Brainstorm Ideas

Product Ideation Expert

Overview

Structured product ideation for both new product creation and existing product enhancement. This skill combines the Product Trio approach (PM + Designer + Engineer perspectives) with Teresa Torres' Opportunity Solution Tree framework to generate, evaluate, and prioritize product ideas systematically.

Core Capabilities

• Product Trio ideation — generate ideas from PM, Designer, and Engineer perspectives (15+ per session)
• Opportunity Solution Trees — map desired outcomes → opportunities → solutions for existing products
• New-product lenses — core value, speed to validate, differentiation, market timing, scalability
• Weighted prioritization — score and rank the top 5 ideas across impact, alignment, feasibility, speed, differentiation
• Idea documentation — riskiest-assumption and validation plan per idea, ready for handoff
• Supplementary techniques — SCAMPER, How Might We, Crazy 8s, Worst Possible Idea

When to Use

• New Product Ideation -- Exploring greenfield opportunities where the focus is on core value delivery, speed to validate, and market differentiation.
• Existing Product Enhancement -- Identifying opportunities within a live product using the Opportunity Solution Tree to connect desired outcomes to concrete solutions.

Clarify First

Before ideating, confirm these inputs. If any is unknown or vague, ASK — do not assume:

• New vs existing product — selects the approach (new-product lenses vs Opportunity Solution Tree mapping)
• Target outcome or problem — the desired outcome the session is anchored to (ungrounded ideation produces random ideas, not prioritizable ones)
• Hard constraints — tech stack, timeline, budget limits (bound the feasibility and speed scores in prioritization)

Stop rule: ask only the 2-3 that most change the output. If the user says "just draft it," proceed and list your assumptions at the top of the artifact.

References

Load the reference that matches the task — keep this file lean and pull detail on demand:

• references/ideation-process.md — the full five-phase methodology (frame → trio → product-type approach → prioritize → document), output formats, supplementary techniques, troubleshooting table, success criteria, and further reading. Read when running a session end to end.
• references/ideation-frameworks.md — deep descriptions of the Product Trio methodology and each supplementary technique (SCAMPER, HMW, Crazy 8s, Worst Possible Idea). Read when you need technique detail or facilitation mechanics.
• references/red-flags.md — common ways ideation output goes wrong with bad/good examples. Read before publishing the idea list or moving to prioritization.

Integration with Other Discovery Skills

• After ideation, move top ideas to identify-assumptions/ to map and prioritize assumptions.
• Use brainstorm-experiments/ to design validation experiments for key assumptions.
• Run pre-mortem/ before committing to build, to surface hidden risks.

Scope & Limitations

In Scope: Structured ideation facilitation using Product Trio approach, Opportunity Solution Tree mapping, idea prioritization with weighted scoring, SCAMPER and HMW supplementary techniques, idea documentation with validation plans, integration with downstream discovery skills.

Out of Scope: Assumption testing and experiment design (hand off to brainstorm-experiments/ and identify-assumptions/), detailed product requirements (hand off to execution/create-prd/), market research and competitive analysis, financial modeling for ideas.

Limitations: Ideation quality is bounded by the diversity of perspectives in the room -- remote-only sessions may reduce creative energy. Scoring models provide structured comparison but are not objective truth; they encode the biases of the scorers. Opportunity Solution Trees require ongoing user research to populate -- they are not a substitute for customer interviews.

Integration Points