How to Turn Ideas into Marketable Concepts
Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you won’t know when you get there.” I have found creative projects often start as an idea. Everyone wants to share their input and build on an idea, but rarely does everyone agree on the expected final outcome unless there is an intentional effort to find mutual agreement. The lack of agreement makes it very difficult (if not impossible) to achieve the desired goal.
Over the last decade of my career, the operations, marketing, and customer experience projects I’ve worked on have consistently dove tailed into technology projects. These projects often have multiple stakeholders across many departments, each with their own agenda of the design and development of the project. I’ve learned the importance of collaboration to ensure everyone has buy in and alignment on the outcomes. Even then, check-ins and reminders are necessary along the way to be sure everyone stays engaged and that they are all forming the same mental picture of the outcomes.
Before we start framing the design on any tech projects, I first try to make sure there is agreement on what is to be built and to call out any conflicting ideas. This occurs using a variety of methods including requirements gathering, concept papers, and paper prototypes – usually large 2’ x 3’ Post-it Notes filled with drawings and smaller Post-it Notes indicating messaging, motion and functions. In COVID days, I resorted to using PowerPoint to capture ideas. These early prototypes aren’t intended to be the final design. But the visuals make it easier for decision making and allows turf battles to be fought before the project begins and vendors are hired for the design and build phase.
Knowing what you want technology to do before you engage a builder is critical to the success of a project. The larger the stakeholder pool the more important the concept and prototyping phases are to designing something that works. I like to bring in thoughts from a variety of internal and external stakeholders to be certain the use cases and objectives are fully considered.
One of my more interesting challenges was over a Call to Action (CTA) feature. The company had multiple functional areas and each wanted the main CTA to highlight their area. The objective of the project guided the concept in a way to provide clear priorities on the message, CTAs and the User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX). The concept documents helped us put the ideas onto Post-it Notes that could serve as our early prototype. We were then able to move pieces around and adjust as needed. But more importantly, the prototype helped us explain why the primary CTA was selected and how it would speak to the company’s primary customer segment.
When trying to create a new product or service in an organization with multiple stakeholders, there are three important steps.
1. Clarifying the overall objective
It is critical to clarify the overall objective to ensure the project has a clear direction for making decisions, filtering out options or conflicting opinions. For example, if your project is designed to drive donations, then ideas about including a map to the closest convenience store may be irrelevant, unnecessary, and a time waster. When objectives are clear, it makes it easier to eliminate ideas that don’t fit the objective.
2. Sketch out the ideas for group consideration
A picture is worth a thousand words. Once objectives are clear, sketch out what it will look like. People can more easily react to something tangible than a fuzzy intangible concept. Your sketch doesn’t need to be detailed, rather a high-level framework will be enough to give your teammates and stakeholders something tangible to critique. The feedback indicates whether an idea was captured correctly, if there are serious flaws in your thinking or if only minor tweaking is needed to move forward.
3. Socialize the Concept
Once the concept is complete, take it to the key stakeholders and listen to their reactions. Ask questions such as
What do you like?
What do you dislike?
What do you wish you had more of?
What do you want to change?
What will it work best for?
What concerns you about it?
What challenges do you foresee with this model?
Based on what you can see, will it work for your customer base?
What would require us to go back to the drawing board?
These types of questions will ferret out any underlying concerns or potential obstacles to moving forward.
By taking these three steps you will reduce much of the frustration and anxiety that keeps projects form making it off the ground floor.