Getting Unstuck
When generating ideas on your own, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll get stuck. Generating ideas is hard work and takes effort. The first thing to recognize when you get stuck is that it happens to everyone. You aren’t bad at generating ideas. You are creative.
Many of us have self-limiting beliefs around creativity. We believe because we can’t draw, paint, or play a musical instrument, we must not be creative. I’m here to tell you, you are. Creativity is a universal human trait. And as a product-team member, there is no one better than you to generate creative solutions to your customers’ problems. If it’s been a while since you’ve generated ideas, it might be slow to start. That’s normal. Push through the discomfort and keep thinking. The following tips will help.
First, don’t try to spend an hour generating ideas. Take frequent breaks. Spread it out throughout your day. Try to generate ideas in the few minutes you have between meetings. After lunch, go for a walk, and daydream about what you might build. A change of scenery can often inspire new ideas. Try generating ideas at different times of the day. Some of us will be better first thing in the morning, when we have a lot of mental energy; others might find the late afternoon to be the optimal idea-generation time. Experiment. Find what works best for you.
In addition to ideating at different times and in different places, take advantage of incubation.42 Incubation occurs when your brain continues to consider a problem even after you’ve stopped consciously thinking about it. You’ve probably experienced this often in your life. After working on what seems like an unsolvable challenge all day, you finally go home and take a break. After a good night’s sleep, you come to work, returning to the problem. Instantly, you identify a solution. In fact, it’s hard to imagine why it seemed like such a hard problem yesterday. That’s incubation. And it works. Incubation can be particularly helpful after hearing other people’s ideas. You may not think of new ideas right away, but odds are, your brain is still working on it in the background. So, if you get stuck, sleep on it. Tomorrow will likely bring fresh ideas.
Another common way of getting unstuck is to look to analogous products for inspiration. For many product teams, this means competitive research. You should draw inspiration from your competitors, but look broader than that. Many innovative ideas come from unrelated domains. For example, Velcro was invented after the inventor found a cocklebur in his sock. He was intrigued by how the latching mechanism worked, and it inspired the design of Velcro.
When you get stuck, start with your competition. But then look wider. Ask yourself: What other industries have solved similar problems? They don’t need to be similar or even be in an adjacent industry. You are looking for similarities in the target opportunity. For example, if you work for a job board and you are helping recruiters evaluate job candidates, you can look at other job boards, but you can also look at how online shopping sites help shoppers evaluate products, you can look at how travel aggregators help travelers choose hotels, and you can look at how insurance companies present different policies. These industries are unrelated to each other, but they are each solving analogous problems.
Additionally, when you are stuck, you can start to consider what your extreme users might need. What would a power user want? What does the first-time user need? What about people with different disabilities? How about people who live in remote locations or bustling cities? Young people? Senior citizens? Your extreme users will vary by product, but thinking about the needs of different types of users as they relate to your target opportunity can help you generate more ideas that may work for everyone.
And finally, don’t be afraid to consider wild ideas. Some people don’t like this suggestion, because wild ideas are rarely pursued. But wild ideas can improve more feasible ideas. This is where the power of mixing and matching different solutions to identify even-better ideas comes into play. So, when ideating, pretend you have a magic wand—anything is possible.