From where Product Ideas come

In the era of globalization, we have seen lots of innovative products coming day by day. Specifically, while the advancement of technology, we have seen tremendous growth in the generation of ideas for new products. Let it be in technology or in other areas.

Uber, Airbnb, Facebook are the examples of breakthrough innovation and have completely disrupted the way we use to do things before. Product ideas like these surely helps in transforming the world.

We often think, from where these guys get ideas for the product.

While working on new product IoT GDM, from ideation to execution; I think I got some answers which could help to answer above question.

Product ideation is generally divided into 2 phases

Initial Ideation

This is the phase when product idea is the brainchild of someone, just like the wright brothers invented airplanes.

Well, ideation does not mean having a random idea of going to Mars with wings, but the realist idea with the proper execution plan.

While looking into problems, for solving needs or even while generating new needs you can get good ideas.

There is a nice video on TedX, which describes “Where good ideas come from”.

After initial ideation, you can do Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to validates your belief and to see if this can be commercialized, and with help of agile methodologies, iterative development we can take it ahead.

Continuous Ideation

Just having an initial product idea and getting it to market will not bring sustainability to our product. We have seen lots of social networking tools even before Facebook, but they were not able to sustain.

Continuous Ideation brings incremental improvements of new ideas, which helps to grow product further.

Unlike Initial Ideation, we can’t be dependent on a single person or a group for that matter for idea generation.

To keep the product alive, bring new product features or transform product over a period of time, we need to get ideas from multiple sources.

Sources for continuous ideation

1 – Team

Your engineering, marketing or sales team is aware of end to end product, which includes loopholes! So, getting continuous ideas from them really helps.

“Collectively, a team has more knowledge, experience, and insight than an individual. Product ideation channels this and applies it to a particular product”

You can refer to a nice article on this point here

2 – Owner / Client

There are many stakeholders are involved while process of product development, owner is the person who actually put money for product development.

May of the times, he/she have a certain vision behind the product, this vision cloud be good source of getting new ideas and defining the roadmap for the product.

3 – Users

There are various tools available in market for user surveys, online surveys are commonly used by marketers, product managers, strategists and others to gather the feedback.

While analyzing user’s feedback you can definitely know what is working and what not.

Many of the times, users being an actual consumer of products can give new ideas which can be incorporated. But we have to carefully separate signals from this large noise!

4 – Product Metrics

Product metrics are quantitative measures that enable to gain various insights of product consumptions.

There are various tools available in the market, which helps to track data and analyze it, while advances in technology this is becoming more and more crucial and implied!

There are various kinds of metrics that can be tracked and use for ideation, like suggested in this article here.

Initially posted here.

Hope you would have got a glimpse of ideation process, please feel free to comment or question below 🙂

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