Product Managers Guide to Community-Driven Ideatio
Powerful idea generation is one of the key benefits a branded online community can offer. Users who specialize in your product are always brainstorming to ensure it matches their use case and makes them successful.
However, managing the product ideation process can be complex when thousands of users and prospects bombard the product management team with new requirements, suggestions, and feedback.
The key factor is actually selecting the best ideas—and without a blueprint of the process, it can be highly challenging.
What Is Product Ideation?
Ideation is the process of collecting notions, feedback, usage-level knowledge, and suggestions to generate new ideas. It helps with both improving existing features and developing completely new ones.
Key benefits of product ideation:- Build better products and services with improved ideas- Improve existing features based on real user input- Make customers part of the product journey and improve engagement- Boost customer loyalty by acting on Voice of Customer
Build an Ideation Hub
Cross-functional collaboration is essential. Work with the community manager to ensure the ideation space is easy to discover and guidelines are clearly stated so members post ideas in the designated section.
Sometimes ideas get mixed with other topics and posted in different sections. The community manager must ensure the right content gets crossposted to the ideation area.
What you need:- Notification with a link whenever a new idea gets posted- Functionality to engage with members for further discussion- Tracker to showcase progress
Companies like Skyscanner have dedicated sections specifically for idea accumulation. Other communities opt for building specific groups (public or private) to centralize ideas—saving time otherwise spent scouring through different discussions.
Allocate the Internal Team
Assign the right resources and invest the right amount of time to ensure value is realized. Consider community size, current engagement level, and volume of suggestions when assigning team members.
The key is finding the right balance between available resources and the number of valid ideas you can source.
Also, empower community members and leverage crowd intelligence to weed out ideas that don't match. Based on likes, upvotes, and engagement, your team can easily pick ideas with valid prospect of making it to the actual product and brainstorm further to include in the roadmap.
Reward High-Quality Ideas
Once you find an idea that would improve the product, ensure it gets enough visibility in the community. This validates the idea with community members and gets suggestions on further improvement or different approaches.
Gamification for Ideation
A community platform with powerful gamification tools helps product managers engage the community with ideation. Gamification applies game mechanisms (rules and procedures that guide players) in a non-gaming setup.
Popular ways to promote ideation:
Leaderboard
Leaderboards showcase the best ideas and members with the best community contribution by scoring their activity and ideas.- Showcases best ideas at the top of the ideation section- Inspires other members to start competitively contributing
Badges
Badges award members who contribute high-quality ideas. It helps them showcase their reputation in the community and boosts morale to continue the good work. Examples: "Idea Master" and "Idea Mogul."
Virtual Coins
This plays into incentivization of member action. Reward members with virtual coins when their idea gets picked up or receives a specific number of upvotes from peers. These points can be redeemed for service, products, or shopping vouchers.
Lead the Discussion
Product managers must be ready to jump into action whenever they see a promising idea that needs further inputs from the company side to streamline the discussion.
When to Get Involved
When product managers initiate discussions and ask pointed questions, they put forth their own notions. This is useful when the problem is already known and you want to collect ideas only around a specific issue.
Start the conversation with a flexible question and describe the framework you're following so members understand what you're trying to achieve and your goals.
When Not to Get Involved
This approach works when you're exploring new ideas and want to give members free rein for out-of-the-box thinking. It allows members to explore new areas and use cases your team wouldn't have originally thought of.
Allowing your community to lead the discussion invokes candidness and honest sharing of thoughts. These discussions can be exported into your analytics engine to perform text analytics and generate insights.
Push the Best Ideas into the Pipeline
The final step is shipping features by working with engineers—this involves profound communication skills. You know which ideas would truly improve the product, but how do you ensure it's actually feasible in terms of ROI and Time to Market?
Consider the lifecycle of the feature and what type of ongoing maintenance and future improvement it would require.
Some inputs come from engineering, others require your research and inputs from customer-facing teams. Some promising ideas might get rejected—however, this allows your team to brainstorm more, learn limitations, and explore possibilities.
Measure Success
It's super important to measure the impact of the ideation community to justify the investment.
Important metrics to track:- Number of new features that originated from community and went to live product- Number of improvements to existing features- Number of bugs or issues fixed- Time to market (TTM) for features
Then measure how these new features improved customer engagement, retention, and lifetime value.
Case Study: Skyscanner
Skyscanner runs a specialized insights community of super users that gathers ideas, tips, tricks, feedback, and bug reports. The idea and feedback section asks members to share ideas to improve the mobile app, report what they don't like, and request new features.
They've effectively increased the number of ideas shared in the ideation space and engaged members by empowering them to vote on ideas.
It also helps Skyscanner get the community involved by showcasing prototypes for testing before moving to development.
Different flairs can be transparently added to ideas to show status: acceptance, rejection, development, and production-readiness.
Best Practices Summary
1. Create a dedicated ideation space. Make it easy to find and clearly explain guidelines.
2. Assign resources. Balance available team members with the volume of ideas you can realistically process.
3. Leverage the crowd. Use voting and engagement to surface the best ideas naturally.
4. Reward quality. Gamification encourages more and better idea submission.
5. Know when to lead (and when not to). Direct conversations when you have specific problems; let conversations flow freely when exploring new territory.
6. Be transparent about status. Show members what happens to their ideas with clear status indicators.
7. Measure and communicate impact. Track how many ideas become features and share successes with the community.
Conclusion
It takes only one robust idea to create a winner, and discovering these gems is very hard. There's no tried-and-tested way to generate powerful ideas. However, the most involved people—users who actually have skin in the game—are the ones with the largest incentive to improve the product.
An online community backed by a solid ideation process leverages crowd wisdom and increases the probability of harvesting winning ideas.
Community platforms designed for B2B SaaS—like Bettermode—provide ideation-specific features: idea submission, voting, status tracking, gamification, and integration with product management tools.
Ready to harness community-driven ideation? Book a demo with Bettermode.
FAQs
How do we prevent being overwhelmed by ideas?
Use community voting to surface the best ideas. Establish clear criteria for what makes a good idea. Create submission guidelines that help members provide context. Let the crowd do initial filtering through engagement signals.
Should our ideation community be public or private?
It depends. Public ideation invites broader input and demonstrates transparency. Private ideation works well for beta programs or when discussing competitive features. Many companies use both—public for general feedback, private for sensitive development discussions.
How do we handle rejected ideas?
Be transparent. Explain why ideas don't fit current priorities or constraints. Thank members for contributing. Sometimes ideas are "not now" rather than "never"—track them for future consideration. Rejection handled well maintains trust and encourages future participation.
How do we balance community ideas with our product roadmap?
Community ideation should inform, not dictate, your roadmap. Use community input as one data source alongside analytics, business goals, and strategic priorities. Be clear with members that not all ideas will be implemented—but their input shapes the product over time.
