10 Advanced Ideation Techniques for Product Pros
Though you’ve likely heard talk about great ideas coming from ‘shower thoughts’, ideation techniques are a more strategic way to go for your product team. These strategies help your team come up with innovative solutions to user pain points, improve your existing products, and launch new ones that meet real user needs.
Want to get the ideas flowing on your team? Let’s dive in.
What are Ideation Techniques?
Ideation techniques are intentional, planned activities that help you and your team generate and evaluate ideas for your business. When it comes to product design and UX design, you can’t get very far without consistently generating and analyzing the potential of new ideas (ie., idea management) on a very regular basis.
Ideations vs. Brainstorming
Before we explore specific ideation techniques, it’s important to understand the difference between brainstorming and ideation. Brainstorming is a form of idea generation—it’s the act of coming up with new ideas, usually without thinking much about feasibility or quality.
Ideation certainly includes brainstorming, but it’s more thorough and encompasses more stages of the idea management process. Unlike brainstorming, you don’t simply emerge with a large number of ideas. Rather, you’ll have possible solutions that are further developed, you’ve evaluated their potential, and you’re equipped to prioritize the best ones.
How Are Ideation Techniques Used?
At this point, you may be asking yourself when and how exactly you and your team should utilize ideation techniques. The design thinking process requires teams to consistently come up with, test, and iterate on new ideas. And different ideation techniques offer different value propositions for your team.
Here are some examples of ideation use cases on product teams:
- Brainstorming innovative solutions for a problem statement or job to be done
- Coming up with new product features to add value for users
- Generating solid, new product directions for hitting a newly defined KPI
- Conceptualizing a new strategic direction that meets a different need of your target audience
- Reimagining your product’s UX in a way that’s more intuitive for your users
Top 3 Ideation Techniques (And When to Use Them)
Now we’re going to take a lot at some specific ideation techniques: when to use them, how to do them, and everything else you need to know. Read on to help your team move on from only haphazard brainstorming to brainstorming and ideation that fuels your progress.
1. Brainstorming
Though ideation is broader than brainstorming, brainstorming is a useful technique for generating ideas and engaging your team members in some creative thinking. Generally, brainstorming sessions are collaborative, and they involve a constant flow of sharing creative ideas that come to mind on a given topic without judgment. The list of ideas can be analyzed and thought out more fully later on.
Here are a few helpful tips for running a successful brainstorming session that yields innovative ideas:
- Invite a broad group of participants to your brainstorming session. The creative process only benefits from including people with different skill sets and perspectives. Though it may be tempting to stop at product managers and designers, consider other stakeholders who may have a different take on the user experience. I’ve seen marketing managers and business development colleagues contribute ideas that product pros would never have thought of, just by virtue of coming at the problem from completely different angles.
- Start off your session with context and direction. All good brainstorming sessions start out with direction from the facilitator. What are we doing here today? Are we problem-solving? If yes, define the problem statement and show the relevant data that substantiates the problem you’d like to solve. Are we looking for a more strategic direction? Why? Brainstorming sessions, although sometimes less structured than other ideation methods, should embrace specificity.
- There are no bad ideas. In this part of the ideation process, you want your team members to feel like they can blurt out any and all ideas that come to mind within the direction that you gave at the start of the session. Later, you’ll comb through your ideas and rule out the ones that have less potential. At this point, quantity is the priority over quality.
When to Use Brainstorming
I like to think of brainstorming as a great starting point for ideation. When you’re beginning to think about problem-solving a specific issue, it makes sense to cast the net wide in terms of ideation methodology, colleagues who participate, and the scope of ideas.
Use brainstorming techniques when you’re just getting started and when you’re feeling uncertain about your direction overall. And, you can use an idea management software to help facilitate the rest of the ideation process.
2. SCAMPER
The SCAMPER method is an ideation technique that helps you generate new product development ideas by looking at personas, problems, user needs, and products through different lenses. First, let’s understand the SCAMPER acronym:
- Substitute: What can I switch out in my product or service for something else? If you have a to-do list app that suggests frequently repeated tasks that are underused according to your product data, what might we substitute task suggestions with? Could you recommend something else that makes productivity easier for our users?
- Combine: How can I bring together more than one element of my product or service to generate a new value proposition or improve the experience? If you have an email marketing platform that allows users to write, design, send, and analyze metrics for their email campaigns, could you make the text and design flow into one seamless experience to save users some time?
- Adapt: What part of my product or service could I adapt to solve the problem at hand? Let’s say that you have a fitness app that’s popular with amateurs, but not with seasoned athletes. What can you adapt in your app that will help you give genuine value to the professionals as well?
- Modify: Can I change some aspect of my product or experience to improve the experience and increase value? If you have video editing software and you notice that users prefer to download and share their video creations to social media directly rather than from your platform, could you simplify your experience by making the export to social media feature less prominent?
- Put to another use: How can I put a feature, flow, or specific technology to another use? Imagine that you have an ecommerce site with a clothing try-on feature that isn’t well utilized. Could you use the technology behind that feature to have users upload a full-body photo and get instant recommendations for clothing that suits their style and body type?
- Eliminate: What can I get rid of in my product or service in order to simplify the user experience? Maybe you have a lot of features in your app’s toolbar that aren’t utilized. Could you get rid of those features so that your users aren’t distracted?
- Rearrange: Can I change the order of something to make my existing product more intuitive? Let’s say that you have a recipe app with a single flow where users enter the ingredients that they have on hand and give them ideas for recipes. Could you increase the usefulness of your app for a wider audience if you created an alternative flow where users can search for recipes with free text, and then take a look at what ingredients it requires?
When you’re running a SCAMPER ideation session, be sure to:
- Keep your participants on task. This isn’t a free-for-all brainstorming technique, so the facilitator of the session will need to make sure that participants keep their ideas limited to the current letter of the acronym that you’re on. This will enhance the creative process by keeping participants within certain specifications.
- Consistently remind participants why you’re ideating. Consider putting up a poster or a statement on a whiteboard to keep your North Star on the minds of your colleagues.
For example: Our users are telling our support team that doing XYZ is too complex and not worth the time. What can we do to simplify the experience and give true value?
When to Use SCAMPER
I like to use SCAMPER when we need big, fresh ideas but I feel like my team is stuck in an innovation rut. Teams tend to have subconscious beliefs that limit the different angles from which new ideas can come. If you find your team with a KPI that you never really reach or a value proposition that user feedback tells you hasn’t really been realized, consider a SCAMPER session to get your team thinking in ways that they haven’t before.
3. Using AI
Artificial intelligence is everywhere these days, and while you’re either all over it or sick of hearing about it, the truth is that AI can be great for generating new ideas.
Since AI tools are all based on amounts of data that are so large that it’s difficult to conceptualize, chances are that those data sets have some ideas that you haven’t thought of yet. Using AI for ideation, overall, involves giving data and context to various AI tools and then assessing the ideas and solutions that they generate.
Here are some tips and ideas for using AI as an ideation technique:
- Regard generated ideas as directions. It’s unlikely that Midjourney is going to design your new home screen or that ChatGPT is going to conceptualize totally new functionality that makes complete sense. However, generating ideas with AI can give you good starting points for new directions.
- Organize a workshopping session to sort through what AI gave you. You and your colleagues can go through the textual input and images that you generated with AI and ask yourselves: is there anything here? Or is there something here that we could tweak that’s actually promising?
When to Use AI for Ideation
I’ll keep this short: pretty much anything that is a cause for ideation in a use case for AI as an ideation technique. Regardless of why you need new ideas or whether or not you’ve chosen another ideation method, it makes sense to also incorporate AI. These tools are relatively low-cost and easy to use, and you can regard them as another colleague participating in your ideation initiative.
Bonus: Even More Ideation Techniques to Consider
The list of ideation techniques never truly ends, and hopefully, you’re already fired up about planning and scheduling your first session. Check out some other methods that we love to get your creative juices flowing in a way that’s fun:
4. Crazy 8s
This is a method where you define a topic or a problem, and then give your participants 8 minutes to sketch out (that’s right, draw!) 8 different ideas. Everyone shares what they came up with and you lead a discussion about which ideas have potential and are worth developing further.
5. Mind Mapping
Mind mapping is creating a visual diagram showing a hierarchy of information. It could be habits and needs, pain points and solutions, or whatever’s on your team’s mind these days! I like to do mind mapping with a small group on a huge piece of paper on the table. Each participant can start sketching out their own mind map before you combine them for a more unified approach.
6. Brainwriting
If you’ve worked on any team before, you know that some people are more or less likely to share what actually comes to their mind. One of the best ways to ideate with a group of people with different levels of comfort is to organize a session whereby each ideation prompt involves brainwriting, or participants writing down the ideas that come to their mind rather than sharing out loud with the group. After the brain writing takes place, you can encourage people to share verbally, or even just have a facilitator collect everyone’s papers and sort through them to decide on the next steps.
7. Round Robin
A round-robin ideation session is one of the best ways to make sure that all participants contribute equally. Ideally, everyone sits in a circle and responds to a given question in order, for multiple rounds. So if your question is what is a new value proposition worth exploring for our user base? You keep going around in a circle, everyone answering the question for multiple rounds, an equal number of times. Someone should be recording everyone’s answers for later evaluation.
8. Worst Idea
Here’s a fun one: define a problem or topic for your team, and then have them come up with the worst ideas that they can think of. Why? Aside from the fact that it can get fairly fun and ridiculous, it’s a great way to generate wild ideas. Every worst idea has the best idea counterpart. So when each participant raises their thought about a ‘worst idea’, the group can work together to think about it conversely. How do these bad ideas help us come up with good ideas worth pursuing?
9. Role Playing
Role playing is a great ideation technique that gives the opportunity to generate ideas in a way that’s both natural and spontaneous. You and your colleagues take turns role playing an interaction for a purpose. On product teams, a common usage of role playing is to have one person play a frustrated user talking to his friend. This helps the team better explore user pain points and ideate potential solutions.
10. How Might We
How Might We is a method, and a phrase, that’s extremely powerful when it comes to going beyond your team’s usual way of thinking. Generally, you go around and each person answers a How might we statement that reflects the topic at hand.
For example, how might we simplify the export flow without redesigning the editing screen? Go around enough times and you’re bound to have some ideas from the team that are worth exploring.
Ideation Isn’t Random, It’s Intentional
If you take away one thing from this guide to ideation techniques, it’s that product teams have to create a dedicated time and space for generating new ideas to continuously create new value. Just waiting for ideas to come to you doesn’t usually work, especially when your team’s mission and KPIs are waiting.
Why not get started today? Choose one or more of the ideation methods that spoke most to you and schedule a planning session with other members of the product team.
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