What are the four strategic lenses for evaluating product ideas?

The four lenses are: (1) Delights customers — is there evidence of real pain or desire this addresses? (2) Builds on the product vision — does it feel like a natural next step? (3) Enhances margin — does it plausibly improve unit economics or market position? (4) Hard to copy — does it create network effects, proprietary data, or switching costs that make it defensible?

How many ideas should you generate in a brainstorm?

Aim for at least twenty before any filtering. The goal of the diverge phase is broad coverage, not quality. Ideas that seem wild often combine with others or seed more practical ones. Filtering down to three to five strong ideas from twenty is a healthy ratio.

How do you avoid anchoring on existing ideas during brainstorming?

Run brainstormers independently, without showing them what ideas already exist in the backlog. Each brainstormer works from the raw customer and competitive data — not from the existing idea list. This prevents the group from anchoring on what has already been discussed.

Playbook

Brainstorm ideas

Run Brainstorm ideas

Generate ideas grounded in workspace context — competitive landscape, customer segments, opportunities, and evidence. Forms testable hypotheses with key assumptions.

Use when

•You are starting a new discovery cycle and need fresh idea input
•The backlog feels stale or incremental and you want genuinely novel options
•You are preparing for a roadmap planning session
•You want diverse ideas without anchoring on what has already been proposed

What You Get

Idea
Structured idea entities, each with a name, description, and rationale for why it passed all four strategic filters.

How It Works

1
Diverge — generate widely
Produce at least twenty one-liner ideas from different angles: customer frustration, competitive gaps, enabling technology, business model innovation, adjacent markets, and workflow automation.
2
Filter: does it delight customers?
Check each idea against customer research — is there evidence of real pain, unmet need, or desire that this addresses? No evidence means no signal.
3
Filter: does it fit, enhance margin, and resist copying?
Evaluate each surviving idea for fit with the product vision, margin impact, and defensibility through network effects, proprietary data, or switching costs.
4
Save surviving ideas
Each idea that passes all four lenses is saved as a structured entity with rationale for why it survived — ready for hypothesis formation and validation.

Why most brainstorming produces obvious ideas

Most brainstorming sessions converge on the same five to ten incremental improvements because participants anchor on what already exists. Effective product ideation starts from first principles — customer frustrations, competitive white space, enabling technology, and business model innovation — and generates at least twenty distinct ideas before any evaluation begins. The filtering step then applies four strategic lenses that cut ideas based on customer delight, product vision fit, margin impact, and defensibility. What survives is a small set of ideas that are genuinely worth pursuing.

Who it's for

Most effective after customer research and competitive analysis are already in the workspace. The richer the upstream context, the more targeted and evidence-grounded the ideas become.

Product Manager

Product Strategist

Founder

Head of Product

Frequently asked questions

What are the four strategic lenses for evaluating product ideas?: The four lenses are: (1) Delights customers — is there evidence of real pain or desire this addresses? (2) Builds on the product vision — does it feel like a natural next step? (3) Enhances margin — does it plausibly improve unit economics or market position? (4) Hard to copy — does it create network effects, proprietary data, or switching costs that make it defensible?
How many ideas should you generate in a brainstorm?: Aim for at least twenty before any filtering. The goal of the diverge phase is broad coverage, not quality. Ideas that seem wild often combine with others or seed more practical ones. Filtering down to three to five strong ideas from twenty is a healthy ratio.
How do you avoid anchoring on existing ideas during brainstorming?: Run brainstormers independently, without showing them what ideas already exist in the backlog. Each brainstormer works from the raw customer and competitive data — not from the existing idea list. This prevents the group from anchoring on what has already been discussed.