brainstorm-ideas-existing

brainstorm-ideas-existing — Multi-Perspective Product Ideation Brainstorming Skill

Skill Overview

brainstorm-ideas-existing is a product ideation skill designed specifically for existing products. It uses a multi-perspective collaboration approach based on a Product Trio (PM + Designer + Engineer) to help teams continuously discover opportunities and generate high-quality feature ideas.

Use Cases

1. Iterating on Existing Product Features

When your product is already launched and you need to identify new feature directions for the next iteration, this skill can generate ideas from multiple professional perspectives, preventing the team from falling into habitual patterns of thinking. Whether you are optimizing the user experience or exploring new features, you can obtain structured ideation outputs.

2. Developing Opportunity Solutions

During product discovery, when you have identified a user pain point or market opportunity and need to devise solutions, this skill helps you evaluate ideas across three dimensions—strategic value, user experience, and technical feasibility—based on the opportunity solution tree framework.

3. Collaborative Innovation through a Product Trio

When product managers, designers, and engineers need to participate together in the product discovery process, this skill provides a standardized, multi-perspective ideation method that ensures each professional role’s unique value is fully leveraged. It is particularly suitable for teams that practice agile development and continuous discovery.

Core Features

1. Three-Perspective Idea Generation

The skill generates five idea directions from each of three professional perspectives—product manager, product designer, and software engineer—for a total of 15 ideas to choose from. The product manager perspective focuses on business value and strategic alignment, the designer perspective emphasizes user experience and usability, and the engineer perspective approaches ideation from the standpoint of technical possibilities and data utilization. This multi-perspective method ensures that ideas are both comprehensive and feasible.

2. Intelligent Prioritization

All 15 ideas are evaluated and ranked across four dimensions: strategic alignment, potential impact, implementation difficulty, and degree of differentiation. The top five most valuable idea directions are then recommended. Each recommended idea includes a clear name, a one-sentence description, the reason it was selected, and the key assumptions that need to be validated, helping the team quickly focus on the most promising directions.

3. Hypothesis-Driven Validation Recommendations

Each recommended idea comes with a list of key assumptions to guide subsequent user interviews, prototype testing, or data validation. This hypothesis-driven approach is derived from Teresa Torres’s continuous product discovery practices, ensuring a seamless connection between idea generation and validation while preventing the team from wasting development resources on the wrong direction.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is a Product Trio different from traditional brainstorming?

The Product Trio is a collaborative method proposed by Teresa Torres in Continuous Discovery Habits. It emphasizes the joint participation of product managers, designers, and engineers in the discovery process rather than handing requirements from one role to another. Compared with traditional brainstorming, the Product Trio approach places greater emphasis on continuous iteration, hypothesis validation, and experimentation. Ideas emerge from the collision of multiple professional perspectives, rather than merely from the subjective opinions of the party requesting them.

Is this skill suitable for early-stage startups or mature product teams?

This skill is specifically designed for existing products, making it particularly suitable for teams with an established user base that are iterating on features or seeking directions for product growth. If your product is still at the 0-to-1 stage, it is recommended that you first conduct user research and define your market positioning. For mature product teams, this skill can help break through fixed ways of thinking and uncover innovative opportunities. For startup teams, it can help them focus on the most valuable ideas when resources are limited.

How can you ensure that the generated ideas are actionable?

The skill ensures actionability on two levels. First, idea generation from the engineer’s perspective directly considers technical feasibility and data utilization. Second, the prioritization stage evaluates implementation difficulty to avoid recommending overly ambitious or technologically immature solutions. The final output includes a list of key assumptions for each idea, guiding the team to quickly validate whether a direction is correct through low-cost experiments—such as user interviews, prototype testing, and data analysis—before committing development resources.