Process and creativity are sometimes rivals. Popular product ideation frameworks like Mind Mapping and storyboarding give product managers a predictable way to think through ideas systematically.
While these methods provide structure and clarity, sometimes they can also feel restrictive, stifling the same creativity they are meant to encourage.
How can you break through the gridlock to identify high-impact product ideas that will delight your customers?
In this blog post, we’ll introduce Archie, our AI-focused product architect that can help take your product ideation sessions to the next level.
If product ideation has been feeling like "product stagnation" lately, this post is for you.
Product ideation is the process of generating, developing and refining new ideas for products or features.
It’s a crucial early stage in the product development lifecycle that involves brainstorming, creativity and structured thinking. The goal of product ideation is to identify innovative solutions that address user needs, solve problems or create new opportunities in the market.
In other words, product ideation is where product owners identify where to improve the product to keep up with customer needs, and where they innovate solutions to get ahead of the competition.
Every product organization is a little different, and different product ideation frameworks structure the ideation process differently.
We can generally think of product ideation as taking place over five discrete steps.
Some of the most popular product ideation frameworks involve evaluating your research data and brainstorming with different perspectives.
Design Thinking is a user-centered approach to innovation. It involves five stages: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.
The process starts with understanding the user's needs and problems, defining those needs clearly, brainstorming potential solutions, creating prototypes of those solutions and testing them with real users.
This iterative approach ensures that the final product is both innovative and user-friendly.
SCAMPER is a creative brainstorming technique that stands for Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate and Reverse.
Each action verb represents a different way to think about modifying an existing product or idea. By systematically applying these prompts, teams can generate a wide range of innovative ideas and explore new possibilities.
Mind Mapping is a visual tool that helps organize thoughts and ideas around a central concept.
By branching out into related topics, subtopics, and details, teams can see the connections between different ideas more clearly. This method is particularly useful for exploring all facets of a problem or concept and uncovering new angles and insights.
The Six Thinking Hats method, developed by Edward de Bono, encourages parallel thinking by having team members adopt different perspectives symbolized by different colored hats: White (facts), Red (feelings), Black (caution), Yellow (optimism), Green (creativity) and Blue (process).
This structured approach helps teams consider a problem from multiple angles, leading to more well-rounded and innovative solutions.
We'd like to introduce you to Archie, our AI product architect.
Trained on multiple LLMs, each focused on different stages of the product lifecycle, Archie is designed to help you enhance creativity as you consider new ideas and product features.
Archie acts as a virtual team member, capable of transforming broad ideas into detailed product requirements, specifications and designs.
Archie includes a number of features to help you increase your creativity.
If you feel like your product ideation sessions have hit the wall lately, Archie can reignite the creative spark. Trained on an extensive corpus of product lifecycle data, Archie can help you uncover new ideas and collaborate better with your team.
We're excited about helping you achieve amazing results.
