Generating new ideas for a product or feature, particularly from scratch or in a vacuum, can be challenging. Some day I may create a more comprehensive guide for developing a product from a blank piece of paper, but when I am completely lost at sea trying to come up with a new idea, there are a few strategies that I fall back on to spark new ideas and create higher-quality products:
Always push for one more idea
One of my biggest takeaways from my capstone course at MIT (2.009, I highly recommend checking out the course material) was that a raw increase in ideas during brainstorming correlates with more creative final outcomes. Additionally, the order in which ideas were created during brainstorming does not correlate to the nominal rank of the ideas.
To me, this demonstrates the benefits of always pushing for one new idea during brainstorming– you never know if it might be an incredible idea that stands on its own, or one that branches to great ideas down the road. At the end of a long brainstorming session when you feel like you have a great portfolio of ideas in place already, there’s also something liberating in pursuing some of your craziest or “least-realistic” ideas in the pursuit of an out-of-the-box solution. Using a flamethrower to de-ice a windshield? Sure! Using a helicopter to 3D print a house? Why not?
If you are struggling to generate new ideas, a tool like a set of Design Heuristics cards can be a valuable ally for thinking about a problem in a new way.
Specific problems breed specific solutions
If you are trying to generate product ideas from a truly blank slate, or need to look at a problem in a new way, I find it very useful to think about very specific problems, or specific implementations of your product. I think it’s easier to generate solutions for more focussed problems rather than trying to tackle the prompt of “come up with a new product,” in part because it imposes specific and unique constraints and requirements on your solution. Something about the mental constraints can often generate a more fruitful and worthwhile creative space, even if it means you spend much more time researching and seeking a specific problem.
As a quick example for a ground-up product, if I was asked to create a product that helps farmers, I would likely be completely lost to start. However, if I was asked to create a product that helped mitigate fires from occurring in hay balers and spreading to tractors (causing a ton of expensive damage), I could come up with dozens of prospective solutions pretty quickly. In this instance, and in most, the increased work in identifying a specific problem pays for itself in the product quality on the back end.
When considering adding features to an existing product, or figuring out how to make it as robust as possible, it can be helpful to generate specific scenarios to test your product. How would we make it survive in 95% humidity at 115 degrees in the Florida summer? Would this product be tempting for someone at a local cafe in Paris? Could they understand the product without speaking English? Specific questions like this often warrant specific solutions that can then be generalized to more robust and broadly-applicable features.
Visualize your end products
This might not be for everyone, but I find a lot of value in doing a quick visualization of any idea to see if it sparks any adjacent ideas or highlights useful features within your idea. Visualizing the end product can mean any number of useful activities, which I will frame as a few example questions for now:
- How is the product stored and transported by the user?
- What does the product sound like? Are there inherent mechanical features in this design that generate sound?
- How big is the product?
- What does the product feel like? How is it held?
- If the product breaks, how would we fix it?
Running through these questions (and many, many more) mentally or on paper very quickly can not only spark new ideas, but also give some mental shape and improve the initial features of early prototypes and figuring out what to test. Of course, the end goal is to have a product that looks, feels, and operates as well as the iPod Classic (my gold standard of product design), and the best way to get there is to consider every facet of a product’s design– injecting that thought process early into brainstorming and sketching can pay huge dividends down the road.
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