- Brainstorm. Put your brightest people into a room for half a day, have them talk briefly about each of their ideas – the advantages and disadvantages alike. Make a list and try to match its entries up with significant problems driving the customer industry that the technology could solve.
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Size up problems. Interview customers and prospective customers about how they perceive the problem. Conduct focus groups using mockups of the product. Ask a lot of questions about the proposed potential solution and how they would change that solution.
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Find the opportunities first. Only then look at the product possibilities. Screen for those that fit with the products your company thinks it is already good at making.
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Kiss a lot of frogs. Most ideas won’t become successful products. So bring out a lot of ideas from all directions. Use a VC-style elevator story approach when presenting the idea. Try to work through the list rationally, but realize that some outcomes might never have been on the radar.
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Rank them. For example, use traffic signals; green dots next to ones that deserve due diligence; yellow ones are promising, but not as immediate as the green ones; red for non-starters.
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Use rapid ‘prototyping.’ But instead of a physical model, write a 1½ page business brief about the product idea including what you need to know about the market and why it can be successful.
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Size doesn’t matter. Actually, it does; but when you’re dealing with a brand new idea, nobody has a clue as to the real size of the potential market. So focus on the aspects you can give at least rough dimensions to such as cost to produce and time to prepare it for market.
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Smell the herring. Unless you have a good sense of how or whether a new product idea can fit with your existing image, brand, or other characteristic of your company, you’ll end up chasing after a lot of red herrings and you’ll fail.
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Know yourself. Just because you may be good at coming out with line extensions, it doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily be good at executing a stretch strategy or a blue sky project. On the other hand, if you’re practiced at one approach, you may find similarities, even in addressing dissimilar markets.
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Role play the competition. Overconfidence in a new product’s market advantages can lead to serious mistakes. Assuming that there’s competition, ask yourself what that competition is likely to do. How would they likely reposition themselves? What are your weaknesses in their eyes? If you were that competitor, what would you do?
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Know what time it is. Is the opportunity you’ve identified one that has to be acted on immediately? Can it wait a year or two?
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Find the channel. Is there a channel for the product? Can you reach one? What are the channel risks? How easy will it be to launch it into the preferred channel? Is it something that can deliver the performance your channel and its customers require?
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Become acquisitive. To enter a wholly new market, one possible strategy would be to acquire a company which is already active in that market who can help provide an inside track.
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Wave a wand. Hand selected customers a ‘magic wand’ and ask them to talk about what they’d wish to see, who would benefit from the prospective solution, and how it might help them.
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Ask an editor. Trade journal editors can be very helpful in sizing up the potential for a product in the industry they cover.
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Beware of analysts. Avoid basing your decision on the reports of major industry analysts. They tend to be way off in their estimates, almost always toward the high end. But remember that nobody has an accurate fix on a new market. If your guess is within 35%, you’re doing great.
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Use group-think. To reduce a long list of options to a short one, use a group exercise where every member assigns each entry on the list a value of 1 to 5. Try to be non-emotional and break the exercise up into bite-size chunks.
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Use the side door. Keep the selection and evaluation process open to stopping, stepping out, and gathering more data when needed before making a final determination.
Champions of Product Management 
