Every product you see sprouts from an idea that is fully developed and realized by the team. By continuously innovating, you can have market leadership which requires more ideas. However, the process doesn’t stop at generating ideas because you need to be strategic and implement those ideas to bring them to fruition. And idea management is the solidification of that strategic approach.
Idea management is defined as the process of capturing, evaluating, and prioritizing feedback. To define each word of the term, the “idea” part is about generating them from various sources. Meanwhile, the “management” part is where sorting and prioritizing ideas based on your strategy comes in.
You’ll know that your idea management is successful if it ensures that your product roadmap is made from customer needs. By having a formal process, you can keep improving your deliverables and customer satisfaction.
What is the Importance of Idea Management?
It’s common for someone to think they have the next groundbreaking idea, but not everyone knows what happens next. Those ideas won’t come to fruition if they’re unorganized and scattered across notes, emails, and spreadsheets. But with idea management, you can keep track of what your customers want in an organized manner.
It’s just as important for your production team to identify those innovation opportunities from your customers. This can be done by making it easy to receive feedback from clients. You can also empower your internal teams and encourage them to share their ideas from a customer’s perspective. What are the themes that support your product strategy and business goal? After gathering those ideas, promote the best ones for your marketing roadmap.
What Are the Essential Elements of the Best Idea Management Software?
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Ideally, the software or tool should have the two features mentioned below. That way, it will fit in the innovation cycle of your company, regardless of the differing processes.
- The UI Should be Simple and User-Friendly
This part is almost self-explanatory but let’s elaborate on it a bit. Idea management involves documentation and preferably, you’d use your time to get that done than studying the tool.
Having complicated software would do more harm than good for your team because they’ll spend more time figuring things out. That can consume too much time and hamper their schedule, pushing their deliverables back. Hence, the best idea management software is a user-friendly yet efficient tool.
- The Idea Management System is Analytics-Driven
Sometimes, you get ideas that are ahead of their time so you’re forced to discard them or shelf them. If it’s the latter, an idea archive or idea management system is better in the long run.
Over time, trends change and when the analytics are better, you can pitch your idea again. Sometimes, you’d even gain more insight from your idea at the present time after an incubation period.
Idea Management Software For Remote Setups
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- Ideanote
Ideanote provides you with a proven structure and process to make your innovations a reality. You can get a central hub to collect more ideas and engage with people across different teams. The program focuses on unifying innovation to move your business forward. Hence, it puts great emphasis on bringing employees together to innovate.
It’s a competitively priced and user-friendly idea management software that’s rich in features. You can also customize it to better fit your working environment, making it great for remote setups.
- Sprint Boards
Sprint Boards are an online retrospective tool for Agile developers where it provides teams with the tools necessary for coordination, discussions, and collaborations. It helps solidify your idea management system for the team.
Sprint Boards offers a free trial so you can test out its simple UI until you decide to purchase it. You can even integrate your Slack, Trello, and Jira accounts on Sprint Boards for work synchrony.
Integrated with Trello, Sprint Boards helps you make unlimited boards and set someone else as administrator. Sprint Boards is also mobile-friendly, allowing you to work even on the road.
- Sideways6
If your company revolves around employee ideas, Sideways6 is a great tool to have. You can encourage your employees to use their voices and brainstorm. Sideways6 believes that giving employees a voice is the secret to business success, so why not give it a shot?
The program offers a free demo for 30 minutes, time enough to get acquainted with its features. You might think 30 minutes is too short for a demo because other free trials can last up to a month. But Sideways6 just needs you to know what it’s capable of as it offers premium tools for your large team. You can maximize big team collaborations with this program, especially since it’s highly integrable.
- Kudosee
Kudosee is an interactive and shareable idea management software to illustrate your strategies. The software uses graphics and images so you can break down the strategy for everyone to see. The users can also get involved and stay informed regardless of where they are.
Kudosee offers a free trial so you can get a feel of its user-friendly and customizable features. When you decide to purchase it, it’s competitively priced, making it worth your while.
- Productific
Do you need software that helps you collect ideas and input from users more easily? Productific is a good program for such purposes because of its features. You can collect feature requests from users and have them vote for the best ones.
With Productific, you can also show other users your next steps and upcoming products. That way, you can get feedback and have a customer-oriented product roadmap. The software is competitively priced while being user-friendly and having a simple UI.
Conclusion
Remote work environments have become predominant since the pandemic, but many things haven’t changed, like the idea management process. Idea management is the act of collecting and organizing ideas to create a product roadmap. The ideas come from employees and customers alike, making the product client-oriented.
With the internet, you can use different idea management tools even if you’re working remotely. Ideanote, Sprint Boards, and Sideways6 are just some of the software we listed above. Every single one of them has the two elements that are essential to the best idea management software – user-friendly UI and an analytics-driven idea management system.
Those two elements are vital to any idea management software. The software only supports the idea management system you have in place. That said, different software has specialties that can help your team accomplish your goals.
