Ideation
What is ideation?
Ideation is the process of generating solution ideas to address customer needs and opportunities. Rather than stopping at one or two ideas, effective ideation pushes teams to generate many solution options—ten or more—for a target opportunity, creating a broader set of possibilities to evaluate and test.
Ideation works best when it's focused on a specific target opportunity rather than generating solutions for multiple opportunities simultaneously. When teams generate solutions broadly across multiple opportunities, they end up with a list of unlike things that are hard to prioritize.
Who should participate in ideation?
Engineers should be active participants in the ideation process, not just recipients or judges of the outputs. They bring valuable knowledge about what's technically feasible and can help translate ambitious ideas into practical solutions that could exist today.
The best solutions come from combining understanding of technology possibilities with understanding of customer needs. This means engineers need to participate in discovery to build depth of knowledge about customer context—product managers and designers bring customer context too, but everyone needs to see, hear, and feel firsthand the customers' experience.
How does ideation work in continuous discovery?
Rather than settling on one preferred solution, teams generate many options (ten or more) and then experiment with several (two or three) simultaneously to get a better read on which ideas seem most promising. This approach helps teams:
- Be clearer about their assumptions
- Understand what behavior they need to see to validate solutions
- Make better compare and contrast decisions about which ideas to pursue
Learn more:
- Stop Brainstorming and Generate Better Ideas
- How Compare and Contrast Decisions Lead to Better Product Outcomes
Related terms:
- Brainstorming
- Ideating
- Ideas
- Solutions
- Opportunity
- Compare and Contrast Decisions
Last Updated: October 25, 2025