#1 New ideas can come from anywhere
Many Product teams are allergic to ideas that don't come from within the team.
I hear this from various companies... including many frustrated leaders and founders.
It's almost as if we've been trained to automatically ditch all ideas that come from top leadership and other disciples - by default:
"New idea from the CEO? That's so top-down, man... probably not a good idea anyway."
"Sales came up with this idea... Are we sales-driven, now? We can look into it next year..."
I understand that specific requests can be painful. For various reasons:
1️⃣ The way they're often communicated in many orgs (e.g. "Can we just build this...?")
2️⃣ The amount of "Can we justs..." that you have to deal with every month
3️⃣ The percentage of actual good ideas from all the "Can we justs" that you've received in the past
4️⃣ The fact that "just" is never just "just". It's way more complicated...
👉 But the job of a product team is not to ditch ideas, by default.
Regardless of how specific they are (solve this problem <-> build this orange button in the top left corner).
Yes, saying "no" is an incredibly important skill.
Extremely valuable...
Especially in weak product organizations with inexistent product leadership.
But the most difficult part is not uttering the word "no".
It's to have a solid argument - rooted in evidence and logical reasoning - supporting why you're not doing it. And what you're doing instead.
💡 Our job is to understand the intention behind each "idea". The problem that it would solve. The outcome it would achieve. Find out which of these ideas (the ones you decided to look into) is more likely to drive customer and business #value - and then make it happen if they're proven to be, indeed, great.
✅ Being a great listener and remaining open-minded is crucial.
Not just because it creates trust.
But because great ideas can come literally from anywhere.
Even when they come in "just" formats, counterintuitively.
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