Ideation is a wonderfully creative process that can help us to take leaps into solutions. When building products under ambiguous conditions, we don't know how customers will adopt our product, how to deliver the best experience, or even which problems are more important to solve. Ideas can help us to navigate ambiguity by throwing open possibilities that we couldn't see earlier. At the same time, ideas can distract us from our goals. Product managers must be able to take ideas in their stride and be able to differentiate between ideas that add value and those that sound important but create no value. However, this does not have to be an individual's judgment. This happens best when we collaborate with business functions and stakeholders to estimate the impact and ensure that we share the same definition of success. This chapter proposes a framework for evaluating the impact of ideas on Key Business Outcomes.
The framework...