Idea Crowdsourcing 101: Inviting Users Into Your Product Strategy
The value of idea crowdsourcing seems pretty self-evident—after all, successful products and features start from great ideas, and you can never have too many of those.
While it's often up to product managers to come up with all the ideas, you don't need to put all the pressure on yourself. Your users, and even your colleagues, are idea goldmines—and it only takes a little curiosity on your part to strike it rich!
Idea crowdsourcing taps into the collective intelligence of various stakeholders and helps you pinpoint stronger, more innovative ideas for new products or enhance existing ones.
So, let’s learn how we can gather and process these ideas and turn them into successful features.
What Is Idea Crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing is the process of gathering ideas from a wide audience for evaluation and prioritization. Most of the time, the audience that suggests ideas will consist of people who are directly or indirectly invested in your products or services (e.g. clients, coworkers, beneficiaries, etc.).
This process is quite popular in the world of digital products. For example, did you know that Jira has a Jira board? It’s a public board (powered by their product, of course) where users can submit bugs and suggest new feature ideas.
Product managers use idea crowdsourcing to improve their understanding of the product, allow their colleagues and users to express themselves, and contribute to its growth.
There are two strong benefits that you can get as a PM when implementing idea crowdsourcing:
- Let your users talk about their needs. No matter how good a PM you are, you will never understand your users' real-life struggles better than they do.
- Look at your product from different viewpoints. If you involve your colleagues in this process, you will benefit from their expertise and hear ideas that would never come to your mind.
To sum up, crowdsourcing is an integral part of product managers' ideation workflow, helping them generate many fresh ideas. Let’s examine how crowdsourcing fits in the ideation process for digital products.
Where Crowdsourcing Fits Into the Ideation Process
Before we find the right spot for crowdsourcing in the ideation process, let’s first refresh our memories with what that process looks like.
There are many ways you can organize your product ideation. But the one I tend to pick for most of my products looks like this:
Let me quickly go over each step in this workflow:
- Defining the problem: You will end up with many irrelevant ideas that you cannot prioritize if you can’t clearly state what kind of problem you want to solve.
- Listing ideas: There are many ways you can source ideas (more on that later). No matter the method you choose, the end result should be an unordered list of rough ideas that you think might solve your problem.
- Evaluating ideas: Not all ideas are created equal. You can use feature prioritization frameworks for idea evaluation or try out idea management software to help assess the potential of ideas.
- Making a shortlist: Based on your evaluation, you will need to pick a couple (not more, or you will lose focus) of the best ideas that you think are worth testing.
- Testing and validation: Conduct interviews, make a clickable prototype or even an MVP, and give it to your target audience to use and tell you if it’s valuable.
- Picking the winner: Analyze the data from your validation sessions and select one (yes, one) idea that is worth developing.
The most logical phase where you will do idea crowdsourcing is when you are listing ideas. The general rule is to have multiple sources of ideas. The more people share their thoughts, the better. This way, you get a well-diversified pool of ideas that represent all points of view around your product.
Why Your Product Team Should Crowdsource Ideas
Diversity, diversity, diversity!
We, the product managers, tend to think that we can look at the product from multiple viewpoints: users, developers, business owners, etc. But the truth is that we’re not really good at it.
No matter how hard we try to get rid of it, the decision-making engine in our head is still affected by a variety of biases. By letting a diverse group of people look at the state of our product, we are significantly decreasing this risk as the biases of one group of stakeholders or users get eliminated by others who are free of those specific biases.
The second factor to consider is your tendency to develop “banner blindness” towards apparent problems in your product just because you have been interacting with it for months or years. By crowdsourcing ideas, you’re bringing in a large group of “fresh pairs of eyes” who have not developed blindness to these issues yet.
Finally, as PMs, we tend to be very vision-driven and can even be stubborn when it comes to ideas that don’t match our understanding of the future of our product. But if a couple of hundred users give you the same idea or report the same problem, it’s time to start questioning your beliefs. You might start to see that your vision was not perfect, and the idea they mentioned is worth working on.
How To Crowdsource Ideas: 3 Key Strategies
Now that we understand the importance of crowdsourcing ideas from your users and stakeholders let’s move on to discussing the processes you can implement to do so.
There are a million ways you can crowdsource ideas. But, based on my experience of trying many of them, these three have proven to be the most effective ones:
1. Have a Brainstorming Session
Yes, plain ol’ brainstorming!
This is by far the cheapest and fastest way to generate ideas for the problem you’re trying to solve. From my experience, the two best ways to run a brainstorming meeting are the following:
Ideate-Discuss-Evaluate Cycle: You give everyone in the room 5-10 minutes to write down their ideas on a sticky note. Then you gather these notes on a board (physical or virtual) and start discussing each one. Lastly, you evaluate these ideas based on basic criteria like feasibility and effectiveness. You can repeat these steps in a cycle as many times as you want if you feel like there is still potential in the room to generate more ideas.
This example was created with Miro, but you can use any other collaborative design tool for your virtual brainstorming session.
Ordinary chaos: Yes, it’s more effective than you think. You just gather relevant people in the room and start spitting out ideas and discussing them. It works really well if the group is small (no more than 5 problem solvers) and you’re able to listen to each other.
The benefit of this method is in the group's ability to build upon the product ideas of others in real time and come up with something that represents a consensus among all parties.
When to Use This Strategy
Brainstorming works very well in the following situations:
When you have a time constraint. Imagine your product is using a 3rd party API and your calculations show that you will hit the API rate limit in 3 days. You can quickly gather your chief architect, DevOps, head of product, and the engineering team lead in a room and start looking for feasible solutions.
From my experience, this was a real case. Within 20 minutes, we found a way to combine API calls into one and decrease the rate of consumption by 3x. It took us another day to develop and ship that fix.
When you’re a small startup that doesn’t have many users to test on, you can’t imagine how hard it is for startups to recruit interviewees who are not their users. I’ve had cases when we had to pay $2,000 (!) for a doctor to have a 1-hour call with us. So in these cases, you can tap into crowdsourcing innovation for your next breakthrough.
2. Run User Testing
The beauty of this method is in its superior precision when compared to brainstorming and hackathons. This process lets you take advantage of the collective intelligence of your audience to uncover new ideas and problems in a data-driven way.
Here are some ways to run user tests:
- Building clickable prototypes on your product design tool for users to play with.
- Conducting online and in-person interviews.
- Running small crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter or other online platforms.
- Use heatmaps to see how people interact with your interface.
- Running surveys to get quantitatively backed ideas from your target audience.
You can also combine all of these methods to have a comprehensive overview of what people want from your product.
When to Use This Strategy
User testing takes time. So, consider using it when you can afford to build prototypes, recruit users, run the tests, and analyze them. If you have a strong innovation management process in place, you’ll be well-equipped to make the most of your user testing outputs.
The results from user testing can be quite precise. This makes it a good approach to the riskiest problems you’re trying to solve when you can’t really afford to be wrong with your ideas and solutions.
3. Host a Hackathon
This idea management strategy stands in between user testing and brainstorming in terms of its precision. You can get more people to take part in the idea generation than with a brainstorming session, but you will still lack the scale of user testing.
One of the best ways to host a hackathon is during company offsites, as it is also a great way to build inter-team bonds and foster a culture of innovation and problem-solving. To boost the motivation of your teams, you can even offer incentives and prizes for the teams with the best submissions.
One thing to consider here is to make sure that your teams are cross-functional and that you have everyone necessary (design, development, product, etc.) to come up with innovative solutions, do quick market research, and turn that business idea into a new product prototype.
When to Use This Strategy
From my experience, hackathons are really effective for solving problems that your company has never solved in the past. For instance, if you want to build your first AI feature, you can challenge your staff to find different creative ways they can solve user pains in your product with the help of AI.
7 Tips For Better Idea Crowdsourcing
Before wrapping up this guide, I want to share a couple of handy tips with you to improve the effectiveness of your crowdsourcing efforts:
- Include “alignment with strategy” in the list of criteria for evaluating ideas. Otherwise, your innovation process will drift away from your strategic goals.
- Don’t take ideas at face value. Instead, try to understand the underlying problem that users experience.
- Challenge ideas and ask a lot of “whys”. This way, you’ll quickly filter out the ones that have significant underlying problems.
- There are no bad ideas. Make sure that everyone knows that there are no bad ideas and they are free to suggest even the most out-of-the-box ones.
- It should not be a one-off task. Make your idea crowdsourcing project a repeating one to keep a constant inflow of fresh ideas into your backlog.
- Consider using an idea crowdsourcing platform. These apps help you centralize innovative ideas and initiatives from social media platforms like LinkedIn, online communities, forums, and other sources.
- Your idea management process should look like a funnel. You start with a large group of uncategorized ideas and end with one that’s worth building. Yes, I would suggest you build 1 idea at a time to keep everyone in focus.
Here’s what that funnel will look like:
Two (or More) Heads Are Better Than One
Idea crowdsourcing is a great tool for product managers. With open innovation, you can create a diverse and well-balanced inflow of ideas for solving user pains and technical challenges.
I hope that I was able to give you the necessary knowledge on crowdsourcing tools and frameworks to make it a recurring process for your product as well.
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