[On Demand] Product Management Webinar: Idea Management

[00:00:05] Megan Saker: Welcome to today’s webinar, How to establish a product idea intake process.

[00:00:11] So Megan, I’m the CMO here at ProdPad and Julie. 

[00:00:17] Julie Hammers: And I’m Julie Hammers. I’m currently head of Design at ProdPad and I’m excited. Head of Product, and head of a long week folks. Happy to see everybody. I’m excited to do this talk about our idea intake process. 

[00:00:33] Megan Saker: Brilliant. Wonderful. Okay, great.

[00:00:36] So just before we kick it all off, I just want to explain that anyone who’s new to PROD hasn’t heard of ProdPad. We are a, all in one product management software home for all of your product management work. So we help product managers manage their idea backlog, an essential repository for all the customer feedback and tools with which to analyze your feedback.

[00:01:01] And then importantly your road mapping tools. So the ways to build your roadmap, communicate your roadmap, and to capture your strategy, your OKRs, and then importantly the link between all of those things. So yeah, if you haven’t tried proper before, I’d urge you to go. We’ve got a free trial with no card, no commitment, or you can book in a demo and we can talk you through it@proppad.com.

[00:01:25] And also importantly ProdPad comes with the greatest product management AI out there. And, again, that is available in the trial, so in your, in a free trial. So go in and have a look and have a play. You could get CoPilot to write up some documentation you need doing tomorrow or something.

[00:01:45] But also there’s actually a bunch of ways that pro CoPilot can help with the idea intake process. So we can show you a few of those later on. Okay. So let me outline the full agenda for today. How to build a product idea intake process. So we’ll start off by talking with you, we’ll start off talking about why you should bother with this, so why taking in product ideas is a good idea.

[00:02:14] We will cover the distinction between ideas and feedback ’cause that’s important and that that has an impact. What a good idea the intake process looks like. So Julie will map out what an ideal process looks like. So you can see what our suggestion is the steps to setting up that process.

[00:02:36] Then. So we’ll talk to you about how to implement that. And then importantly ways to communicate that process to ensure adoption to get buy-in from the organization. So the process actually works. We’ll cover how to set expectations with all your con contributors and how important that is. And then finally, how to get your idea to submit your stakeholders to self-serve updates so that they aren’t creating a whole bunch of noise for you.

[00:03:08] Okay, so let’s start with why is it worth your time and effort to set up an ideal intake process? What benefits will this bring? Like why on earth do you want to invite ideas from far and white? So let me tell you it is a good idea to welcome ideas for other people because it is fundamental to a growth mindset.

[00:03:31] So it’s the best way to make sure you are always open to learning and finding new opportunities to create value. And part of that is being receptive to other people’s ideas. It’s about not being arrogant and thinking that you always know best and you are the only one who has worthwhile ideas.

[00:03:52] As Janice says, actually our CEO and co-founder are product people. It’s not your job to have all the answers. It’s your job to ask the best questions. So if other people think they have answers and stuff, great, send them in. Then you ask the right questions to develop those and nurture those ideas.

[00:04:11] And don’t forget, taking in ideas doesn’t mean that you have to execute them all. Of course. This is also key to making sure that you get other perspectives right, that you might be missing. So maybe you have customer teams or support teams that go super deep with users and customers. They have a really unique insight into their sort of problems and their objectives.

[00:04:34] You might have people in other areas of the business who have ideas around how to do, technically how to deliver a, A-A-A-A-A feature or a service in a more cost effective way, therefore increasing the business value of your product. Because remember, of course the problems that your product should be solving can also be for the company, for the organization, not just the customer.

[00:04:58] So yeah, different perspectives, very important. Having an idea intake process will also encourage engagement from the whole organization. So you’re giving them a voice, you are offering them the chance to shape the product evolution, and that’s compelling, right? So that’ll get their attention. Whether people’s ideas are strategically right or not is often beside the point.

[00:05:22] Encouraging people to think about the product making them feel like their contribution is valuable will go a long way to helping you establish that sort of company-wide product culture. It’ll encourage colleagues to take the time to understand the product management process. Understand what product is what and does, and that creates an opportunity for you to explain how you go about your product decisions.

[00:05:49] What the fact that you’ve got product objectives, a vision, a well thought out roadmap whatever you need people to know about your approach. This, an idea intake process creates the engagement for you to be able to do that and gets the attention. It’s a path to a true innovation culture which will mean better results for your company, for you.

[00:06:12] You’re harnessing the collective knowledge of the company to crack problems in a novel way. You’ll be saying goodbye to silos, right? So you’ll be creating transparency from inviting ideas and sharing your process. More understanding of what product is across teams, more collaboration.

[00:06:29] They won’t think that product is the place where ideas go to die. God knows what happens with them when they’re over there. And you’ll build relationships, right? With people in other departments, other teams. Everyone will play nicely together. So that’s the reason.

[00:06:46] But let’s take a moment to clarify what we mean by ideas particularly in relation to feedback. So you’ll have noticed that I was talking a lot there about taking in ideas from your internal sort of teammates and colleagues, right? But what about customers? So some product teams will actively invite ideas from their customer base.

[00:07:08] They’ll explicitly ask users to submit any product ideas they may have. They’ll have an idea Dropbox or portal or whatever. Now our advice is that this is better framed as feedback. So ask your customers if they have any feedback, what problems are they facing? How do they, how well do they feel that your product is solving their problems?

[00:07:29] So when you use prod pads, for example, as your product management tool, you get an unlimited number of feedback portals and widgets where you ask questions that elicit sort of useful feedback, not feature requests. And importantly the responses come into you. Through those portals into your ED as feedback.

[00:07:47] So the thoughts and contributions from your customers come to you as the product manager as feedback. And then it’s up to you obviously to understand the underlying problem the customer’s facing and then start to think about possible solutions or indeed point to where you are already working on solutions on your roadmap.

[00:08:05] And why do we suggest that customer input is always framed as feedback. It, otherwise you run the risk of becoming the dreaded feature factory or what Janna calls the sort of agency trap building features to order, blindly building what’s being requested about exploring other possible solutions.

[00:08:24] So yeah, if you explicitly ask your customers for their ideas, you are also setting the expectation that their ideas will get built. Just as they’ve described them. And only disappointment lies in that direction. So rather encourage feedback and then you can enjoy more flexibility, explore different solutions.

[00:08:46] It’s also worth being clear with your internal contributors about the distinction. And really that’s for two reasons. One, so your customer facing teams understand the difference and they can then actively reframe the feature requests that customers bring to them. So when a customer tells them they want or need feature X, they can ask the right questions to find out why they feel that they need that, what problem do they think it would solve, and thereby bring it back to the problem.

[00:09:20] Which then comes into the product, into the product team as a piece of feedback. And there on the slide, I’ve got some examples of how they. Customer facing teams can work with customers and reframe what was an idea into some feedback. And then also secondly, in terms of making that distinction to your internal teams, it means that they, your internal teams understand that they can submit feedback, right?

[00:09:45] If they encounter a problem with the product or something’s not quite working or whatever, they don’t have to come up with a solution. They can just send you some feedback. But on that first point quickly, how do you get your customer teams to not just take feature requests from customers at face value?

[00:10:03] How do you get ’em to delve deeper and work in this way to get useful feedback? We’ve covered this in a previous webinar. We have another bunch of examples here to help with this. So you can scan these and help yourself. I can also include them in the follow up email that we’ll send you.

[00:10:21] But then we also have this, which is a ready-made presentation deck that you can download a copy of, and you can use this directly with your customer teams. So you can literally present this to your customer teams. It covers why you need the best quality feedback possible.

[00:10:39] How. What’s in it for them? So delving deeper how that will make their jobs easier and more enjoyable. It’s got examples of exactly what good product feedback looks like. And then it’s got the list of the questions to ask to delve into, with those customers and get to the heart of the problem.

[00:10:59] It also covers how to get help or train your customer-facing teammates to talk to the roadmap. In, in, in the best way. We’ll come to the steps that you need to set up an idea intake process later, but certainly one of them is to communicate this distinction between ideas and feedback. So what exactly is the difference?

[00:11:23] This is how we define it here at ProdPad. So you can take a look there. Essentially, feedback is about identifying an issue or a problem or a friction point, and then ideas are about possible solutions to that. I appreciate there are a lot of words on this one slide.

[00:11:40] But we have got a version for you to take away. Another download, but we created these downloadable guidelines designed to help you with that internal communication of these ideas feedback distinction. So you can grab yourself a copy of these and you can share these internally or indeed adapt them if your definition is ever slightly different.

[00:12:01] Again, I’ll include that in the follow up email. So now you see why an ideal intake is important. What exactly do we mean by ideas now? With this need for ideas comes the need to put process and boundary around how you gather these contributions from across the com company. Otherwise, you’ll be drowning in messages and thoughts from myriad places and you’ll be drowning in an influx and you won’t be able to make it in the tail of it.

[00:12:30] So you need to establish a process and procedure around this idea to protect yourself from chaos, establish order. So really that you can turn these contributions from colleagues into an advantage rather than an inconvenience. So what does that order and process look like?

[00:12:51] This, here’s our suggested process and this is what a lot of our customers do, and certainly what we do here, atd. So over to Julie. 

[00:13:00] Julie Hammers: Thanks, Megan. Today the crux of what we’re gonna talk about is how to establish a robust idea intake process. This particular example shows how it might work with ProdPad but generally the idea is that as a couple of you said in the comments ideas come from all kinds of places.

[00:13:20] And so you want to have integrations and or touch points are a way to not require you’re. Stakeholders, peers, folks that are contributors have to leave their, if they have an app that they’re always in, whether that’s like HubSpot or Salesforce or wherever, they don’t have to leave necessarily.

[00:13:43] Or Slack, if you work out of Slack don’t have to leave where they’re at. And they’re able to add those ideas in place without having to bop around or have to go, make, go through a convoluted process just to submit an idea. So you want to have a way to capture all those channels and have it all go to a centralized backlog and have all the ideas all have the same criteria as they come in.

[00:14:11] And then. The next central part of this process is that you need to have a triage and review process. And I’ll go more into detail in that in a bit. And that’s where you’ll prioritize everything that comes in and evolve the discussion. You’ll want to poke holes on things and get clarity and verify the ideas as they come in.

[00:14:34] And then, then those ideas will go through your workflow and we’ll talk more about what the ideal workflow will be once you’ve triaged it into your backlog. And what’s nice about preppa is that we are integrated in a way with our feedback platform and with our roadmap that we are able to at the same time that those ideas come in, you’re able to you wanna associate any feedback, customer feedback that goes along with that idea because that helps, make the case or helps to clarify the problem space, like all the different kind of edges that you could look at when you’re trying to like look at a problem.

[00:15:12] And then you can also very clearly be able to link that idea to something that’s on your roadmap. And that is part of the process as well. So critically throughout all of this there should be automatic updates or automations in place so that everyone is up to date.

[00:15:28] So the person who added the idea, and then everybody who has touched that idea in the process, is then notified of any changes that kind of happens across your kind of product development cycle.

[00:15:44] We are going. Okay. Once you have, set up this initial flow where you’re capturing everything. Let’s break down this process a little bit more. So it’s very simple. Like you have your contributors that like to add the ideas or they have ideas, they submit them and they go into your unsorted backlog.

[00:16:02] And then as I said, your PMs so whether you’re a solo PM or if you’re part of a team you’re gonna triage that list. And then it’s going to go to a backlog. And then it’s gonna progress through a workflow. And then again, like you’re gonna have those automatic updates as it goes through.

[00:16:21] When it’s in that unsorted list you’re gonna be evaluating these ideas for kind of merit, clarity and strategic fit. And then once it’s triaged those ideas will go through your backlog and progress through your workflow stages throughout the entire process. Again there’ll be links to folks that were involved from the beginning.

[00:16:42] So by doing that why bother with making sure that folks that submitted an idea are updated? It closes the loop and it builds trust because I think a lot of folks would echo that for teams like yours, your sales team or your customer success team can get disheartened if they’ve submitted ideas before and they just don’t hear anything back about it.

[00:17:06] It just goes into a black hole. So by having this centralized process with notifications and keeping everybody in the loop that kind of helps to build the process and they’ll, and if they can see that things can actually happen from, something that gets submitted.

[00:17:23] Okay. So once you have this, I hate to say that I love to love to triage, but honestly I’m like an inbox zero junkie, so I actually really like it. So here are my kind of pre-flight steps for any idea that we’re going to evaluate that comes into your idea backlog.

[00:17:43] And keep in mind that you have in ProdPad you have CoPilot at your side to help automatically triage stuff that comes in as well. So first of all you wanna look at your impact and effort. Other, different teams have different strategies just in terms of how you quantify impact and effort scoring.

[00:18:02] You’re able to customize that in ProdPad to you. But yeah, you wanna understand not only how, like not only like the impact like that it could have right now, but you also wanna understand like the impact it could have in the future too. So it’s a little like a nuance sometimes, but sometimes something can actually have, if it is delivered at a certain point after something else has been delivered, it’s gonna have a bigger impact.

[00:18:30] It’s worth noting that impact is not a one-time score. Sometimes impact can evolve over time too. So you also want to have, understand like the alignment with your product vision. And overall is this something that we do? Is this part of our values? Does this align with the kind of things that we would do as a company?

[00:18:51] If you use personas does it align with the kind of your ICP or your kind of target folks that you design for and build products for? Tagging is a big thing. Like some people use tags, some people don’t. But adding tags to add to that metadata so that you can start to like groups and chunk different ideas up into an initiative or into a theme is usually pretty helpful.

[00:19:12] If it’s something that you know from the get go that is gonna be owned by a certain team, you can assign an owner, and add links for associated feedback. If you already know. In our app, we’re able to see related feedback or related ideas that might be similar or in the same theme with our AI and machine learning.

[00:19:34] But beyond that other things you can do are OKRs. So some folks will have overall like KPIs that they’re looking for as a business. Other folks use OKRs. It might be not just like you’re looking to see if, whether it aligns for the roadmap, you might be saying like, okay, like which of our four objectives that we have right now as a company, does it align with any of those.

[00:19:56] If not, then, maybe it goes into a holding pattern. And then a little kind of last but not least here, like you want to, make sure, ask for feedback from the folks that you know, submitted the idea. Outcomes are very important. It’s. What kind of easy ideas are cheap, right?

[00:20:15] But it’s a little bit harder to say what do you think the outcome would be or what would happen if this was launched in our app tomorrow? What would this do for the business? What would this do for our customers? For, so for, you want to actually have an idea of that before.

[00:20:31] You actually start any discovery or kind of development for sure on it? Too often I’ve seen teams take something all the way through like design, discovery and all the way up until it’s in, in development and say okay, how are we gonna measure this? So or what are we hoping to do?

[00:20:49] And yeah, that can often be too late. It’s better to start thinking about that at the very beginning when those ideas come in. And yeah and lastly, like I said before, yeah, you just wanna make sure that, and aligns with things that you have currently on your roadmap.

[00:21:07] Okie dokie. You have triaged your lovely ideas that have come through. You now have things sitting in a backlog. So now what happens? It is best to have an idea management workflow and probably have workflow stages. You might be familiar with these from like development tools too where some things like, in progress done your typical kind of Kanban states.

[00:21:31] But these states should relate directly to your product development process for your company. So the labels, what they’re called, should be clear enough that everybody in the company can go, okay, I know what state this is in. Try not to use team only names for these things or else it can be confusing about what state something is in.

[00:21:55] So keep it, try to keep it to a minimal amount of states like four to five and. It’ll make your life easier as you’re trying to move things through a flow. So I’m gonna talk briefly about what these example states mean and what they do for us. So for us at ProdPad we have the initial state of a PM who has reviewed the ideas.

[00:22:15] And then we have a definition stage, which is where the initial kind of specification starts to happen, where you start to define what the scope is, what’s out of scope, the opportunity space and what the solution to this problem should include. And usually if you’re working with a kind of design partner it starts to get a little bit more filled out.

[00:22:34] Once you have that initial idea, you might start talking to your customers. You might have a prototype, you might have something very light that you’re maybe you’ve done something in AI and you just wanna get it in front of customers really quickly. You’re, in discovery, you are trying to understand are you solving the right problems?

[00:22:51] Is this, validating whether this actual problem is worth solving. So editing is worth noting at any point. The idea can actually like, fall out of the process and say if it, if something’s not we’re not, it doesn’t seem to be landing with folks. It just doesn’t seem to be like scratching the right itch.

[00:23:09] You have the right to pull something out of the flow and put it in your archive or put it in your parking lot. Don’t be beholden to the workflow it doesn’t own you. And then yeah, so if it does go through discovery and into design, then you’re gonna get it to that 80% point with your design partners to start to really flesh things out.

[00:23:29] And you’ve, at this point, should have a full specification, should be in this part of this design process too. You should be playing with your technical peers to do technical discovery and building out that part of the specification as well. And then it is ready to get prioritized.

[00:23:45] And so this is the point where you can use an integration with ProdPad or your tool to send it off into development and then still have that status and have that content be synced back to your tool. But this allows you to keep the product kind of discovery and vetting process separate from your dev tool.

[00:24:06] Because the issue with having your ideas and like feedback going straight into your dev tool is you run the risk of like just becoming a feature factory of the ideas just becoming like a backlog that is endless and that isn’t properly vetted in terms of what ends up getting implemented at the end of the day.

[00:24:27] Gives us as PMs a lot more control over it. And then lastly, we’ve got a parking lot because sometimes ideas are good ideas, but they’re not good ideas right this moment. So you need a place where you can just pause and put it to the side. That’s an overview, and as I said, these stages and steps should align with your product development process.

[00:24:48] You can tailor it to the way that makes sense for your company. 

[00:24:53] Megan Saker: Great, thanks Julie. And then, okay, so you’ve seen, our suggested idea intake process mapped out there, so let’s give you some tips on implementing that, on, on getting it set up. So broadly speaking, there are sort of four steps to the setup before you start the sort of communication process and getting buy-in and stuff.

[00:25:13] So Judy demonstrated there. First up, you need a space for these ideas to flow into. You do not want to be gathering up ideas from multiple sources manually. Things fall through the cracks. You don’t have the time for that. We are obviously biased and think that space should be ProdPad.

[00:25:31] But whatever you choose it’s worth having that separate space from your development. Sprint planning, as Julie just said. Then the product teams have come to us sort of time and time again saying that they are tangled up in a giant mess in Jira that they can’t see the wood for the trees.

[00:25:49] There are literally half formed ideas from some bloke in sales sitting in the same place as fully specced, validated, ready for development work and that. That’s a lot of mess. Spare thought for your developers, that is overwhelming. It’s best just to show them what’s actually being prioritized and thought through as Julie said.

[00:26:10] The other advantage, obviously using ProdPad as Julie showed, is that connection to your feedback and your roadmap’s all together at one place. CoPilot our AI will do a lot of automated similarity matching, linking feedback flagging, duplicate ideas, et cetera. Next you need to, once you’ve got your central place, you need to set up those integrations so that you can offer everyone that sort of super simple idea submission without leaving the tools they are already in.

[00:26:40] So for ProdPad those integration possibilities look like this. So you need to decide what you need. So make sure you understand all the tools that everyone else is using and hook them up. This is about making it super non onerous for people. There’s also a bunch of other ways that ProdPad can remove effort in the process, both for you as a PM and for the idea submitter.

[00:27:03] Like I said, there’s automatic linking of ideas to related feedback, so you don’t have to manually go hunting through your feedback. Your idea submitter actually as well gets an instant picture of how well this aligns with customer problems that you know, you already know about.

[00:27:18] Duplicate ideas are flagged at point of submission. So this is actually also great for stopping people submitting a new idea when something. When the idea already exists or something very similar is in the backlog. And that again, is a great sort of time saver for you. Look, they’ll get flagged, oh, it’s already here, it’s already, and then they can see the progress on that idea.

[00:27:39] Also love this and we will talk about this a bit later on as well, but they can, and all you, whoever is looking at the idea can get instant analysis of strategic alignment. So this is great help. So CoPilot with a click of a button can give the submitted idea an assessment of how well their idea aligns with the product vision, with the strategy, with the OKRs it also gives constructive feedback and suggestions on how to implement or how to improve alignment.

[00:28:08] So the idea SIMer can either tweak it or even maybe ditch it, say, oh, I’ll get away from here. I won’t bother. The CoPilot can help them also flesh out the ideas. I think I saw in the comment earlier someone talked about, what, if people don’t have enough data at the point of having the idea or, and I’ll come back to this in a sec.

[00:28:28] But then finally, as Julie has demonstrated there, everyone will get automatic notifications so you don’t have to manually update all these idea submitters. So yes, this is what I’m talking about with a CoPilot helping to flesh out these ideas. They, you, your ideas submitters can just have.

[00:28:47] Nothing more than a title. They can click a button and CoPilot will generate a sort of fully fleshed out idea description. It’ll include reasonable target outcomes. It will have to think about risks to consider. And this is all because of the deep understanding of product management.

[00:29:04] Best practice a CoPilot has alongside the context data that it has access to, so everything about your product and your existing backlog that’s in your pod pad. So then the submitter can accept that or can work with a ProdPad to refine it. Julie? 

[00:29:25] Julie Hammers: Yes. So step three, how often are you refining and triaging the s backlog?

[00:29:34] It can be the BOS some teams existence sometimes when it’s easy for kind of any type of backlog to grow and it’s there for 12 months and then all of a sudden you have to just archive the whole thing ’cause there’s no way that you’re actually gonna act on any of these things. Making it a habit is crucial.

[00:29:50] You need to decide what the cadence you’ll be like, if you wanna do this like daily, weekly, biweekly just be consistent. Give yourself a cal meeting slot where you know your team is going through these things together. If you’re working as a team, it can be helpful to maybe have some PMs like pre-triage items and then before, there’s kinda like a vetting process to decide whether something will move from like that, like reviewed state or definition state, then into a kind of more full discovery. That’s the point where you’re saying like, okay, this is a bet that we’re gonna take on. And so you might wanna have a special, a specialty meeting that you do as a group to review those ideas.

[00:30:32] But yeah, like I said it keeps going, especially if you actually are able to be in the good position of having your. Teams like submitting ideas on a regular basis. It’s something that you’ll need to stay on top of. So I recommend starting with a weekly session and just adjusting based on your ideal volume.

[00:30:55] It really is tough, I think, to be single. PM to process more than like 20 ideas, I think in a week. Realistically, if you wanna do them any justice. Even with AI’s help, like it can, if you wanna make sure that you’re being careful with your triage.

[00:31:12] Just make sure that you’re giving yourself enough time. And then lastly setting your kind of workflow stages, like I said before, should make sense for your team and your process. They should include maybe things like discovery or design ready for dev or parking lots.

[00:31:28] And yeah, it should reflect how your team actually works. Like not some kind of idealized double diamond process on the full workflow. Keep it simple and, evolve it, see where the pain points are before you add more stages.

[00:31:51] Megan Saker: I am on mute. Classic. Absolute, classic Bingo cards. Got capacity for that. Amazing. The key to making all this work, to having a successful idea intake process is communicating the process to everyone, like making it super clear and motivating. If you don’t do a good enough job of this, then it’ll all fall down.

[00:32:13] You’ll have a process with no ideas working through it, or ideas coming at you from outside of this process. So you need to communicate the process to get buy-in, ensure adoption, ensure everyone’s doing what we need them to do. So let’s start with how to communicate. So I recommend it.

[00:32:32] Creating a presentation, not dissimilar to what we’re doing now, visualizes the process and explains it to everyone. And then I would get a slot in a town hall in an all hands meeting. Make sure it is getting the visibility that it needs to get. But of course, some people will be asleep in the town halls at the back or whatever.

[00:32:55] So that’s not enough. I would take that show on the road. I do a bit of a road show. I would speak to all the sort of department heads, try and secure a slot in each team’s regular meetings and present it there. And while you were talking to those department heads it’s probably worth it. Having a one, one-on-one conversation with them, getting their buy-in.

[00:33:18] Tell them why it’s important, how it’ll benefit their area of the business, and recruit them to help drive these behaviors in their team. Write it up, obviously, keep it short, snappy, engaging, and then put it wherever your internal communication tends to happen, like Slack or teams, whatever, pin it, flag it and mention those department heads that you’ve chatted up.

[00:33:42] And then importantly make it part of. Of new hire onboarding so that it’s continuously part of the process. And also you’re introducing that, the point of onboarding with someone. And so that means that they are coming in with the perception that there is a product culture here.

[00:34:02] And don’t forget to keep refreshing this in their mind. So either through, like on the spot coaching or feedback, like maybe you hear in a meeting someone has an idea for the product and you say hey, don’t forget, submit that. Send that in. Or, have a regular pattern of going back into team meetings or whatever.

[00:34:23] So that is how we recommend you tell them the how. Now what should you tell them? Julie. 

[00:34:30] Julie Hammers: Yeah. So we wanna start with the why always. So you want to communicate clearly. You want to want them, you need their ideas basically. ’cause they’re like, they’re closest to the customers and they have valuable insights, right?

[00:34:48] But yeah, we need to start with the why of like, why is it so critical that like we get these like diverse ’cause basically like diverse teams and diverse, like products are stronger, right? And the more that we incorporate all these different points of view and the stronger it’s gonna be for everybody, it’s very, just to make sure that they feel welcomed and included in the process. And, it shows that your team is open and working with other departments and you’re not closed off is gonna help everybody out. And again, like Megan covered earlier you want to cover that difference between what is feedback and what is an idea and whether, you know what the right time, thing is, but also it I think it’s important to say hey there’s no bad ideas and there’s no bad submissions. If someone goofs and some feedback as an idea that’s okay. Like you can just let them know hey this is better office feedback next time.

[00:35:43] Just, make it a learning process because it can be hard for people to rock. Maybe this is the first time around. You also wanna communicate kind of and this is where you’re like. Overarching like a product kind of strategy and the, like what you should be talking to the, your whole company about anyway, but just reiterating that and saying look, this is our vision for the company over the next five to 10 years.

[00:36:08] And this is what our value prop is. These are our OKRs currently, here’s where you can find them. This is where our roadmap is. And, here are the kind of ICP, our user profiles or personas and have all the information readily available so that if people are saying like, Hey, I have an idea.

[00:36:26] They can even just check and see proactively, like whether that fits our lines. And again, it’s gonna be a learning process for everybody. And. As we talked about earlier, you wanna make sure you’ve mapped up the process and just have it in a doc that’s readily available.

[00:36:44] Or, share them like in, you can share from ProdPad or, whatever tool you have to kinda show them like how that workflow works. And so that they’ll understand that things aren’t gonna, like everything does get seen. Like I do see every single because we use Slack at ProdPad and like I see every single piece of feedback that comes in through customer success or sales.

[00:37:04] And I see it on the daily, so if they understand that they’ll say Hey, this is a channel that I can use. And then, yeah, definitely explain your prioritization, CRI criteria, how that works, how it’s customized in your particular company. And give examples of what those good ideas might be.

[00:37:22] And say okay, this is something that was submitted and, this was like really really novel and had fit really well. Just find that example like in your particular roadmap or create one if there isn’t one. And use that as a sample for folks to use too.

[00:37:42] Megan Saker: Just some few little extra tips on getting people engaged with this. You could use the reports in ProdPad to see your idea submission leaderboard so you could try and stoke up a bit of competition amongst everyone. I’ve actually redacted the names so I’m not, and shamed my colleagues at the pub.

[00:38:05] The ones down at the bottom of that chart anyway, but hey, I might be tempted to do it internally. Make sure everyone has the Slack and Teams app of your chosen tool installed. So it might be worth throwing some instructions on how to go to the Slack app store or the team’s app store, whatever.

[00:38:21] And then, yeah, look, these last two points we’ve already said, but they’re worth stressing again. Tell ’em why they should care. And just make sure you make it super easy to actually submit ideas. So you know, those extra fields on the submission form do you actually need that? They might make your life a bit easier, but are they going to be a barrier to actually getting the ideas in?

[00:38:43] So focus on what makes it easy for them, and then tell importantly how easy it is okay, you followed all our advice here. You’ve really hyped this up with everyone. They’re totally brought in, they’re pumped about ideation and collaboration. But you have to be careful that you’re not suggesting that all the ideas will be given the same amount of love and attention.

[00:39:07] You don’t want everyone to assume that every idea they send your way will get deep discovery. And Stan’s a good chance of getting hit on the roadmap and being released to production. If you don’t set expectations you’ll be creating world pain for yourself. So you’ll get badged for updates.

[00:39:26] So if you don’t set expectations people will decide for themselves how quickly things should be reviewed. And they’ll come to you for updates rather than understanding realistic timeframes and the fact that they’ll get automatic. They’re automatically notified. So there’s no need to chase.

[00:39:44] You’ll have disappointed and disheartened teammates. So if they hear nothing and they believe you’ve had their idea for long enough they could lose faith in the process. So they’ll start to think you don’t value their input, that it’s pointless. Send ideas in because they don’t get looked at, they won’t bother again.

[00:40:00] And obviously you run the risk of potentially missing out on some good ideas there. And this actual one is pretty scary. You might get miscommunication with customers. So with your customer-facing teams, if they don’t have the right expectations about your process and how ideas are assessed and prioritized, they might believe that submitting an idea guarantees it’s going to be built.

[00:40:21] And they can start making promises to customers like, oh yeah I’ve actually told the product team about that, so that’ll be coming soon. So they, yeah, you need realistic expectations as part of this. So how do you set those expectations, Julie? 

[00:40:39] Julie Hammers: Yes. So here’s the fun part you gotta say yes to.

[00:40:42] No. You need to again, like I said, send, sending a little bit like a broken record, but just talking about what good looks like and what ideas or features are able to make it through the process. Talk about the product vision, what aligns our prioritization criteria and what the typical flow looks like in your organization.

[00:41:07] It might be the case depending on what your development flow can be like. How realistically, will an idea go from conception to production? We love our life, quick wins quadrant in ProdPad. The things that are potentially high impact and less effort.

[00:41:26] But not everything is a quick win, right? And some things will need to get broken down or broken out into different experiments or phases. And yeah, it’s really important that you communicate that hey this type of project or this type of idea will realistically take us a quarter.

[00:41:46] Or realistically this is a quick win, but we’ve got a lot of high priority stuff on right now. And so I. Once we pick up that work it’ll be done in a week, but it’s gonna come after these things that we already have laid out. So really, super helpful.

[00:42:02] Just be a good partner to folks that are, submitting ideas and help, set those realistic expectations. So it’s just, yeah, all about relative priority or team velocity and making sure that we’ve explored the problem space properly. So when people understand your criteria and your timelines upfront, they’ll submit better ideas.

[00:42:23] They’ll wanna make sure it’s the best possible idea, like it’s, crossing all the, like the t’s and i’s or dotted all the i’s just to make sure that it’s gonna have a good chance to make it into your roadmap.

[00:42:37] Megan Saker: Great. I’m slightly conscious of time. We obviously wanna leave some time for questions, so I’ll just rattle through this quickly. This was just a sort of special shout out to, when you’ve got scenarios with those heavy hitter stakeholders. I’ve said CEO here but that’s just ’cause I like the rhyme, is any sort of exec. Level, power player in your organization. And they will need some particular skills. We’ve got some tips there, but also, so we’ve covered that. Topic, how do they know the CEO, how to manage your stakeholders, and avoid hippo situations.

[00:43:13] And again, there are a few resources there, including a webinar with Minister Apple. Yeah, do take a look at that. Just to remind you again, this is useful when it comes to setting expectations. The vision alignment assessment that I mentioned earlier. So ProdPad, CoPilot, can, a click of a button can generate really considered answers that you can use with those sort of tricky stakeholders as feedback on why their idea might not be the best strategic fit right now.

[00:43:43] So if you were in that situation, like using CoPilot, let CoPilot have the conversation for, okay, so this is important. I’m gonna have to rattle through this, but this helps keep the noise down for you as a pm. So how do you make sure, how do you get people to self-serve their updates rather than coming to us?

[00:44:03] So we covered a lot of this, right? Those integrations, make sure they’re set up ’cause that will do it. Make sure they have the right toggle set in their notifications. So that they’re getting the emails. They can ask CoPilot for updates directly from Slack, for example. So I’ll show you that in a sec.

[00:44:19] There’s some things on there, this is it. So this is how you can speak directly to CoPilot from Slack, proper CoPilot. So they can ask for an update on an idea, either the idea name or the number, whatever they’ve got. And as you can see there, CoPilot will give them the lowdown and including the workflow stage showing this example, this idea they’re asking about is currently in the design workflow stage.

[00:44:41] So that’s a great way for your stakeholders to self-serve their updates. And just a final reminder and look for a pad we haven’t done that enough. All contributors are free of charge, so there’s no cost for a reviewer, as we call them, a seat. And then reviewers can submit ideas or indeed feedback.

[00:44:58] They can own ideas that they submitted, which gives them full editing rights but they can’t push them into development. You’ll probably be. So finally we have talked about the idea intake process and how to establish that we have a webinar and a complete ebook to download, which talks about the broader, the entire product management process.

[00:45:19] So if there are other areas, your process you’re looking to optimize and improve, do check those out. We have a matter of minutes. For questions, what. Have we got, I know that there’s some questions that have come in through the chat as well, so we could also try and dig in and find those. 

[00:45:37] Julie Hammers: So we have a couple of David’s here.

[00:45:39] So I think I would like to start with David Kenzie’s question about how do you suggest making this kind of process as efficient as possible? I like having a robust, robust process, but I don’t like spending too much time maintaining one. Totally. I get you. One of my mantras is let’s talk more rock.

[00:45:57] We should have just enough processes that work for your company, I think what’s helpful is to approach your process, like you would building a feature approach like you create in creating processes for your company. Treat it like you would be, creating like an experiment or an MVP.

[00:46:17] Be willing to try something. Sometimes, things don’t work but get lightweight enough that you could try something maybe with one team or with one project first. See how that goes. And then if that works, then you can start to scale that out to the rest of the org.

[00:46:33] And yeah, in terms of changing things just like investing in the stock market these days, don’t touch it. Like just try to. Let it be and change, like when you have an app that makes it easy for you, that definitely helps. But, trying to only make changes to your process a couple times a year is good because it keeps your team from feeling like they’re getting shifted all over the place with new changes or whatever.

[00:47:00] So keep it small, experiment and then try to keep it consistent. 

[00:47:07] Megan Saker: Nice. Great. David Harrison’s got a question here. What role does user research and following up with feedback submitters or gathering metrics, things that take longer fit into the discovery cadence? 

[00:47:21] Julie Hammers: That’s a good question.

[00:47:22] So in terms of it really, you can have that information filter in at different stages. I would suggest that something like at the like definition stage, it actually helps to have that information ahead of time and that if you have maybe some kind of panel research or opportunity area.

[00:47:41] Say like you’re going into a new market and you have tasked your user research team to go investigate this market and create some kind of maybe some competitive analysis for you or some kind of personal development. You can use all that information and like to tie to it or a link to it from, at that idea stage.

[00:47:59] ‘Cause usually like that kind of information informs a lot of different ideas. You might have something like an opportunity solution tree where you have one kind of bigger opportunity that a lot of ideas are gonna come through. And I find that a good UX like research team is actually informing higher up in the process, like at the top level.

[00:48:19] So you might actually like your initiatives or on your themes on your roadmap, that’s where good research will come into. But you might also see, if you’re trying to talking about like the measuring of things I think we covered this I think in maybe a, another webinar, but just in terms of measuring outcomes we have distinct parts of our idea workflow after it’s being completed to actually come back and say okay, whether something was done and was it a success or not a success.

[00:48:52] So you can actually create additional columns for your ideal workflow to actually note that measurement or that how things did. I know I’m talking, talking at a high level here, but it is possible to get those things. But like it’s I think it really depends on w how, like, how long your stages typically are. But in order to not hold back things, I would say try to keep like the kind of user, like the broader user research more associated with like initiatives versus like at the idea level, if that makes sense. 

[00:49:26] Megan Saker: Yeah. Yeah, it does. And yeah, this product process content we put optimization sort of tips and work and workflow stages in, in a lot of that as well.

[00:49:38] So that’s definitely worth checking out. We, I have one oversight, have one out of time, but thank you so much Julie. But for all the insight, that was great and thanks everyone for joining. Like I say, I will send a follow up email in a day or two including the recording and links to the resources that we have that we have covered.

[00:49:57] So yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. Apologies we didn’t get to your questions. But yeah, thanks very much and thanks Julie. 

[00:50:04] Julie Hammers: Yeah, thanks everybody. Have a good rest of your day. Bye now. Bye.