Catalog
method#Product#Delivery#Governance

Ideation

Structured process for systematically generating and evaluating ideas in early phases.

Ideation is a structured method for generating, expanding, and evaluating ideas during early product discovery or problem-definition phases.
Established
Medium

Classification

  • Medium
  • Business
  • Design
  • Intermediate

Technical context

User research artifacts and personasRoadmapping and backlog toolsPrototyping and testing tools (e.g., Figma, InVision)

Principles & goals

Diverge first, converge later.Quantity breeds quality: many ideas before quick evaluation.Diversity of perspectives increases innovation value.
Discovery
Team, Domain

Use cases & scenarios

Compromises

  • Confirmation bias when selecting only familiar solutions.
  • Dominance by individuals can stifle diversity.
  • Lack of follow-up leads to lost insights.
  • Strictly separate divergent and convergent phases.
  • Use varied techniques to engage different thinking styles.
  • Document ideas and decisions for traceable later validation.

I/O & resources

  • Narrowed problem definition or challenge
  • Relevant user data or research findings
  • Interdisciplinary participant group and facilitation materials
  • Prioritized idea list with evaluation criteria
  • Quick prototypes or experiment plans
  • Documented assumptions and hypotheses to test

Description

Ideation is a structured method for generating, expanding, and evaluating ideas during early product discovery or problem-definition phases. It combines divergent creativity techniques with later convergence to select viable concepts. Ideation helps teams create variety, test assumptions, and produce prioritized solution candidates.

✔

  • Increases solution variety and team creativity.
  • Early validation of assumptions via quickly prioritized concepts.
  • Promotes team alignment and shared problem understanding.

✖

  • Requires facilitation; without it outputs may be unstructured.
  • Can remain superficial under tight time constraints.
  • Not every idea is market- or technically relevant without further research.

  • Number of generated ideas

    Count of entries produced during a session.

  • Idea conversion rate

    Percentage of ideas that become prototypes or experiments.

  • Time to validation

    Average time from idea generation to first validation.

Ideation workshop for payment feature

Cross-functional team generated 80+ ideas, filtered by feasibility and selected three concepts for validation.

Process ideas in support team

Support team used ideation to improve ticket handover; outcome was a new triage template and 30% faster initial response.

Remote ideation for marketing campaign

Distributed marketing team collected ideas asynchronously, consolidated live and developed two campaign prototypes.

1

Preparation: define goal, invite participants, provide materials.

2

Divergence: run several short exercises to produce ideas.

3

Clustering and convergence: group similar ideas and evaluate.

4

Selection: prioritize by criteria and choose candidates.

5

Follow-up: plan prototypes, formulate hypotheses, assign owners.

⚠️ Technical debt & bottlenecks

  • Unstructured documentation impedes later reproducibility.
  • Lack of integration into product backlog leads to idea loss.
  • No defined metrics for tracking and measuring success.
lack of psychological safetylimited participant diversitytight time budget
  • Using ideation as a brainstorming show without outcome ownership.
  • Only leaders decide on ideas without team input.
  • Uncritical adoption of ideas without user validation.
  • Confusing quantity with quality.
  • Unclear criteria lead to inconsistent selection.
  • Method blindness: always using the same techniques without variation.
Method competence in creativity techniquesModeration and workshop facilitationExperience in evaluating and prioritizing ideas
Diversity of participant rolesTime constraints and timeboxingFacilitation and methods competence
  • • Availability of relevant stakeholders
  • • Technical feasibility constraints
  • • Organizational decision-making bandwidth