Ideation Practices

Visioning

Visioning involves imagining and describing the desired state or outcome in vivid detail, providing a sense of direction and purpose.
Visioning is a powerful tool for setting goals, aligning efforts, and inspiring people to work together towards a shared aspiration, or North Star.
The outcome of this practice is a concise description known as a vision statement.

It is difficult and challenging for most people to quickly grasp the concept and the objective without involving them in an explanatory dialogue. A vision statement acts as a North Star, for anyone involved in the Ideation phase and beyond as to what the future should look like when the idea is successfully realised.
This North Star acts as a focal point of a common goal the team can believe in and align their work to.

Brainstorming is a creative and collaborative exercise used to generate a large number of ideas for a specific problem or topic. It typically involves a group of people coming together to share their thoughts and suggestions in a free-flowing and non-judgmental manner. The goal of brainstorming is to foster creativity, encourage innovative thinking, and explore various possibilities without any constraints or criticism.
Brainstorming can take various forms, including in-person group sessions, virtual meetings, or even individual sessions where individuals jot down ideas on their own before sharing them with others.
Here are 7 simple rules to help you excel in this practice:
Be visual ; Go for quantity over quality ; Defer judgment ; Encourage wild ideas ; Stay focused on the topic ; Build on the ideas of others ; One conversation at a time

Brainstorming as a collaborative exercise encourages diverse thinking, generating new interpretations, approaches or even new idea candidates relating to the focused topic. This practice delivers optimal results with cross functional and diverse participants.

This practice sits at the very core of modern ways of working. Define value incorrectly, and all subsequent work delivered will not optimise valuable outcomes. What is perceived as valuable often does not transpire to be true.
Value can be highly subjective. This is because it is inherently highly subjective, reflecting the functional, emotional and social needs of end users, and the current objectives of a directorate or business sponsor.
For example for one user profile the most valuable feature on their smart phone may be access to social media, while for another group digital payment wallets and banking maybe their most valuable feature.
Value can be highly transient - What is valuable changes over time, reflecting the changing circumstances and jobs to be done of end users and the environment that they interact with.
For example a business sponsor’s key focus for the current quarter is reducing operational costs by increasing greater automation efficiencies in running a service. The next quarter the most valuable objective may have changed to improved end user satisfaction through higher first time self service resolutions to simple requests via digital channel.
The key types of value to be considered are: financial, reputation, user satisfaction, growth and operational integrity.

Increasing confidence and articulation of where value lies, increases the likelihood of delivering timely valuable outcomes that solve genuine user needs and demonstrably contributes to one or more organisation objectives
Defined value is the foundation to enabling product managers to undertake meaningful prioritisation of backlogs