Ideas from everyone who talks to customers

Product ideation challenges that reach beyond the product team

Product ideation works best when it draws on everyone who sees customers, not only the product team. With Brainstormer, a product lead opens a challenge, colleagues from sales, support and engineering submit ideas, and AI expands and scores each one against your product goals so the shortlist is ready for planning.

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Challenges with a focused question and a deadline
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Ideas from sales, support and engineering in one place
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Scoring against your product and company goals
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A shortlist and board report ready for roadmap planning

Why product ideation needs more than the product team

Product teams already have plenty of ideas. What they lack is a structured way to hear from the people who talk to customers every day: account managers who hear why deals stall, support agents who see the same confusion every week, engineers who know which quick fixes would remove a whole class of problems. That knowledge usually arrives as hallway comments and forwarded emails, and most of it is lost.

A focused challenge fixes that. Instead of an always open feature request board, the product lead asks one question for a set period, such as "What would make a customer in their third month use the product weekly?", and everyone in the workspace can answer.

The result is a set of ideas tied to one goal, from people with different views of the customer, which is far easier to act on than a long, mixed backlog.

Product ideation challenge questions that get specific answers
Goal	Weak question	Strong challenge question
Activation	How can we improve onboarding?	How could we cut customer onboarding time in half?
Retention	Any ideas to reduce churn?	What would make a customer in their third month use the product weekly?
Expansion	How can we grow accounts?	What would make a team of five invite the rest of their department?
Support load	How do we reduce tickets?	Which of our ten most common tickets could the product prevent?

Running a product ideation challenge

Write the question around one outcome, add a short description with context, and set a deadline, usually one to three weeks. AI starter ideas give the challenge a few examples so the first contributor is not facing an empty page. Members submit ideas and vote on each other's.

Each submission is expanded by AI into problem, solution, first step and success measure. A support agent's one line idea, such as "show setup progress on the dashboard", becomes something a product manager can evaluate without a follow up meeting. Duplicates are merged with authors and votes kept, and ideas are grouped into themes.

For facilitated sessions on top of the challenge, the design sprint tool and design thinking workshop pages describe formats that pair well with it.

Scoring ideas against product goals

The workspace has 3 to 6 strategic goals with weights, for example grow expansion revenue, reduce time to first value and cut support contacts. Every idea is scored on impact, cost, risk and strategic fit from 1 to 10, with a written rationale and a weighted total based on those goals.

That gives the product lead a ranked list that reflects strategy, with votes shown alongside so you can see where colleagues and scores agree or diverge. The reasoning is written out, so when an idea from sales ranks low, the author can see why. More on the scoring model is on the idea prioritization page.

For a hard strategic question, the AI workshop lets six perspectives (Optimist, Skeptic, Customer, Engineer, Marketer, Visionary) attack it at once, and the output can be sent into the challenge as ideas.

From shortlist to roadmap

Shortlisted ideas move through approved, in progress and implemented, with each change recorded. The board report for the challenge gives the ranking, themes, stage counts and a recommendation, and exports to PDF, Markdown or CSV, ready to bring into roadmap planning.

Product teams often start on the Team plan, with up to 25 members and 3 open challenges, and move to Business when they want company wide challenges with up to 150 members and weighted goals. Our page for product teams covers the wider setup.

Try the demo with one challenge on the homepage, read how it works, or see pricing and start your workspace.

Questions

What is product ideation?

Product ideation is the stage where a product team generates and develops ideas for new features or improvements. Brainstormer runs it as challenges open to the whole company, then scores and tracks the ideas to a decision.

Is this a feature request board?

No. Challenges are focused questions with a deadline, answered by people inside your company. Ideas are expanded, scored against your goals and moved through a decision pipeline.

How do you turn jobs to be done into product ideas?

Write the customer's job as an outcome, then open a challenge that asks how to help them make that progress faster or with less effort. Let ideas range wider than the current product, merge duplicates, group them by the part of the job they serve, and score them with the job's outcome as one of your weighted goals.

Can people outside the product team take part?

Yes. Anyone invited to the workspace as a member can submit ideas and vote, within your plan limit of 25, 150 or 1,000 members.

How many challenges can we run at once?

Team allows 3 open challenges at a time. Business and Enterprise allow unlimited challenges.