Quantity Leads to Quality

For many of us, brainstorming seems unnecessary. We hear about a customer problem or need, and our brain immediately jumps to a solution. It’s human nature. We are good at closing the loop—we hear about a problem, and our brain wants to solve it. However, creativity research tells us that our first idea is rarely our best idea. Researchers measure creativity using three primary criteria: fluency (the number of ideas we generate), flexibility (how diverse the ideas are), and originality (how novel an idea is).³⁵

Similar research shows that fluency is correlated with both flexibility and originality.³⁶ In other words, as we generate more ideas, the diversity and novelty of those ideas increases. Additionally, the most original ideas tend to be generated toward the end of the ideation session.³⁷ They weren’t the first ideas we came up with. So even though our brain is very good at generating fast solutions, we want to learn to keep the loop open longer. We want to learn to push beyond our first mediocre and obvious ideas, and delve into the realm of more diverse, original ideas.

Most product teams are inundated with too many ideas. We have endless backlogs, countless customer requests, and a never-ending roadmap. The problem, however, is that many of these ideas are first ideas to a variety of customer opportunities.

If we took the time to map each item in our backlog, each customer request, and each initiative on our roadmap to the opportunities on our opportunity solution tree (see Chapters 2 and 6), odds are we’ll have only one or two solutions for each opportunity. Even though we are inundated with ideas, we aren’t pushing past our first or second mediocre ideas to get to the realm of diverse and original ideas.

Now, not all opportunities need an innovative solution. You don’t need to reinvent the “forgot password” workflow (but you should still test it—more on that in Chapter 11). But for the strategic opportunities where you want to differentiate from your competitors, you’ll want to take the time to generate several ideas to ensure that you uncover the best ones.

Okay, so let’s get everyone in a room to brainstorm so that we can find those more diverse and original ideas, right? Not quite. We first need to discuss the challenges with brainstorming.