How To Manage Product Ideas
The misconception about the Product Management role is that PM’s comes up with product ideas. But often, we don’t come up ideas — we spend most of our time managing and triaging other people ideas.
The job of a PM is to help the business build the right things. Properly managing ideas can help your company to:
- Avoids shiny objects syndrome
- Centralised prioritisation and transparency
- Ideas can build on top of ideas
- Centralised justifications for do’s and don’ts
However, if not managed well, you’ll create a culture of an ‘idea death pit’ for the product team, and stakeholders will go around you.
To avoid the ‘idea death pit’ — here are 5 Steps to Manage Product Ideas:
1, Capture ideas in a transparent backlog
2, Merge duplicate ideas regularly
3, Assess new ideas against current initiatives & goals
4, Promote ideas to your product roadmap
5, Communicate back to the idea creator
Let’s dive deeper into each of the steps to see how it’s done.
Step 1: Capture Ideas in a Public Backlog
Creativity is about connecting ideas. Ideas should be groomed just like a product backlog. Most of the time, people just want to be heard. A public backlog of ideas will reduce the noise in your business.
Create a lane in your product backlog called “Ideas”. You can also label with the department where the idea belongs.
A public backlog is an excellent method to showcase what your team is working on and the status of different ideas. (We’ll talk about merging ideas in a moment. Right now, is about capturing it.)
Clarify Ideas With These 4 Questions
To remove biases from ideas, ask the following clarifying questions for the idea:
- What is a high-level description of the idea?
