Evaluation Criteria
What are evaluation criteria?
Evaluation criteria are the specific standards or measures that a product team uses to assess and decide which ideas, solutions, or features are worth pursuing. These criteria should be clearly defined upfront, tied to business impact or desired outcomes, communicated transparently to everyone participating in idea generation, and applied consistently when providing feedback on ideas.
Having clear evaluation criteria enables broader participation in the ideation process, creates procedural justice, and helps teams avoid making ad-hoc or intuitive judgments.
Why should teams define evaluation criteria upfront?
When you open idea generation to your whole team or company, people need to understand how their ideas will be judged. Defining evaluation criteria before ideas are generated—rather than making intuitive judgments in the moment—creates consistency and transparency.
Clear criteria let people self-filter whether their ideas align with what matters to the business. They also create procedural justice: everyone understands the rules of the game, and those rules don't change mid-process. This keeps people motivated to contribute ideas because they trust the evaluation process is fair.
How do teams use evaluation criteria to give feedback on ideas?
Evaluation criteria give you a framework for responding to every idea consistently. When someone suggests something vague or unclear, you can ask for concrete examples tied to your criteria. When an idea seems irrelevant, you can bring the conversation back to your criteria: How does this help us achieve our key outcomes? Does it impact the metrics we're trying to move?
For example, if your criteria focus on business impact, you might ask: Does this idea drive applies? Does it improve conversion rates? This framing helps turn feedback conversations into productive explorations of business value rather than subjective reactions.
Learn more:
- You Aren't The Only One Who Can Have Innovative Ideas
- Reward Ideas With Good Feedback
- Improve These 8 Decisions and Build Great Products Faster
Related terms: