What's idea management?
Tempo Team
Ideas can come from anywhere. But how do product managers ensure they’re working on the ones that result in customer-driven products? By tapping into the insights offered by customer feedback, of course. And how do product managers collect, organize, prioritize and align teams on these ideas? Using the right process.
Here’s a scenario you’re probably familiar with: a product manager acts as the de-facto idea management...everything: the process, the system, the tool, the strategy. She collects vital customer insights and information about the product by jumping from meeting to meeting with the teams that possess this information. She’s trying—and failing—to hold these insights using multiple spreadsheets, sticky notes, and dashboards.
She also has a backlog of ideas to manage! But it bothers her to know, deep inside, that it’s a bunch of stuff the team will never build because the priorities are always changing in her highly competitive industry. She’s also in charge of leading the prioritization efforts that ensure the team is aligned and working on the most impactful features and ideas. This is hard to organize, because people are complicated, but without buy-in and alignment there’s no progress.
And that’s just a quarter of what a PM needs to be doing at all times, constantly and consistently.
But what do all the headaches in that scenario have in common? They can all be solved by having the right idea management process in place. Allow us to explain what we mean ✋
What's idea management?
Idea management is just a fancy umbrella term for the process of collecting customer feedback and consolidating it in one place, turning that feedback into sorted insights, prioritizing the ideas generated by those insights, then committing to them on the product roadmap.
Roadmunk can help you centralize feedback, prioritize ideas and build customer-driven roadmaps. Sign up for a free trial .
Customer feedback comes from different customer-facing teams working on a product. It comes from sales, support, customer success, product and even design and development. It comes in every format: as zendesk/intercom messages, emails and social noise. An idea management system acts as the repository where everyone in the organization can submit feedback and organize it in a way that’s visible and easy for the product team to find.
Ultimately, by housing that information in a dynamic knowledge base widely available to the entire product team, an idea management system facilitates building products that are customer-focused and customer-validated.
The right idea management process helps product teams see that there is
1. Tangible, validated evidence (feedback) that confirms the need for any given feature 2. A prioritized list of ideas organized by themes, segments and parts of the product 3. A set of committed roadmap items coming down the development pipeline
An idea management system includes having a strategy for involving stakeholders and customer-facing teams when it’s time to prioritize and commit to something on the roadmap. The entire product team then works together to prioritize the list of ideas generated from the customer feedback insights.
These prioritized ideas then get assessed against viability, feasibility, desirability and usability constraints and are benchmarked against business goals, the competitive market and the breadth of research the product management team has done so far (the greater context in which a product exists).
Without an organized idea management system and strategy in place—one that allows product managers to listen to all the relevant customer feedback, analyze it and collaborate with stakeholders on prioritization—product managers deal with headaches like:
"I have too many sources of feedback and no way to gather them in one place where I can easily spot trends and common themes. Valuable input from relevant customer personas is slipping through my fingers."
"I spend hours gathering feedback from CS, Sales and every other customer-facing team and not enough time analyzing the feedback. I know product success is proportional to the time spent listening to customers but I have too many resource constraints and I can’t prioritize it."
"I don’t feel like I’m making enough evidence-based decisions or that I have a deep understanding of the segments I should be listening to."
"I don’t have a flexible portal—or backlog—that facilitates planning initiatives that can change. We’re agile and/or our product exists in a dynamic market that’s always changing. An idea management strategy that doesn’t take that into account, coupled with the high context switching required to process feedback, can cause burnout."
If product teams don’t have a plan for overcoming these problems, then how can they ensure they’re building products based on information that’s grounded in real user needs?
With the right idea management, product managers instead feel confident that they’re achieving a few things:
"I have a consolidated space for visualizing all the feedback, seeing who it came from (company type & size, job title) and the segment(s) the user belongs to."
"I can use this information to follow up with interviews, problem exploration questions, and just to close the feedback loop if what they requested becomes a feature."
"I can collaborate with the rest of the organization on voting, prioritizing, and submitting feedback so I’m not the only point of contact for those things."
"I have a validated, prioritized view into the needs of my customers."
Let’s get into the activities and deliverables that make up idea management.
Idea management: Capturing, prioritizing, planning
Ideally, a strategic idea management process helps product managers succeed at capturing, prioritizing and planning the right ideas.
With the right idea management process in place, product managers can stop feeling as if crucial insights are being lost in an untamable sea of customer feedback. It also gives entire teams empowerment and visibility into how and why ideas are being prioritized.
Let’s dive into those three product management activities that fall under the idea management umbrella.
[PODCAST] Dive into the tactics Rose Yao used to collect data at Google Maps Platform when launching and improving on features.
Capturing: Where do ideas come from?
When product managers enter the space of product planning, they come into it with a deep, empathetic understanding of the users, the market and the ecosystem the product exists in.
What some call the product manager’s instinct (their ability to make good decisions for the direction of the product) is actually a combination of hyper-niche knowledge: user research, market and competitive research, and business research.
WIthout all that context, customers don’t know the product the way a product manager does. But customers still possess a unique type of vital knowledge that can only come from their experiences with the product. And in some companies, like in places where product managers can’t even dogfood the tools they build, this feedback is indispensable to the long-term health of the product.
With Roadmunk, teams can submit customer feedback to a centralized inbox using a handy Chrome extension. Customer-facing teams can submit feedback to an inbox, which can be tagged according to the product component or feature it applies to.
Types of customer feedback
Customer feedback, within the context of idea management, comes from two types of sources: structured and unstructured feedback.
Structured feedback is the kind that requires planning, having a hypothesis, and asking intentional questions that dive into a specific part of product usage and user behaviour. It’s more strategic than the unstructured kind because it requires intentionally approaching specific segments, personas or types of customers to get their specific feedback.
These are your...
Surveys
Polls
Feedback portals and forms
Interviews (via email, phone and in-person)
Unstructured feedback is the unprompted, unrequested kind gathered by everyone on the team who works in a customer-facing capacity. This feedback can fall under a spectrum that goes from complaints about the current product all the way to feature requests and suggestions. It can come from anyone, so PMs are more discerning with this type of feedback.
This is the type of feedback that comes in via...
Support emails
Zendesk/Intercom messages
Social noise and forums
This type of feedback is more manageable if you have a tool like Roadmunk in place to help you funnel all of it into one organized platform.
The listening bit in idea management involves more than just collecting all the feedback that exists and centralizing it in one place. It also requires one of the most pivotal skills in a product manager’s toolkit: knowing what problems and needs are worth solving and which ones aren't.
Product success is relative to the amount of time a PM spends understanding that bigger research context that requires a lot of information originating in hundreds of different places.
Questions to ask about the feedback you receive
All feedback is important, but not all feedback should be treated equally. Feedback is only good if it comes with the necessary context needed to decide if it’s something to act on or something to put in the backlog. That’s why it’s good to ask these questions about every piece of feedback as it comes in through the pipeline:
What customer segment does the user giving the feedback belong to?
Why are they reaching out? What are they hoping to achieve if we build what they request?
Are they using our product the right way? Is the problem something that can be solved using an existing feature or tool?
How much of a headache (time, effort, cost) is this problem for this user?
Finally, on the margin between organizing feedback into accessible categories and prioritizing it, product managers have to ask themselves three table stakes questions about each potential idea before it even gets quantified with a prioritization method:
Is it viable? Will we get a good ROI on this idea? Will it contribute to the long-term growth of the product and the business?
Is it feasible? Do we have the technical and people resources to build this idea?
Is it desirable? Does this solve the right user-validated problem/want/need?
The next step in the idea management process is team prioritization, stakeholder alignment and buy-in.
Prioritizing: How can I organize and prioritize product ideas?
Here's a recipe for disaster: prioritizing which ideas get turned into a committed roadmap initiative just by number of requests and votes. If it was that easy, prioritization wouldn’t be such a thorn on a PM’s side.
Customer feedback can come from irrelevant user segments or be rooted in a problem that can be solved with solutions already offered by the existing product. Without a fair assessment of the internal and external factors that determine whether an idea will succeed, there are just too many unnecessary risks.
What if an idea is a time sink and a resource drain that yields little to no impact on the growth of the product? The question alone should send shudders down the spines of product professionals both new and seasoned. Can product managers do anything to ensure that those risks, constraints and potential opportunities are accounted for, quantified and widely agreed-upon? If so, how?
Here at Roadmunk, we’re fans of value vs. effort and RICE. So much that we offer them as prioritization frameworks in our idea management suite.
But if you want a quick pen-and-paper/whiteboard method, a value vs. effort matrix can be a lean way to go about it.
Value vs Effort matrix
A 2x2 matrix helps product teams quantify and visualize the resources needed to realize an idea (effort, cost, risk) and how the idea will affect business goals (usually labelled ‘value’ or ‘impact’).
Calculating effort is easy enough: just add the number of work hours per person that it will take to build the idea. Value, also known as impact or complexity, is a bit trickier. To calculate the nebulous (and speculative) value of an idea, have your team match ideas with the specific metrics and goals they will push forward. Then assign a numerical value on how valuable the idea is towards fulfilling those business goals.
Here’s what it looks like as a graph:
And here’s what each quadrant tells you:
High value, low effort: These are the quick wins, the no-brainers, the low-hanging fruit. These are the ideas that don’t require tons of development effort, time, or money. They’re risk-averse, cheap solutions that are relatively easy on the technical side.
High value, high effort: These are the ideas that need a strategic approach. Your team will definitely work on implementing these ideas at some point in the future, they just need to be planned out more carefully.
Low value, low effort: These are the “maybes”, the “will get to it later when the scope opens up a bit more” ideas. They’re not essential to the success of the product, but they’d have a noticeable impact.
Low value, high effort: These are the ideas you can afford to pass up. They’re not worth doing at the time of the assessment, and they’re not likely to become a priority for a while.
A prioritization matrix isn’t the only source of truth when it comes to deciding which ideas get turned into initiatives on the roadmap. But it’s a good way to get a baseline or benchmark that everyone can agree on.
Planning and executing: when is an idea ready to go on the roadmap?
Once you have the ideas your team is ready to commit to, it’s time to make sure everyone’s on the same page in terms of buy-in and alignment.
After an idea has been assessed against all the relevant factors that influence the direction of a product (competitive analysis, internal goals, value vs. effort), it’s time to plot it along a roadmap.
Sticking an idea on the roadmap doesn’t mean the work is done. It’s merely the beginning-middle bit of the product planning process. After stating the intention to work on the idea at some point in the future, product roadmaps must be flexible and able to adapt to the ever-changing landscape of software development (especially within agile teams).
Not to mention, product plans and strategies can change according to the discoveries found through user research and testing (prototypes, mockups, UX tests) and the competitive ecosystem the product exists in.
That’s why we define product roadmaps as statements of intent rather than literal, set-in-stone maps.
What's the TL;DR of idea management?
Idea management feels like a massive amount of work that encompasses literally every aspect of a product manager’s job. But it’s really just a term for the process of going from a piece of relevant feedback to a prioritized, committed item on the roadmap.
Here's a recap of the main deliverables and moving parts that make up each part of idea management:
Having a centralized and collaborative idea management process with the right tooling doesn’t ensure that your team will always build the right thing, but it’s a success factor that can make or break a product.
If one of your priorities is to build customer-driven products but you don’t have time to gather, process and organize customer feedback in an organized way, it’s time to re-evaluate your ideation process.
Ready to start building customer-driven roadmaps? Sign up and try our ready-to-use templates.
One of the biggest idea management headaches in a product manager’s life is this question: “Are we developing the right product ideas?” The answer can get overwhelming—especially when there are way too many sources for ideation available for product managers to tap into.
Product managers need to have a well-defined idea management process in place in order to answer that pesky question and feel confident in the decisions they make for what the team should build next.
What is idea management, exactly?
To put it simply, idea management is the qualitative process that a PM has in place for gathering, defining and storing the ideas that come from different sources and stakeholders. Idea management is the work PMs do before running their ideas through a more quantitative prioritization framework).
The core of a good idea management process is this: product managers have to go beyond simply capturing and cataloguing all their customer feedback and product research. Customer feedback contains vital information—signals that product managers can tap into and use as context for validating ideas that satisfy the right user needs. The right user needs, in this case, are the ones that push the organization’s chosen metrics forward.
We spoke to a bunch of seasoned product managers with diverse product backgrounds about their idea management process. In general, they had a top-down approach for how they dealt with it.
It’s simple enough:
Start at the highest level by defining your business values and product strategy. You need to be able to trace a direct line between every idea and the company mission.
Focus on understanding the common user problems and needs communicated in the feedback and research (instead of rushing to build solutions). This allows you to have deeper empathy for your current users.
Don’t ignore stakeholder input and eliminate the concept of “bad ideas”. Define which stakeholder input—internal and external—will best serve the product, and have an idea management system or software for keeping track of those (like Roadmunk! Where teams can submit their feedback from anywhere using a Chrome extension). When a stakeholder has a “bad idea”, don’t just reject it, present your reasoning for the rejection.
This philosophy doesn’t guarantee perfect ideas, it just keeps PMs and their teams on the right path for organizing and keeping track of the right product ideas.
When you have a solid foundation like the one above for defining what makes a good and valuable idea, you can feel more confident that you’re making the right choices for the business and the product.
Capture customer feedback, prioritize ideas and create beautiful roadmaps: try Roadmunk's free 14 day trial by signing up here.
Starting at the top: Instilling a strong mission, vision and product strategy among teams
In terms of idea management, you should be able to trace every idea back to the company’s vision and mission. You should be defining your features, projects, and tasks based on those intrinsic values of the company.
The way you define the core values of your business, and the impact you want your product to have, depends on the specifics of the work you do. But in general, your company’s mission should answer these questions:
What are you fixing or solving with your product?
How will your product impact its industry?
How will your product impact your customers’ lives?
What are the overarching goals for the company?
By having everyone on the same page, you’ll know that you’re working on the right ideas and staying away from features that will sidetrack you from getting the results that really matter to the product.
“When deciding what ideas or improvements to prioritize, focus should be placed on finding the items that can bring value to the user but that are also aligned with the company’s goals in the long run. You need to be able to determine the overall impact of a decision. How many users will this update actually impact? And how does it support the company’s overall business goals? For that, it’s important that the Product Vision is defined and that all areas of the business are aligned. Once you know what the ecosystem needs to be, you can build the Product to match it, making sure to iterate and validate it through ongoing user testing and feedback.”
In order to define and assess actionable ideas with clear objectives in mind, you need to get close and personal with the company’s high-level goals and ambitions. That way, you can apply them to how you manage ideas. What’s your product trying to be, and to whom? Depending on the size of your company and the industry you work on, that question can be answered in a bunch of different ways.
But what everyone involved in ideation should keep in mind is this: is this feature or product idea aligned with the bigger goals of the company? Before submitting it or considering it as a roadmap item, ask: Is this idea directly tied to the company’s mission, vision and values? If you can answer yes to these questions, and explain the how, you can then start to think of the idea as actionable.
For example, if your product is trying to be the simplest version of your competitors, then it doesn’t make sense to push every single feature idea in your backlog. It’s better to focus on just one or two ideas that you intend to deliver in a way that no one else has.
The why of your product should be answered using your product vision and strategy—and they should also define your idea management strategy. A good idea management process needs to involve a cross-checking of:
The company’s definition of intent (mission)
: What are the intentions that drive your mission? Is it a good balance between objective parameters and lofty ideals?
How is this idea valuable to customers?
Part of managing product ideas involves a constant reminder of the value you intend to bring to your customers.
When it’s time to estimate the value of an idea, it’s important to have a solid prioritization process in place. Just like with an unruly backlog, idea repositories are useless if they don’t offer a way to organize those ideas based on the factors that matter to your organization. Impact on customers, value and cost/effort per idea are important estimations that will determine if an idea is worth pursuing or not. (It’s why we offer two prioritization templates, RICE and value vs. effort, in our idea management suite).
“Every time we talk about an idea, we build it up not to be a feature talk anymore, but it has to be something that impacts the business. PMs should figure out the business metrics that matter and that the team can work with to define and manage ideas. At Too Good To Know we tie ideas to business metrics. We try to solve problems with an open mind. Then, when engineering or design or sales comes with to the Product team with ideas, we know that it's part of those business metrics that matter. Reinforce the pillars of your business and reinforce that transparency for why you and the team should choose certain ideas over others.”
Idea management should be driven by specific customer problems
Defining a product's audience is one of the elements of product planning that PMs spend a lot of time fretting over. Defining who those clients are—their needs, day-to-day challenges, their professions—isn’t a “Set it and forget it” task. This information should come to the forefront of decision-making is during the idea management process.
When you do a shoddy job at empathizing with your customers, you can end up building the wrong product that doesn’t resonate with anyone, especially not that ideal audience you didn’t take the time to understand at a deeper level.
This isn’t just about dogfooding. It’s also about putting customer needs before anything else; before MRRs and ARRs, before external pressure on what feature you should build next, etc.
When you make a conscious effort to understand the problems your customers face, you can then feel confident that your solutions are the best way to solve those needs.
“I find it easy to get caught up in the hype of trying to “innovate” and to build some shiny new thing. But I believe that, in certain scenarios, it is more important to focus on the core user experience. Product managers need to make sure the product’s core is as solid as possible before venturing into building something new. More often than not, companies try to build on crumbling infrastructure or hack their way into building a new product or feature with the hopes that it will be a silver bullet. To solve this problem, a PM should always go back to their users, to the people who are actually using your platform, both internally and externally. They will, quite often, be able to pinpoint the gaps and help find the problems worth solving. That’s why I usually put myself in our customer’s shoes. I always take the time to understand the product from their perspective so I can be more objective when making a decision on what to work on next.”
Focus your idea management strategy on uncovering problems worth solving. Look for the ideas that will contribute to solving that problem that the customer initially had when they sought your product. When you define who these customers are and what their problems look like for you to solve, you’re providing an answer to the question: Who are you building this product and for who? The more thoughtful the answer to that question, the more clearly you’ll be able to to visualize what are the goals you need to get to the best version of your product.
One of the ways that can help you define what product ideas are worth pursuing is by asking yourself: “Are these ideas directly tied to the customer problems and needs that will bring the most value?” When you shift your thinking to that, you’ll know you’re building stuff that gives your customers not just the most valuable solution, but the solution they needed the most to address those specific problems.
“My thought process starts by asking: What are we trying to accomplish for the business and for the customers that we have? Do we understand who our customers are? What are the big important themes to be defined? Come up with a framework to define those themes, distill that down into some sort of a metrics dashboard for the big picture, and prioritize those things. You're going to come up with big themes when you do that. They’re going to come out of conversations like: “Okay, we have to double down on this particular market. No, we've got to double down on building a more robust product just for this type of need or this particular type of use case.” In terms of idea management, Product Managers need to make a decision on those theme definitions at the high level before they get into updating a product. Start with that and resourcing those themes as best as you can with that top-down approach. After you do that, that’s when you can get into managing, assessing and reviewing your backlog of ideas.”
Need help finding the right roadmapping tool for you? We have a guide to help with that.
Ideas should involve more than one stakeholder
The ideas that you eventually turn into action shouldn’t come from a PM vacuum. After you’ve done all the market and industry research, collected the feedback from the customers and the executives, you can’t miss the most important step in the idea management process: involving your team.
Your customer-facing teams, for example, have access to a lot of important customer input. Facilitate their involvement using a tool like Roadmunk, where teams can submit feedback from anywhere (emails, customer feedback management tools, etc) using a Chrome extension.
This not only ensures that you get the perspectives from your customer-facing team members whose insights might be different than a product manager’s, but it creates an environment where everyone feels heard and acknowledged. Not to mention, by centralizing all that customer input and feedback, product managers can avoid losing good ideas and insights that could have an impact on the product.
Different PMs will have different strategies in place for this process. Some like to hold one-on-one “idea management” meetings with each relevant team, others set up slack channels, keep up a whiteboard with post-its or they use an idea management tool like Roadmunk.
“Make sure that, one, you’re asking the questions that will get you answers that consider all perspectives and two, you’re documenting the responses on an ongoing basis. Take special care to note passionate responses. The most important aspect of conversations, is making sure that you're interacting with the right people. As a PM, you recognize you can't know everything—there are things you need to leave to domain experts. Managing a product, you need to have a surface understanding of a problem, but when it comes to the details and working toward a solution, it's less likely that you, as the PM, are the person that knows what that is. You'll hear several solutions, and it's up to you to decipher the incoming responses with the knowledge you have to choose the right course. Throughout several documented conversations, you'll be able to review your notes and, oftentimes, notice recurrences.”
Having an internal idea management feedback system also allows you to diffuse any internal stakeholder tension. When you create an environment where your team feels like their ideas will be stored and considered, and where the prioritization process is clear and understood by everyone, you’ll have easier idea management meetings and conversations.
[PODCAST] Dive into the tactics Rose Yao used to collect data at Google Maps Platform when launching and improving on features.
Key takeaways
Define the qualitative aspects of what makes a good idea. Every idea that comes through the pipeline, either from customer feedback or financial stakeholder input, should be tied to your company mission and vision. Define what you company values the most; when you specify this and teach it to the team, and use it to justify why some ideas are more valuable than others, your decisions won’t feel biased or dismissive and instead, they’ll be rooted in a real framework everyone can cross-check and reference.
Build features with empathy for your customers and the problems they want to solve with your product. When you create an environment that’s focused on understanding a problem or pain point from every angle, and whether that problem is experienced by a significant portion of your customers, you naturally build more sustainable products and features with long-term value. (Also known as the Feature Factory Trap)
Give your teams a way to bring customer feedback to the product team. Use a tool like Roadmunk for feedback submission, idea management and idea prioritization. When you explain why someone’s idea isn’t quite there, use the qualitative measurements you defined with your company mission and vision, or a prioritization framework that helps you estimate the factors that matter (cost, reach, impact, value) down to numbers.