💡⏰ How we generate ideas on demand as a team

A founder asked recently how to get ideas when working as a team.

I loved one of the other suggestions: everyone must come up with the worst ideas possible (e.g. for a new feature) — and then within a team you have a selection of terrible ideas, that will often lead to greater clarity around what would make great ideas.

A couple things we've done that have been fun / led to some great ideas at GoSquared and with what we're doing on EcoSend:

Ca-pitch-ino (pitching + ☕️)

Every Friday morning we have a little coffee session where people have to pitch our product and someone plays the prospect / customer, someone else has to pitch and respond to their questions.

Often this leads to new ideas for how to talk about our proposition. It has led to marketing ideas galore.

Pitch as if you're someone else

Another approach one of our team brought was to describe our proposition but adopt the persona of a celebrity. E.g. "pitch your product but as if you're Steve Ballmer".

Hack day / hack hour

I've always found constraints have led to amazing creativity. I still want to find a way to make every day a hack day because every time we've done one we generate so many more ideas and build like crazy.

Converging or diverging

One other thing I found a long time ago that has stuck with me (maybe basic) but often we'd get a group of people together for "an ideas session" and it could quickly descend into chaos...

... and then I came across "divergent" vs "convergent" collaboration and how all the chaos happens when those two blur over.

So we have since always tried to keep it really clear:

• is the meeting to "get more ideas"? (no such thing as a bad idea, nothing can be shot down or dismissed)
• or is it a "let's pick an idea to take forward"? (more about prioritisation, goals, alignment, making a decision).

Hope this helps!