3. Observing your customers, through data and user research 🧐
4. Spending quality time with previous data dives and user research 🔬
5. Using the product yoursel️f 🕵️‍♀️
6. Thinking in a quiet place 🤔
7. Having small discussions with teammates 💁‍♂️
8. Working backwards from your long-term vision 🤩
9. Looking into what caused users to churn 📉
10. Looking at competitors 👀
11. Looking at adjacent markets 😏
12. Looking at analogous businesses in completely different markets 🔭
13. Creating user journey storyboards 🎞
14. Having hackathons and watching the demos 👩‍💻
15. Catching technology shifts 📱

Where great ideas rarely come from:

1. Large brainstorms — bad source for big new ideas, but has other benefits such as getting everyone on the team involved in the process 🎯
2. Staying heads down for too long — give yourself space to go big and wide on occasion 🙃
3. Copying what your competition is doing — don’t assume they actually know what they are doing 😝

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Sincerely,

Lenny

Thank you to everyone who contributed your great suggestions on this twitter thread, particularly Gustaf Alströmer, Alistair Croll, Blake Robbins, Carey Caulfield, Lin Classon, Justin Jones, Henry Vazquez, and Jatin Bhatia 🙏