Product Ideation. Product ideation is not about developing great new products in a closed- brainstorming session. It’s shaping a product or service to meet an identifiable market demand of sufficient size with a margin to generate profitable growth. The more differentiated value a product or service has in meeting customer needs the higher the likelihood of market success. Because value is a function of perception, an iterative discovery process that leverages customer needs, motivations, and desires will drive effective and efficient product shaping. This is not as easy as it sounds because customers don’t always let their guard down and tell you what they really think or want. The are many reasons for this hesitancy. They include a customer’s fear they are sharing “dirty laundry” outside their enterprise, natural resistance to change which represents risk, loyalty to an incumbent vendor, and a lack of relationship trust. Rarely does a product hit the mark from day one, and many companies fall into building a “better mouse trap” mentality spinning our features that don’t move the needle in the market. Or they become impatient when their product doesn’t have sales momentum and start wandering into other markets in search of traction burning value resources in speculation.

Small Changes Lead to Big Results. When a car is headed for a bridge and veers 5 degrees off the center line, it ends up in the water without adjustment. The same holds true for products. If you are off a little it can have big consequences. Likewise, with minor adjustments, you can cross the chasm and head towards prosperity. The entire trick is knowing where to aim and steer. Developing an intimate understanding of your market vertical domain is essential. Uncovering unseen or hidden requirements can change market traction because they are an essential part of “the value “in the eyes of the customer.

Incumbency and the Allure of Copying. It is not an uncommon business philosophy to emulate a successful product as the most efficient and fastest way to the market. The emulate the leader philosophy is also known as chasing the market. As new features arrive from incumbent competitors or new entrants, businesses feel compelled to copy rather than develop product capabilities and features in a holistic way designed to create differentiated value based on insight. Copy and following can be a big mistake unless an intrinsic cost advantage (i.e., cheaper offshore resources) or incumbent margins are so high there is room to compete on price. In the higher margin business scenario, the incumbent margin must allow for a discount to prevailing pricing sufficiently large to overcome the cost of changing to a substitute that is offering only cost reduction as its value proposition. The one exception when competing purely on price can make sense is when price-demand elasticities are such that a lower-cost entrant can capture new buyers.

Solution Leadership – The Why(s) and What If(s). If customers understood how to solve their problems, they wouldn’t exist. Ideation is about solving a customer’s need or problem with an intimate understanding of why the problem or need exists. Understanding the “why” allows for solution thinking, and “what if”. The “what if” is a proposed solution from a user context perspective. Presenting “what ifs” to target customers invites a much deeper level of information exchange because the customer can respond to a discrete idea in relation to what he or she knows and experiences. This enables the customer to share situational details, processes, and constraints that elucidate hidden constraints and well as degrees of freedom that allow for more precision in a proposed solution design. What will emerge through iterative ideation are real-world tradeoffs and priorities in function, process flow, and usability along with a better understanding of the subjective value of a solution that would be nearly impossible to capture independently or without costly hit-or-miss iterations.

Not All Good Customer Ideas are Good. A customer-driven ideation process doesn’t mean all good ideas are good for the business. Being able to discern which ideas have sufficient addressable market size and appeal is important. Critical decision parameters are: (i) is it a shared problem among a sufficiently sized universe of users, (ii) will customers pay more for the improvement or is it a “must have” that is core to customer’s expectation of a complete product, (iii) the quantum of time and cost to develop the improvement, (iv) what is the lost opportunity cost in investing in the improvement versus others, and (v) does the nature of the improvement offer translational value in other areas through reusability or leveragability (i.e., it kills 2 birds or 1.5 birds with one stone).

It Sounds Good Because You Don’t Know the Domain. A classic error in product development is using internal logic as a self-validating decision function. What is logical from the outside looking in is not always logical on the inside looking out. That is why having more than peripheral domain knowledge is so key.

Logical But Wrong. A classic example is there are many software mobile apps that put data in the hands of police officers. Some are aimed at tactical use and appeal to the idea that if an officer responding to an emergency could look down at his/her phone and see a floor plan of the building they were entering it would be and where they were in it, it would be extraordinarily useful. Logically, it would. However, responding officers entering a building need to have their eyes up to detect threats and must rely on voice communications. That isn’t known unless you talk to police officers who have responded to active threat scenes.

Logical But Wrong. Another example is push-to-talk apps that use operating systems that follow mobile operating system user design behaviors for consumers. It is logical to assume Apple and Android have spent years optimizing their GUIs and behaviors, and you would be right. But, if your PTT app is intended to be used by construction workers, firefighters, or anybody who uses gloves, you’d be wrong. They don’t work well because the GUI controls are too small, the menus are located in the wrong place to easily access and navigate, the gestures are too refined, and in a mixed mobile OS use environment they behave differently.

The point is good product design doesn’t rely on assumptively logical conclusions about what is or should be the case. The art of good product design is building to the use environment, and the requirements of the use environment can differ from the general case.

That’s Easy to Build Better. Many engineers are incredibly intelligent and that leads to assumptions about the ease with which an incumbent system or product can be supplanted by something better. What is often the case is that in theory, it is true, but in reality, incumbent systems have already captured and leveraged the customer’s business process, motivations, and needs. If the incumbent is reasonably responsive, the product or service has had the benefit of iterative improvements that further secure its incumbency. That’s why being off a little can have such a significant impact on success. But, as with any system or product, there are weaknesses, inefficiencies, and missing functions or behaviors that a customer wants that the incumbent doesn’t have or needs delivered soon. It is in the hidden gaps space that provide transformative value that products quickly gain traction.

The Ideation Process. The ideation process is a series of steps designed to discover valuable product and domain knowledge that can be distilled into action product design specifications and requirements that enhance the perceived value of a product from a customer perspective. Below is a summary illustration of the product idea process.