Personally I’ve got ideas and notes in the margins of books, in the Notes app on my phone, scribbled in notebooks, as audio recordings, emails to myself, as Google docs, and the list goes on. I’ve started consolidating and stockpiling them here, as drafts in a folder for my blog which I then revisit daily. But the real question is: how do your professional self and your organization as a whole stockpile great ideas?
How do you record and revisit:
- When the team is working on a project and digresses into something that could make for an impactful project?
- When someone asks a question during a meeting that sparks a great idea, but the timing isn’t right?
- When you know that a feature or improvement isn’t in version 1.0, but might be appropriate for 1.4?
To dip your toe in the water, work with your team to build out a designated place/method for logging these ideas and set aside a time once a month to revisit them and decide where on your road map they will live. Maybe they are ready for a beta test right away, or they are moonshots that don’t have a place on the map yet. Ultimately, each one could still be important to the future version of your team and you can’t rely on remembering them when the time is right- you’ve got to plan for their eventual integration.