Idea Portals, Rediscovered
Have you experimented with idea portals or other formats of idea submission from internal or external customers only to end up with an avalanche of ideas that are hard to compare to each other leaving no good way to prioritize the winners that should make it onto the roadmap?? If so, you are not alone.? We were there too.??
Idea portals are prominent features in many product management software platforms such as AHA! and ProductBoard. There are whole suites for just idea management, such as BrightIdea and Qmarkets. The thought behind all these portals is that portal visitors, who might be some or all of your company’s employees or your customers, submit their ideas for enhancements and features of your product. Other portal visitors get to vote on ideas if they like them or if they were thinking along the same lines.? Then you evaluate the ideas against each other based on those votes and additional criteria (RICE, which stands for Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort, for example, is popular) and then those who submitted the ideas can track delivery if their ideas get picked up to be implemented. And so you tap into the wisdom of your employees and customers and engage them in your product.
The prioritization step, however, is not as simple as the current portals propose.??
First, there is a problem with voting. Most idea portals offer that feature and it’s tempting to use it but it's extremely misleading. You will always have more votes on older ideas than on newer ones. You also will have more votes on an idea that is simply better written or is submitted by a more “important” person in your organization (in case of use of the idea portal for internal users). I recommend turning off the voting option (if your software allows you to do it, I know that AHA! does).
Second, you will get ideas at every level of the opportunity space. Some ideas are opportunities for new pursuits, some are solutions to opportunities, and some are growth ideas. You really cannot compare them to each other. For example, you might receive an idea of implementing a third-party Business Process Management solution to orchestrate and automate some of the processes from operations, you might get an idea to automate some of the customer onboarding tasks from customer service, and you might get an idea of pursuing a different segment from sales. RICE won’t help here. These are different levels of entities in the opportunity-solution space.?
Third, you will get some ideas for solutions that are not aligned with the product outcomes that had been prioritized.
And finally, you will have lots of ideas, and investigating, estimating, and prioritizing all the ideas is a ton of work. This is why many never implement those idea portals or abandon them shortly after experimenting with them. Engaging with them certainly needs planning and if you have a mature product organization fluent in your customer and industry, with an established customer research engine and collaborative stakeholders, I would advise against idea portals. But sometimes your situation may dictate that you quickly receive a download from customer and industry frontlines. This may happen in the case of acquisitions in adjacent markets or industries or in the case of a very nascent product team without industry experience.
My team and I were in this situation. We acquired a company in an adjacent space. It was a very lean startup that had limited product and engineering resources. They needed a lot of solutions and fixes to drive revenue but my team only knew their process, features, and software at a very high level. The sales team from the acquired company was more knowledgeable about the customer and industry. And in a B2B2C environment focused on events and hence rare repeat B2B purchases, access to business customers was extremely limited. Moreover, approaching these customers for high-level education sessions was not an option while revenue pressure was really high.
My team was using AHA! and it had a highly customizable idea portal. I decided that it was better to try to get a crash course and end up in a temporary mess than keep on chipping away at understanding the space. So we rolled out the idea portal and we got a lot of ideas and the mess of trying to figure out how to go about prioritizing them. At first, I tried RICE-ing them all.? That was taking a lot of resources from UX, engineering, product, and stakeholders. And then a new product manager on my team mentioned Opportunity-Solution trees as something he found helpful. This was the first time I heard about them. I read an article about them and they made a ton of sense and then I realized that maybe they can help us with the idea-portal mess.
A little about Opportunity-Solution trees:
They are essentially maps that help you visualize a path to a solution that should be prioritized. They were introduced by Teresa Torres in 2016. The idea is also captured in this visual (from Teresa’s site—see Example 1). Teresa also wrote a fantastic book about the continuous discovery , which I recommend to everyone.
So my team and I organized our existing knowledge of the opportunity space into a tree and then added new ideas that we received from the portal into that tree. The tree helped us organize our thinking and limit what needed to be evaluated to only those ideas that were on our current critical path. It also offered a great visual for our stakeholders of how the product organization was thinking about product and prioritization.
I want to illustrate our process with a hypothetical product that, as a recent home-purchaser, I think would be helpful: a marketplace of the various parties involved in a real-estate transaction with tools that automate or streamline processes, from mortgage quotes to engaging with real estate lawyers to inspections and the final signing. Imagine that you introduced your initial product, which includes a mortgage-quote generator, and you are now continuing to build out your product. You, as a business, are focusing on a transaction volume that might make sense to break into two separate product outcomes of transaction starts and translation completion because the problem spaces with the two might be different. Perhaps your team is focusing on the “Start.”
Why do your customers not start an engagement with your product? Perhaps you launched a one-sentence survey for those exiting and you are distilling the sentiment that:
What do banks need in a marketplace to join it? What would appeal to them? What are the banks’ pain points, needs, and desires?
Once you list those opportunities you can quickly see that security is a real blocker for the banks. There is no point in doing anything else if security is not in place.
And at the same time, while other benefits, such as analytics, are appealing they won’t mean much and banks will only engage with you if you don’t have a sufficient number of customers on your platform for them to consider joining. You must bring demand on and perhaps even have to subsidize it to generate the benefit for the supply side of the equation.
Your goal and your customers’ problems can be organized into the opportunity tree shown in example 2.
Now, imagine you’ve launched your idea portal and received these ideas:
You now add these ideas to the right sections of your tree as demonstrated in Example 3.
It becomes clear that you don’t need to compare all of these ideas to each other. And since you know your critical path, you don’t need to evaluate all of them—only the ones that are on the critical path to your product outcome at the moment.??
And you just learned about the whole new opportunity space from one of the ideas once you followed up with the customer success manager who submitted it: customers get mortgage broker referrals from their real-estate brokers and they feel that they will get a better rate and customer care from a personal engagement.? See your tree further updated with this new information in Example 4.? This is an important nugget you just learned. And guess what? It’s still not on your critical path, so it’s something to explore later.
Now, do you jump to implement a partnership with Zillow and a third-party security certification since they are on a critical path? No, you run a brainstorm to identify additional options so that you ensure that you are implementing the best solutions to these opportunities. It’s a good idea to include the authors of those ideas in the brainstorming, along with other stakeholders and experts on these subjects in your organization. Once you have multiple options for those critical path opportunities, these two solution ideas should be considered contenders for the solutions that you actually further explore, test, and finally implement.
It’s worth socializing your tree with your stakeholders and the organization to show how the product is thinking about problem and solution spaces and that their effort of submitting the ideas was not wasted. They provided you with needed education and improved your thinking and while these ideas might not be implemented right away they are on the map and are considered.