Evaluating Your Ideas
Once you’ve generated 15 to 20 ideas for the same target opportunity, it’s time to start evaluating your ideas. First, start by asking for each, “Does this idea solve the target opportunity?” It’s okay if it’s only a partial solution, but you’ll be surprised to find several ideas that don’t solve your target opportunity at all. Don’t worry—this is a natural side effect of idea generation. But now is the time to weed them out.
Next, you’ll “dot-vote”43 as a team to whittle your set down from lots of ideas to three ideas. Dot voting is a simple method that facilitates group evaluation. Research shows that while we are better at generating ideas individually, we are better at evaluating ideas as a group.44 To dot-vote, allot three votes per member. As you vote, the only criteria you should be considering is how well the idea addresses the target opportunity. You aren’t voting for the coolest, shiniest ideas. Nor are you ruling out the hardest or even impossible ideas. We’ll deal with that down the road. Each person can assign their votes however they please. They can place all three votes on one idea or vote for three ideas individually. Once everyone has placed their votes, you’ll select the top three ideas that garnered the most votes.
It may take a few rounds of dot-voting to get to your top three. For example, if after round one of voting, several ideas have one or two votes, but no ideas have three or more votes, take some time to discuss your votes. Don’t let this turn into a long debate or argument. Instead, let each person pitch the ideas they voted for. During your pitch, be sure to highlight why each idea best addresses the target opportunity. Then vote again.
Coming out of any voting round, if there’s a clear winner, set it aside as one of your three to move forward with. Continue dot-voting until you have set aside three ideas. It’s important after you are done dot-voting to take a quick poll and make sure everyone on the team is excited about the set you are moving forward with. This doesn’t mean you have to have consensus on all three options. But everyone on the team should be excited about at least one idea, and each idea should have a strong advocate in the group. If that’s not the case, revisit your set of ideas, and dot-vote again.
Dot-voting is a great way to go from lots of ideas down to some ideas. Groups tend to evaluate ideas better than individuals because groups have a wider breadth of experience to draw on. However, we don’t want to dot-vote to select one idea. You’ll see in the coming chapters that we will use prototyping and assumption testing to whittle our set down from three to one. Our goal for now is to set up a good compare-and-contrast decision: Which of these three ideas best delivers on our target opportunity? You’ll learn how to answer that question with the next couple of habits.