How to Ideate a Brand New Product
When you’re building a completely new product or feature, you have to figure out the right solution.
What often happens in large corporations is that someone – a business leader or a product manager-adjacent person – tells the product team what to build. This is communicated through quarterly iteration planning, but the reasons are typically not shared. Why are we building this? Who is the end user?
I’ve recently heard from a software engineer at a workshop I was running that they were frustrated with the user story template:
I as a [user persona]
Want to [do an action]
So that [I can achieve an outcome]
The reason for their frustration was that they didn’t know who the user was, and neither what outcome the user wanted to achieve.
That’s a bummer, because this way a user story template is really just for the template’s sake; it doesn’t make any sense.
So, ideally, how should all this work?
Before we can come up with the right solution, we need to understand the problem or need our user is having that we want to solve. The whole goal of this is that once we solve that user problem, our user will either buy our product or stay with it longer, so it ultimately generates a financial return on our investment.
But if we don’t actually succeed in solving that pain point, it won’t do anything for our user; we’ll just generate costs.
Start From Your Target Audience’s Problem
We started building Little Parrot because we’ve seen that product people struggle with a couple of things:
A lack of time to allocate to lengthy courses to learn new skills.
The current tech landscape is changing so rapidly that it can feel like a full-time job to keep up.
Constant fear-mongering in publications and professional networks (like LinkedIn) about falling behind without knowing a ton about AI.
Ideation Workshop
Prioritised User Problem
It’s important to make sure that your whole team is on the same page about the problem you want to solve for your users; it’s not just the product manager and designer who own this knowledge. Deeply understanding the problem will result in coming up with better solutions. Since developers are the closest to the technology, they have a unique perspective on what’s possible; involving them in ideation will therefore result in better solutions.
Even thought we have a two-person team building Little Parrot, we still started from the prioritised user problem we aim to solve by filling in this template:
I am [your user]
I am trying to [desired outcome]
But [barrier / problem]
Because [root of problem]
Which makes me feel [emotions]
Here’s what it looked like in action:
I am a busy product manager
I am trying to feel confident
But I don’t even know where to start to get actual skills
Because I don’t know what the best framework or methodology to apply is and I don’t find real practical resources
Which makes me feel overwhelmed and paralysed.
We predominantly thought about the current AI hype and how overwhelming that can feel, but we didn’t want to only focus on AI skills, but broader product skills as well.
Create Your Persona
Understanding who you’re designing a solution for is essential. It helps to build empathy across your whole team.
We used a simplified way to define our persona, focusing on their main characteristic, frustrations, and goals.
This is what we came up with:
Persona: Chick
About: busy product manager
Frustrations:
there's so much to learn, so little time;
FOMO with constantly evolving tech landscape.
Goals:
to feel confident in their job;
to quickly acquire applicable skills.
Chick is a character we came up with: a PM who is still learning represented by a chick still in an eggshell. Honestly, it’s partially a version of me, reflecting all the mistakes I’ve made over my product journey.
Storyboard: From Struggle to Solution
Drawing helps with communicating ideas. Visualising the user’s story helps us empathise better which then unlocks innovative solutions in us.
So, everyone in our team went through each step to create a storyboard, and we discussed what we drew after each step. This allowed us to get inspiration from each other and make sure we’re working towards the same goal.
The steps of the storyboard are the following:
Draw what the user struggles with.
Visualise what the user can do and how they feel once the struggle is resolved.
Sketch all the moments that lead the user from the initial struggling moment to their happy ending. Show how your solution helps them get there.
Our user is struggling with:
All the fear-mongering messages that they are behind.
They try to use AI, but they get back generic, fluffy answers.
As a result, they don’t understand why AI is so useful for everyone else. (Have you seen the “10x developer/PM with AI” posts on LinkedIn?)
Once the struggle is resolved:
Chick knows what to use Al for
Can collaborate with it
Can prompt it to get high-quality, useful outputs
Potentially, they can automate recurring tasks
Feels confident with their colleagues (discussing AI)
The happy ending looks like:
Chick understands the foundations of how AI works, so they can use it more efficiently.
They’ve acquired prompting techniques to get high-quality, useful outputs.
How they get there:
Little Parrot offers a nurturing, and stress-free environment where they can practice and learn, following science-backed methods for better knowledge retention.
It’s okay to experiment and not get the answers right, because that’s how we learn: by trying things and practising.
They can learn in bite-sized pieces (e.g. while waiting for the bus).
This allowed us to really get to the core of the solution we want to create.
Happy Building!
I hope these ideation techniques will come in handy next time your team is coming up with a solution for a new feature or product. Happy building!