What did I do to improve my product improvement ideation?

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Generating product improvement ideas have their own distinct challenges. It was my Achilles heel for quite a long time. Developing a mental model around ideation goes a long way and help you generate ideas up a notch. Learning some well-established frameworks is helpful in the beginning. However, as you grow, your dependency on these frameworks increases and your ideas seems more mechanical. These frameworks seem to be great in theory, however, they are a real struggle to implement. It’s important that you use mental models which suits your working style to carve out the way for yourself. Mental models are not something which you get by fluke, it requires constant observation about things around you. Developing a mental model is more of an art than science. Using that you will be armed with the solutions to the problems that had plagued your product. Let’s dig down to the various mental model I use to find product improvement ideas.

1. Inversion mental model: This is the easiest mental model to learn which can be implemented in a variety of situations. In this model, we basically look at the problem from the opposite point of view. Suppose, you have a problem with “ how to retain more customers”. Frame this question as “ how to prevent customers from leaving your product”. Let's assume, you have a problem with increasing downloads of your app, the way you can frame the question is what is preventing users from downloading the app. We as a human are expert in fault finding and it’s imperative that by framing the question in an opposite way, we would be able to generate more coherent ideas for the solution.
2. Constraints mental model: Another technique that I used quite often is to use constraints to channel my thought process around product improvement. In this technique, I apply artificial constraints to the product problems and then structuring the solution around that constraints. For example, in case the problem is “ how to increase the number of customers for your product”, I would frame the same problem as “ increase the number of customers without increasing the marketing spend”. This helps you to narrow down on the solutions quickly rather than exploring all the possibilities. For the same problem, you can implement various constraints to come up with a wide variety of solutions. For example, the problem of “increase number of customers without increasing the marketing spend” can be changed to “ increase the number of customers in 30 days”. Thus, for these new constraints, you would generate ideas that are widely different from the previous problems. Note, the constraints are always related to resources such as time, capital and human resources.
3. Users perspective mental model: In this mental model, think of your product problem by putting yourself in the user’s shoes. It will help you in coming up with solutions that resonate with the users. For example, imagine you have a product in the social e-commerce space and want to increase the engagement of the product. For this problem, think from the user’s perspective about product features that would keep them more engaged. If your user is not tech-savvy or well educated, it makes more sense of implementing games on the platform to increase user engagement rather than improving the content of the platform. This approach will also help you gauge whether the product problems are actually relevant to the users. For example, if you have a fintech product that sells mutual funds and government bonds, you should not be concerned with the latency problem. Delay in processing of these products by even 1 minute is not a problem for the customer which could have been the case in case your product was about day trading which requires very fast processing. Hence, for any product problem, look from the user perspective mental model.
4. Similar industry mental model: Most often, the problems which your product is facing is similar to the product in a similar industry. Use this to advantage to brainstroam solutions using that as a reference . For example, in case you have a food delivery product and you are facing problems with the user's retention. Look for a solution where a similar problem has been solved in the courier product. Look at the features which they have implemented for inspiration in your product. I am not talking about emulating your competitors but the companies in a similar industry. Emulating the competitors would harm the unique value proposition of your product. The customer will not use your app if they are unable to differentiate your app from your competitors. An app for personal finance can take inspiration from payment apps. If you have a social media app, look for a similar problem in the OTT products i.e. how they were able to solve a similar problem in their industry.

Hence, using these four powerful mental models you can improve the ideation of your product. Please note that this list is not exhaustive , I have mentioned just the four mental models which I have used constantly for my benefits . Look for the models which suit your competency and structure that to solve your own product problems at ease.