(2017-07-20) Postlight Idea Jam Product Plan

This is our jam: How Postlight kickstarts every idea with a real Product Plan.

Last year, we sat down and attempted to plan out a company-wide Hackathon during the week all our remote employees were in town... instead of a traditional hackday, focused on shipping a rough product, Postlight shut down the whole studio for two days to have a ideation and design marathon that we dubbed “IdeaJam.” (cf Design Sprint, Lightning Decision Jam)

The rules were simple: build the best Elevator Pitch for a product to convince the rest of the team of a its purpose and viability. In this case, we asked everyone to “define the future of chat.”

we needed to sell the six-week version of a product, specifically with an eye toward how to actually shipping an MVP on time that could continue to grow in the future.

We didn’t find a killer product, but we found a killer process that increased conversation across disciplines, and left everyone enthusiastic about working together.

Since then, Postlight has remixed our version of Ideajam in various forms with companies looking to kickstart their own idea from start to finish

last month, we opened our doors to 40 designers and product thinkers attending The 99U Conference in New York City to experience a Postlight Ideajam. The only wrinkle? We only had two hours to do it.

Each team had roughly an hour to get their team to pitch a concept product using whatever process worked best. The pitch needed to involve design and maybe some engineering, but at its core the pitch needed to solve a real problem for a real audience.

We prompted the team with the following: design and create a service where users can communicate with other users using video.

We can’t take credit for their ideas or spill the beans about their products, especially since some teams joked about seeking funding

One big limitation of the Mini part of the Ideajam Mini did force us to edit out a critical part: the Plan. Great ideas can happen at any time, but they’re famously cheap and easy to come up with. To ship a great idea, you need a plan. The elevator pitch is the fun half of a product strategy. The rest is all in the details: what technology choices need to be made, what’s in the roadmap of a shippable product, how many resources do we need, and so on. For Postlight Labs, we always aim for the six-week version of a product. For our clients, we build an aggressive but feasible timetable for our collective teams.

Here’s a crash course in how to do an Ideajam Mini:....