Giving ideas enough shape to become real
Some ideas have a habit of hanging around. They come up in meetings, get talked about for a bit, disappear, then come back a few months later. Everyone still thinks there’s something in them, but somehow they never quite turn into anything.
Often the idea isn’t bad. It just hasn’t been given enough shape to do anything with. An idea can stay promising for a very long time while it remains abstract; it’s only when you start making it more concrete that the awkward questions appear. Who is it actually for? What problem does it solve? What would someone do with it? Which bit are we least sure about? And, eventually, what do we do next?
There’s a useful amount of vagueness
Ideas shouldn’t necessarily be nailed down too quickly. There’s a period where being vague is useful: you can move things around, try different interpretations and see where they lead. Decide too much too early and you risk turning the first version of an idea into the version.
But you can stay in that state for too long. One sign is that everyone agrees with the idea until you start talking about what it actually means. Someone thinks it’s a new product, someone else sees it as a feature of something that already exists, marketing has a particular audience in mind, and the person who originally suggested it was thinking about somebody else entirely.
Everyone has been agreeing with slightly different things. At some point the ambiguity that gave the idea room to develop starts getting in the way of making decisions about it.
Some signs an idea needs more shape
There isn’t a particular stage where this happens, but there are some patterns I’d start paying attention to.
Patterns to watch for
- Different people describe the idea differently. There’s agreement at the headline level, but it starts to disappear as soon as you get specific.
- Every conversation makes the idea bigger. Another audience, another use case, another feature that it could probably include.
- You keep going back to the beginning. Things appear to have been decided, but the same fundamental questions keep returning.
- Nobody knows what needs testing. There are lots of unknowns, but no sense of which ones actually matter.
- The next step is always slightly unclear. The idea stays alive, but nobody can turn it into a useful piece of work.
- Work has started without resolving any of this. Pages are being designed, features specified or things built, but the basic questions are still open.
That last one can be particularly deceptive. Once an idea becomes a project, activity starts to look like progress. Stopping to question the idea can then feel like going backwards, particularly once time or money has been spent on it.
But starting to build doesn’t make the unresolved questions disappear. Sometimes the useful next step is to stop making for long enough to work out what you’re actually trying to find out.
Giving something shape doesn’t mean specifying it
Giving an idea more shape doesn’t mean producing a requirements document and answering every question before anyone is allowed to start. Quite often it means making something rough: a sketch, a proposition, a user journey, a prototype with half the buttons missing, or a description of one particular customer and what you think they need.
The thing you make depends on what you’re trying to understand. Making something tangible changes the conversation because things that sounded perfectly clear when everyone was talking about them suddenly aren’t. Assumptions that nobody knew they were making become visible.
A sketch can expose disagreement that another hour of discussion wouldn’t. That’s partly what prototypes are for: not to show what the finished thing will look like, but to give everyone something specific enough to disagree with.
Work out what you need to learn
There will always be things you don’t know. The useful bit is working out which of them matter yet.
Imagine you’re considering a new service. You could spend a lot of time working through exactly how it operates, what the process looks like, what it’s called and how it appears on the website. But perhaps the whole thing rests on an assumption that a particular group of customers has this problem badly enough to pay to solve it. That feels like something worth finding out fairly early.
This is where projects can go wrong by asking “How do we make this?” too soon. A more useful question at this stage is:
What do we need to learn next?
Once you know that, you can decide what you need to make, do or ask to learn it. It might be a conversation, a sketch or rough prototype, or something more substantial. The next piece of work has a purpose beyond simply moving the project forward.
Make just enough to learn something useful
This is where making something small can help, but smallness on its own isn’t much of a goal.
A landing page might tell you whether people respond to an idea, but it won’t necessarily tell you whether the thing behind it works. A prototype might show that someone understands a journey, but it doesn’t tell you that they’ll pay for the service.
Once you know what you need to learn, the next question becomes:
What’s the smallest thing we can make that will tell us something useful?
Sometimes the answer will be tiny. Sometimes it won’t. What matters is whether doing it leaves you in a better position to make the next decision.
Just enough to move
The aim isn’t to turn an idea into a finished plan. It’s to give it enough form that you can test an assumption, show it to somebody, discover that two people have been imagining completely different things, decide what belongs in the first version, or decide not to pursue it at all.
Finding out that an idea doesn’t work is still progress. It’s better than keeping it permanently alive because nobody has ever made it concrete enough to find out.
Good ideas need enough structure to survive contact with reality. Occasionally, contact with reality is how you find out they weren’t such good ideas after all.