It goes without saying that having a system in place for collecting and evaluating recommendations for your strategic goals is a good idea. And gathering, analyzing, and prioritizing requests and feedback is what idea management is all about.
We are sure that you want to make it as simple as possible for individuals to contribute and share their ideas. The ‘management’ component entails selecting and ranking the most relevant ideas against your plan, so you can improve or build a new product. Your product roadmap will be informed by genuine customer expectations if you execute your ideas effectively. You may continually improve upon what you provide and delight customers if you have a structured procedure in place for doing so.
Fundamentals of an Ideal Idea Management Process
When you follow a structured concept management approach, you are able to make sense of the comments you receive from different contributors. It should contain crucial stages like frictionless data gathering, an objective assessment methodology, and a smooth transfer from concept to feature backlog. You should also make certain that an internal process for review and communication exists. Here are the fundamental components of a successful concept management process:
1. Organize your idea collection: Bring all of your thoughts together in one location. Many customers communicate their needs to the sales, support, and engineering departments. As a result, ideas are frequently dispersed among numerous spreadsheets, papers, and other applications. With a uniform system, customers can submit ideas directly or internal teams can submit them on behalf of the customers. Most idea management platforms also include a voting feature to minimize repetition.
2. Arrange ideas into categories: Organizing your ideas by subject allows you to rapidly identify opportunities for development in certain aspects of your product. It also aids in the detection of comparable areas of feedback that are repeated. If you’re using IdeasPro, you can easily get this information from users at the time of submission by asking them to share which aspect of your product the idea pertains to. This makes it simple to compile a list of similar ideas to consider at the same time.
3. Compare your results to your approach: Prioritize ideas that are clearly aligned with your overall strategy and will help you accomplish your objectives. This allows you to swiftly respond to each idea submission by saying yes or no.
4. Communicate directly: Once you’ve collected and analyzed incoming recommendations, you may need to ask clarifying questions to assure you’ve comprehended the request. After you’ve determined the priority and whether or not to include the idea in your roadmap, you should notify the person who made it with a concise explanation. This encourages individuals to contribute more ideas in the future by promoting openness.
Your team’s time is limited but your ideas are not. You must balance possibilities with a realistic expectation of what the team can accomplish. Determine which ideas will have the most impact using your strategic objectives and efforts as a guide.
Since evaluating ideation is comparable to assessing creativity in many aspects, the following best practices apply for the most part:
- Concentrate on a few critical indicators at a time
- Balance your input and output metrics
- Use metrics that can help you develop
- Recognize and analyze the lifespan of the concepts you’re evaluating
Since idea management is at the center of an organization’s innovation efforts, it has a significant impact on how well it can generate future outcomes.
The most important elements for success in idea management are the same ones that great innovators do right:
- Alignment with overall business strategies and innovation
- Support for ideation and creativity at all levels of the organization
- Involvement of senior management in innovation and idea management
- End-user insights inspire ideas and innovation
- Ability to test, learn from, and execute ideas based on rigorous project selection early in the idea management process
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IdeasPro for Salesforce
Although Salesforce is hailed as ‘THE’ platform to have on your tech stack since it’s not just a CRM but a full-blown ecosystem, its default Ideas Management feature, however, isn’t scalable enough. To fuel growth and drive business value, a robust and comprehensive ideation solution comes in handy. Grazitti’s IdeasPro for Salesforce helps you come up with fresh and original ideas. With IdeasPro, you can stay close to what your customers need, organize that information, and target your efforts accordingly. The main objective of IdeasPro is to use it as a high-level plan for organizing those ideas that ultimately contribute to your innovation strategy.
Want to take your idea management in Salesforce up a notch? Let’s talk.
To know more about IdeasPro, schedule a 1:1 demo with our Salesforce experts or just drop us a line at info@grazitti.com.
