Here's how you can effectively convey your ideas and suggestions to your boss.

Also apart from impact, we need to think in terms of visibility. Managers are more likely to approve your idea if it gives your team and him visibility over a wider audience and particularly among the extreme leadership. Although it’s directly never said but praises from top leadership matters a lot in big tech companies. So apart from substance think in terms of visibility as well, whether the thing you are proposing would improve team’s and eventually his visibility in eyes of top leadership and how you can ensure that.

People generally don't like change but they do like to look good ??. To make a suggestion more digestible, I usually start with a POC (proof of concept) to show off what we COULD be doing. Before doing that however, ask yourself a couple questions: 1. How will this improve our lives at work? 2. What is the business value? 3. How much effort will this take? If your proposal is heavier on 3 than 2 and 1, maybe re-think it.

Sometimes going to our superiors unprepared is what makes them rejects our new ideas. Bosses want their companies to grow but sometimes their afraid of a new thing. Especially things they don’t fully understand. So it’s very important that you explain everything to them, and don’t be too technical in your explanations, make it easy for them to understand. Show them how can the new idea help move the company forward and why this is the right time to integrate this new features or idea. If they can see the benefits clearly not only they will accept your suggestion but you might also get a promotion for that. Bosses likes people who are innovative enough to move their company forward even when their not there.

I've made the mistake of selling tech when I should have been selling solutions. ? We're implementing a read-aside caching strategy to reduce database hits ? We have a solution to improve the speed of our most popular search queries A non-tech audience wants to know how tech will affect their particular business area and daily work lives, not the technical details which may cause more confusion than support. People won't champion what they don't understand.

When presenting your idea to your boss ????, be as clear as possible. Clarity is gold and remember, not everyone is coming from a technical background like you. Let’s say you want to your boss to pay for a cloud service like GCP, AWS or Azure because your project is hosted on a shared hosting which is getting slower everyday because of your users growths. You can avoid all the technical jargons like how compute engine works and just explain to him how this new service will improve the performance of your application and makes it more secure and reliable to your customers. He’s a business owner not an engineer explain to him how he can serve his customers better, anything else is secondary.

The best way to communicate ideas effectively to a superior is to ensure clarity. When your thoughts and ideas are clear enough and logical, with a goal in mind, you just might be considered.

Yes this actually helps a lot, having that open discussion and listening to manager’s inputs helps us decide whether its something which the team or the manager has already looked up onto and its limitations, and some which they haven’t looked into and worth following up after adding on the things suggested by the manager. Implementing those feedbacks suggested by your manager can make your idea grow and eventually that improvised idea can bring much larger impact. Also manager would also like to promote this idea further since it’s not only yours idea, he has also contributed to it (general human bias).

Add it to your task schedule, too, for the PM to see. It will not be easily forgotten in the hectic environment that way. Keeping track of it with correspondence also avoids the situations where somebody just walks up and says, "This is obviously low-priority, so do my task instead," and you have to bother your boss again (at a worse timing) to prove to said somebody that you are actually innovating.