Sharing ideas

Sharing ideas - row of adults sat on chairs viewing and sharing content on various technology

In Emergn’s VFQ Product Manager Pathway, it describes four objectives in bringing your ideas to life:

  • Explore the concept of an idea pipeline and the overarching principles to manage the flow of ideas to market.
  • Understand your role at each stage of the idea pipeline in delivering valuable products to market in the best possible shape.
  • Develop a prioritized backlog of work for managing risk and value throughout development.
  • Enable an environment for effective collaboration that is driven by feedback from inside and outside the team.

These are all necessary parts to making ideas come alive. But before all this happens there is a human side to how this formulates and a strategy around timing and approach that might be helpful as we think through our idea and begin to consider making it more widely known.

Before the work starts, let’s consider that ideas typically go through three stages:

  1. Rejection – this is where others tell you that we’ve tried it before and it didn’t work
  2. Toleration – often the result of either someone playing the management card or the team doesn’t have a better idea in mind at the moment so everyone comes along
  3. Acceptance – buy-in and support and an attitude of ‘let’s do it’

Consider

While it’s not completely accurate to say that every idea will follow this path, it is worth noting that how you capture (method, research, feedback) your idea can determine which stage you start at.