Idea lab: finding new software and feature ideas
Good product ideas rarely come from a brainstorm in a meeting room. They come from watching people work around a problem, from a general tool stretched to a job it wasn't built for, from a mechanism that works somewhere else, and from changes in technology and rules that make something newly possible. This lesson gives you six sources of ideas, a way to turn one observation into several ideas, and an idea card you can fill for each. Twenty prompts at the end give you material to practise on, and the next lesson shows how to judge them.
By the end you can
- Use six sources of ideas: workarounds, spreadsheets and chat groups, unbundling, "X for Y", new technology and rule changes
- Read a spreadsheet or a chat group as a specification of the job people are doing
- Turn one observation into several ideas of different sizes before choosing
- Spot made-up ideas and fix them by finding the real person and the real moment
- Write idea cards with who, job, workaround, cost, evidence and why now
The everyday picture
Walk through almost any park and you will see a strip of bare earth cutting across the grass, where people walked the short way instead of following the paved path. Planners call it a desire path. Nobody designed it. It shows exactly where people need to go, and how badly: a path worn deep in a month means hundreds of people a day.
A clever park manager doesn't put up a "keep off the grass" sign. She paves the desire path. Software is full of desire paths: the spreadsheet next to the official system, the chat group where requests really get handled, the paper notebook at the warehouse gate. Each one shows a job the official tools don't do, and how often people need it done. Finding ideas is mostly finding desire paths and deciding which to pave.
Where good ideas come from, and the made-up kind
Paul Graham, who co-founded the startup programme Y Combinator, wrote in his November 2012 essay How to Get Startup Ideas that the best ideas have three things in common: "they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing". He contrasted them with what Y Combinator calls "made-up" or "sitcom" startup ideas: ideas that sound plausible, the kind a TV writer would give a character, but that nobody actually needs. His advice for finding the real kind: "Live in the future, then build what's missing."
Many well-known products started as a tool somebody built for their own work. Slack began as the internal chat tool of a company building an online game; when the game was abandoned in 2012, the tool became the product. Shopify began in 2004 when Tobias Lütke, a programmer, was unhappy with the e-commerce software available for his snowboard shop, Snowdevil, and built his own; the founders released that platform as Shopify in 2006. In both cases the builders were the users, so they knew the job, its frequency and its pain.
As a PM inside a company you have a version of this advantage. You can be close to the people doing the work: store staff, riders, shop owners, warehouse clerks, buyers. You don't need to want the product yourself, but you need to have seen someone need it. A test for a made-up idea is to ask: who, exactly, did I see struggle with this, and when? If the answer is "people in general" or "I imagine that…", the idea is made up. Fix it by going to find the person and the moment, or drop it.
Graham also notes that a good idea can be "something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount", and that the second kind is often the better start: narrow and deep, "like a well". Internal tools are often wells: 40 sales reps who need something badly, every day.
Quick check
Which of these is most likely a made-up idea?
The recipe network names no person and no moment; it is built from a general belief. The other three come from something observed, with a count. That doesn't make them good yet, but they are real problems you can judge in the next lesson.