Coming up with a good idea is hard more often than not. For instance, I’ve been struggling for five minutes now with how I want this introductory paragraph to sound. But, while doing this is, perhaps, somewhat challenging at the moment, it’s no where near as hard as coming up with a good idea for a product.

The reason why is pretty simple. In general, a product will have many more concerns than something else that requires only (or mostly) creative thought. For instance, a painting has primarily aesthetic concerns. A piece of technical writing is (from a certain point of view) more complex. It needs to concern itself with both aesthetics (lexigraphic and syntactic) and functionality, as well as some other things. A product often has aesthetic, functional, business (economic), technology, manufacturing, marketing, supply chain, and competitive concerns, and many others. This isn’t to undermine the skill it takes to create a painting. In some cases a piece of art completely qualifies as a product (graphic design for instance). It’s just trying to show that a good product that will be successful is an inherently complex thing to come up with.

So, this is a problem that I’d like to try and figure out how to mitigate to some degree, because software can almost always be thought of as some type of product. No, it won’t always be sitting on a store shelf, but for it to be successful it will need to deal with the majority of the elements I listed, and some I didn’t. It’s a pretty simple concept, so I won’t bother spelling it out. The point is that coming up with a way to get to the good ideas early would be a really great thing. Less time wasted chasing ideas that go no where and more time focused on something productive.

So there needs to be an analytical method to evaluate if an idea for some software product (really any type of product, even a work of art or novel) is a good idea. This is a fairly challenging thing, actually. How can you know if something you come up with will be successful before you create it? Worse yet, something as complex as a product might have mostly good ideas and a couple bad ones and it won’t be successful. How do you identify these issues as early as possible and then correct them?

In general, it’s just a resource problem. If you had unlimited resources (including time) you’d just do every halfway decent idea that came to mind and see how it worked out. That certainly is an “analytical” method. Design it, build it, and see if they come. Of course this is completely unrealistic, even for huge corporations with tons of resources. It may be analytical, but it certainly isn’t optimized. So we need to do something much quicker and get to the gold as fast as possible without throwing out too much in the process. But none of this is really that hard though, if you think about it. It comes down to a couple primary points.

Come up with as many ideas as possible, even if most of them are crap.

First of all, the more ideas you come up, the better your chances are of coming up with one that’s good. That’s simple enough. Secondly, if you come up with lots of ideas, and get in the habit of doing so, then those ideas also feed each other. So it isn’t just a linear increase, but rather some sort of mild exponential ratio of good ideas to mediocre or bad ones.

Have a procedure for evaluating ideas as quickly as possible.

Over time I’ve come up with a pretty tight list of things to think about when doing a quick evaluation of an idea.

• A brief description of the idea
• What are any other offerings and how would this improve upon them
• Who the target audience is
• General types of technology involved
• Possible business models
• Long-term growth/development potential

Simple enough. The idea here isn’t to write pages and pages, just enough to encapsulate the thought. Then, I do some pros and cons, maybe 3-4 of each. If a number of these ideas are of the same type, then that makes it easier to compare them. Sticking to the same method each time, and then doing pros and cons helps take any emotion out of the decision.

Nothing I said here is groundbreaking by any means, but sometimes getting a little methodology going can go a long way. I’d like to hear what other people do to organize their thoughts and decide what ideas are worth persuing, or perhaps I’m somewhat alone in my analytical approach to everything.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 30th, 2006 at 10:38 pm and is filed under Philosophy and tagged with . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.