Chapter 3. Identify the Solution and its Impact on Key Business Outcomes

Ideation is a wonderfully creative process that can help us to take leaps into solutions. When building products under ambiguous conditions, we don't know how customers will adopt our product, how to deliver the best experience, or even which problems are more important to solve. Ideas can help us to navigate ambiguity by throwing open possibilities that we couldn't see earlier. At the same time, ideas can distract us from our goals. Product managers must be able to take ideas in their stride and be able to differentiate between ideas that add value and those that sound important but create no value. However, this does not have to be an inidual's judgment. This happens best when we collaborate with business functions and stakeholders to estimate the impact and ensure that we share the same definition of success. This chapter proposes a framework for evaluating the impact of ideas on Key Business Outcomes.

The framework will ensure that we carry over only the most impactful feature ideas into the product backlog. Our backlog can then be lean, and we can focus all our resources on delivering the most value both to the customer and to the business.

In this regard, this chapter addresses the following points, describing how to do these:

• Finding the right problem to solve
• Creating an end-to-end view of the user and business (product/service) interaction
• Identifying feature ideas
• Estimating impact on Key Business Outcomes and derive value scores
• Prioritizing feature ideas based on value scores