Internal Ideation process

Hi Brigid,

welcome to our community, excited to hear that you are setting up your community and that you are looking into ideation!

Your timing is (almost) perfect, as next week we are planning to launch our own ideation group here in this community. We think it will help each one of us to exchange best practices, challenges and of course also success stories that are all about ideation.

Therefore your question is spot-on, offering ideation namely is much more than just “flipping a switch” on a category settings page.

It is quite important that the product team can handle the incoming requests - a certain commitment to your ideation from them is a must in my book.

You should therefore be careful about the scope of your ideation category. Do you want to offer ideation for all products / entire company, or just specific items? My advice would be to start with some limitations, so that it is easier for your colleagues to handle.

On our community, we review every new idea that has been posted in the last 14 days. This is done by the product owners themselves, this way they are on top of things and also engage directly. You could also choose to send a digest, however I think it is better to keep them close to the actual feedback.

Furthermore, our product team has also committed to a minimum of ideas being realized each sprint / quarter. This makes sure to have enough capacity for improvements coming from customer feedback next to our own vision and roadmap (ideally both should overlap at least a little bit ;) ).

I don’t think the amount of votes should be the only thing you are looking at - some ideas might not fit your vision, or even worse: Only fix a symptom of a larger or different issue. It surely is an indicator of popularity, we also look at most popular ideas during our reviews, but this is not the only factor involved. We look at the match with our own vision, feasability, as well as the complexity vs. benefit compared to other ideas with similar popularity.

If you want to read more about how we are doing ideation on our community, I'd recommend this article. And if everything goes right, I am happy to invite you to our own ideation group next week! :)