Quantity>Quality: a case for broadening your ideas and do not obsess with one

Ideas generation is one of the most recurring topics when working with product development: how do you best facilitate ideation, how do you create the right environment for ideas to bloom, how many should you consider, how many (or few) do you choose, when do you decide to stop pursuing them, when is it worth continuing to invest in them. These and many other questions about ideas spin in my head every time I think about what is needed to go deeper into a problem or to find the next one worth solving.

I already wrote on how I think one should choose ideas based on product strategy and competencies, but another really interesting topic about ideas is: how do you get to the best ones? How do you find that innovation sparkle or that tweak in the feature that will lift it from ”nice” to wow?

One million dollar question. My own opinion about how to get to the best product idea has shifted over time. If at the beginning of my career I thought that the goal of a PM was to try to get as much information as possible to try to narrow the scope of the execution to a few hypotheses to pursue as possible. Today I believe that having a broad spectrum of ideas is fundamental to get to the right one.

To clarify, I am not talking about moving in scattered directions, I am talking about maximizing ideas that align to a strategy and are pointed towards moving a certain objective/KPI. One really clear direction defined by a strategy, one objective to focus on at the time but as-many-as-you-can-possibly-think-of ideas to get there. Yes, I am advocating for a BIG quantity of tests and ideas. It sounds counterintuitive when it comes to execution, but I think that it is the way to go. And here is why.

If you stop and think for a moment, product development works kind of similar to a lab. You want to test ideas, you want to find the solution to a certain problem and you want to get to the perfect experiments that not only fulfill your customer’s needs but delight them. Exactly as in science, it is quite rare that the first thing that you test will be the one that succeeds. That is why you want to maximize the hypothesis that you make and test as many as you can in order to increase your possibility of success.

It is not quantity over quality, but quantity will bring you to quality.

And here is the trick, quantity and quality are not mutually exclusive, and thinking about them as a dichotomy, could lead to really poor choices in product development. Forget the general idea that if you want to do better work, you have to focus, pick carefully what you put your hands on, and give it all your attention and love.

Focus is fundamental to select which problems to pick and it becomes important again when you need to materialize one idea and bring it to market. But in the central part of identifying which idea solves the problem best, you need to embrace quantity.

Pic by Ottaiano Pasquale/Getty Images

I really think that is important for product people to not obsess over one idea, but instead try to test out as many as possible, as quickly as possible, to maximize the chances to put our capacity, attention, and focus on the right one. This approach comes with both a mindset-shift and a baked-in challenge.

THE MINDSET SHIFT

To make it work, you and your team need to be on the same page about quantity as a means to quality, because this means that your focus, in the first step of the development of any product or feature, should be on maximizing tests and learnings. It is not about building perfect things, but about failing fast. This means spending a lot of time visualizing the different opportunities to pursue and feed them with data and industry knowledge, customer interviews, and internal feedback. About focusing on creating quick prototypes or AB tests.

What you are optimizing for is the chance of choosing the best idea amongst the many that you came up with as a solution to a certain problem.

It is about speed, making it quick and dirty, accepting that you have to cut some corners before knowing if you want to invest in a solution, and not all product teams are comfortable with this mindset. But if there is one thing worth investing in, is to get the team to that mindset, because if you get there, you will have maximized your chances of finding a good idea.

THE CHALLENGE

How do you make sure that you generate the most amount of ideas and that you do not stop at the first ones because of creativity fatigue? And how do you make sure that when your great feature/product is out you spend some more time further iterating on it?

It is human to ”want to get it done” and move the next shiny new thing, we all have experienced that fatigue connected to working with a problem for a long time, you just want to put a tick on the list and get on with your life. But recognizing that quantity is what you need, can give everyone who works with that product awareness in this phenomenon, and that can lead to concrete steps on how to avoid it.

Here are a couple of practical ideas that have helped me while focusing on quantity:

Do not expect all the ideas to come in a defined and set moment (hello 2h ideation workshop).

The brain simply doesn’t work like that. The remote setting is perfect for this, use synchronous and asynchronous meetings with time In between so that people can think

Be persistent in the creative process.

I recently read this article that makes the point that our best ideas are often our last. This is because we assume that the decline in productivity during an ideation moment (the longer the meeting is, the fewer ideas are generated) directly correlates to a decline in creativity. But this is not true. And this misconception can lead us to stop brainstorming too early before we even reach the best ideas. My tip is: create an ”idea dump” space in Miro/slide/any tool of your choice and let people fill in ideas there whenever they have them. Force this ideation moment into some of your routines even (after standup/at retro/before grooming.. everyone writes at least X new ideas to solve this problem) to make it a team habit

Never stop at the first iteration.

This could be controversial but if you are working on something it means that that specific thing was the most important for your company/team when you started. Unless macro factors change or you really run into the wrong hypothesis, why do you want to quickly go over it and do not continue to invest in your best bet? Make sure that you dare to take fewer bets and dare to spend more time investigating them. I believe that if you ask any of the PMs I work with, they will tell you that I sound like a broken record on this matter as I always say: are you sure you want to take so much into the backlog? Dare to pick ONE thing.

And it is because the core of what I believe is good product development is setting a clear direction, putting the focus on a bet, and then spend the time you need to make it great for your customers.

Unless the bet was wrong at the beginning (which can happen) why shouldn’t you? Focus and quantity should be your North Stars.