Lifecycle of an “IDEA” – PART I
“It makes total sense to generate ideas that are bad”! Confused!? Read this snippet & am sure you'd agree with me
Narrative:
(Set over a call with one of the founders who I was advising)
He was trying to carve a niche into EdTech & the discussion started off as usual with the goals, the immediate things that matter to the org. & what ought to be on the roster just in case they haven’t already...
The engineer was connected & came aboard rather hesitantly started off with the presentation (PPT) possessing the list of such Apps that they seem to have built. They seemed to have an endless list of them each catering to a different market segment & what they thought qualified as a problem worth solving…
I demanded to see one of them Apps & patiently waited for the Engineer to walk me through the whole thing. It seemed like something of a skeleton / barely the UI bit (which is why I didn’t use the phrase MVP here) & I stopped it there.
I turned the prompt on to the founder & asked him to put a finger on one of these that he / his team was confident of bringing to the market & achieving even initial success. AND that’s when their faces went totally blank…
The problem is NOT / in fact NEVER about the ideas. It almost always is about the manner in which one chooses to work around those ideas, nurturing, shaping, building & turning them into what could be a potential fit for a specific market segment as targeted, improving the probability of them going on to become money-spinners.
The world ONLY tends to remember good ideas, which when pursued meticulously bears a potential of becoming great & that’s only fair. When nobody remembers bad ideas, their worth ought to be well-known & appreciable by the Cofounders / team of product managers who often tend to participate all throughout the ideation exercises.
But here are a few more questions that often crosses one’s minds:
Why do some ideas get classified as Good & Poor?
Is there anything like a bad idea really?
How are good ideas born?
How much of that happens to be by chance / fluke?
There’s been this whole misconception that the process of idea generation is more like random shots fired off a gun going into all directions & at the same time, owing to which one also tends to believe that firing off 100s of them on one trial could improve the probability of hitting pay-dirt.
Before addressing those questions there, one ought to understand the idiosyncrasies of an idea first.
What’s an IDEA?
Break into #ELI5 here an IDEA could be defined as:
“thoughts that are often considered unstructured but progressively move towards becoming more structured & generated towards supposedly solving problem(s) for a targeted bunch of people”
They are termed unstructured for a reason. It is because of the fact that they tend to look like a figment of one’s imagination most times. Any time one wants to understand the strength of an idea, one ought to measure it with the level of confidence one has to put their money on it & be able to build & roll it out into the markets. And of course, nobody would put their money on something if it isn’t going to add value as intended & targeted.
Ideas could also go through what one could term a LIFECYCLE.
It could all start from just a random figment of someone’s imagination
to something like formalization where they could get more stronger, get richer in terms of relevance
and then move towards some aggregation / validation where they could get thoroughly tested against all those environmental parameters that matter, validated against every SPEC of the detail that it ought to be
to then hit a litmus test getting subjected to a question that simply is “Is the IDEA GOOD / POOR?”
the resultant of which could invoke a response towards labeling ideas as indeed GOOD / POOR
But importance of not purging those so-called POOR IDEAS & parking them into what could be like a backlog so that one could revisit them at a later point in time is usually the difference between some teams that have evolved over the years as opposed to the ones who are still seem to be getting there.
“The confidence level stands to determine whether or not a given idea happens to be [INVESMENT READY] & is one of the most important metrics towards measuring the strength of an idea”
An IDEA could be perceived as possessing a few crucial parts. It ought to start off with the objective so as to establish a degree of clarity over the goals which then ought to roll over to identifying the opportunities inclusive of the problem that needs to be solved & who it resonates with, finally landing on the outcomes with a definition of how the problem would be solved, what would change for the sample space in question & by what magnitude.
Dissecting it a level further here, the IDEA could be perceived as possessing what’s a MAJOR stem & a few MINOR stubs. Given any situation the MAJOR stuff could largely remain constant as it is the anchor that defines the future course of action across the other stages that follow.
Let’s dive into a CASE STUDY to get a hang of this.
CASE STUDY: User growth @ META
Let’s dive into a practical product growth situation at META / Facebook. Just supposing META is looking to multiply its user base by 2x. Now, it could be a choice worth considering whether this ought to be done at a global scale or to targeting a specific geography where the volumes stand testimony to the traffic & there seems to be a sizeable population that is still on the fence when it comes to the App’s usage & could trickle in their way if they cleverly launched something that implores those users to get onboard.
Breaking this down, we now have:
1. “META looking to multiply its user base over a given geography”
That is the quintessential OBJECTIVE there, which could come as an input to the product team / manager(s). And that won’t change unless something major or a paradigm shift happens over a given period of time. That constitutes the MAJOR stub of the IDEA.
2. “Focus on building a super-quick shopping experience”
Businesses taking directly to META via REELS to showcase products & integrate the shopping experience into the workflow there is pretty common a sight as of today. This might as well land one on an existing problem that users seem to face given how someone seeing an Advert, clicking on it only to wait for an eternity for the site to load as Facebook seems to take them directly to the hosted site. This could qualify as an OPPORTUNITY provided there’s enough data to establish the drop-off rate & abandoned carts of such businesses that have taken the Reels route towards promoting their products. The robustness of the UX ought to also be a talk of the town with many of those influencers taking to popularizing this new feature which offers a huge value at a very competitive price.
3. “Solve the problem, retain the B2C traffic whilst facilitating the B2B clients over their business goals”
Facebook could build something of a quick shopping interface that does away with the users having to tirelessly wait for the site of the end-client to load & display more info about the product that is showcased in the REEL with options to quick checkouts given how the payments feature is already integrated in Facebook currently, reducing the exchange of money to a simple transaction over a matter of few clicks rendering the users happy in the first place & also the B2B client who could be an OEM / a Reseller happy. Do you see how that just didn’t serve as a great OUTCOME but turns out to be a Win-Win for all of them involved…?
In case you are wondering how most PMs manage to generate ideas that work & totally fitting this 3-O model do check out this snippet “HOW DOES ONE IDEATE WITHIN SCOPE”.
Now that finally ought to land us on the topic of a bad idea.
What makes an IDEA POOR?
Extending the understanding we have built thus far here, a POOR idea would be something of a thought that could be found lacking in terms of any (/ all) of the 3-Os, meaning:
the Objective may be largely unclear
the Opportunity may have been over / under estimated
the Outcome may be a big unknown / could end up looking fleeting
But most ideas as they get generated could be POOR given how nobody would have the confidence to take them ahead & bet on them becoming big. The best bet for any leader in an org. is to commission the teams with all the freedom they need to generate a whole bunch of ideas & hold that in something like a repository. That ought to multiply the number of ideas being generated as the next big one that could turn into a million-dollars could just be around the corner & it could just come from anywhere, absolutely anywhere & most times from areas least expected.
Having said that, although rather rarely, some ideas that get classified as bad at the time they are generated could turn out to be good over a period of time provided they are polished. And that ought to act as a simple justification of a process in between that transforms those bad ideas into GOOD ones, which is what REFINEMENT is all about.