Idea Bank

An Idea Bank is a holding space for potential product improvement ideas. It serves both as an inspiration for future work and as a buffer against overloading the active backlog.

Having an idea bank relieves the pressure from stakeholders and customers who provide feedback and expecting to be heard. People proposing ideas can have confidence that their suggestions will be considered, without raising expectations about delivery schedules or that the ideas will ever be implemented. In that way, an idea bank is a systematic way for collecting and handling non-urgent user feedback.

Being actively managed and relatively restricted, the idea bank is different from an open suggestion box. Accepting a proposal into an idea bank is, quoting Itamar Gilad from Evidence Guided, “a weak form of commitment”. The team owning the idea bank will review the idea, without committing to anything else.

In that way, an idea bank is a great way to prevent the active team backlog from growing uncontrollably, while still allowing the team to keep the additional ideas on their radar.

An idea bank helps a team keep track of ideas, and provides options for future work. A product manager can dip into the idea bank quickly to compare different options, and find alternative suggestions for items under review.

How to manage an idea bank?

In Hacking Growth, Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown suggest that each idea in the bank should have the following details:

Gilad suggests that the team should relatively quickly review and categorise an idea that enters the bank, sorting it into one of the following two categories:

  1. Candidate: you may want to work on this idea relatively soon
  2. Parked: the team chose not to work on this idea right now

When choosing a category, you can quickly filter ideas by relevance (for example, identifying if the idea is consistent with your current objectives using the Five Stages of Growth model, Pirate Metrics funnel or current OKR focus), then quickly assign a score (such as ICE) to compare against other relevant ideas.

In addition to assigning the category, it’s good to explain the reasoning for the choice the team made, so that the ideas can be recategorised later.

At the start of a new milestone, or when business priorities change, it’s a good idea to review the categorisation in the idea bank. You will likely want to promote some parked ideas into candidates for your backlog if they seem important for the new business objectives, or park some ideas that were previously backlog candidates because they are no longer important.

Expect most ideas to end up parked. The candidates will eventually find their way into the team backlog.

Although assigning a “Candidate” category does not increase the team workload (it’s just a sign that this idea might end up in the backlog), it might be a good idea to limit the number of ideas that can have that category, similar to limiting work in progress. If you’ve reached the limit of active candidate ideas, the least worthy one needs to be parked in order to add a new candidate.

In a multi-team environment, Gilad suggests that each team should have a separate idea bank, focused on their area of work, but that a team idea bank should be visible to all the other teams. This allows people to take ownership of their area of work and restrict the number of candidates in their pipeline, without impacting other teams. However, it also allows other teams to dip into ideas from related areas for inspiration.

How is an idea bank different from an open suggestion box?

An open suggestion box usually allows anyone to add ideas, and does not necessarily commit the delivery team to even provide any feedback. It’s mostly a one-way information flow.

An idea bank commits the team to at least consider suggested ideas. Usually, anyone can propose an addition to the idea bank, but one person is responsible for actually adding ideas to it (typically the product manager). This person plays a gatekeeper role, filtering ideas which deserve to be considered and reviewed.

Having a clear owner prevents the idea bank from turning into an open suggestion box and overwhelming the team with review work.

For teams that want to allow anyone to propose ideas, similar to an open suggestion box, but still manage them in a more restricted way, similar to an idea bank, one option is to introduce additional statuses. For example, ideas could be in “Proposed” status after being sent by a user and before the idea bank owner reviews them. If they are useful enough to be considered by the team, ideas could become “Pending”, then become parked or candidates.

How is an idea bank different from a community suggestion forum?

An idea bank and a Community Suggestion Forum both serve for collecting ideas, but there are key differences between the tools in terms of curation and workflow management.

Where accepting an idea into an idea bank is a weak form of commitment, accepting an idea into a community forum shows no commitment at all.

An idea bank often has a designated person responsible for reviewing and adding ideas, who will likely perform at least some initial review and triage when a new idea is proposed. A community suggestion forum typically allows any user to submit an idea, and new additions will probably not get any attention from product management until they gather a significant number of votes.

Unlike a community suggestion forum, which emphasizes open discussion and community-driven prioritization, an idea bank focuses on evaluating and prioritizing pre-screened ideas. It serves as a tool for product managers to assess, refine, and select ideas that align with strategic goals. This approach allows for more structured workflow management, often including features like status tracking and the assignment of tasks for further research and development.

The two modes of collecting user feedback can also be combined, with the idea bank effectively being a subset of the community suggestion forum. Once an idea from the forum generates enough support, a product manager may consider it for the addition into the idea bank, and continue managing from there. In that way, the community suggestion forum is effectively a preparatory stage for an idea bank, with the constraint that there’s no expectation for all ideas in the forum to be considered.

How is an idea bank different from a backlog?

An idea bank is a low-commitment repository of ideas. The large majority of ideas in the bank will never get implemented. A backlog should be a relatively high-commitment pipeline. While some ideas from the backlog might be thrown away, it’s reasonable to expect the team to at least start working on the majority of backlog items.

Product backlog items are usually more homogeneous than those in the idea bank. Backlog items need to be refined, evaluated and structured for implementation. Backlog items are usually assigned to a specific milestone, clearly related to a particular user benefit or goal, and generally of a similar size. Items in the idea bank very from months of work to a quick fix that takes a few minutes, from something that relieves a minor inconvenience to a something that addresses a major pain point for a group of customers, and from things that are tangentially related to current usage patterns to complete product pivots. It’s no necessary to assign a clear user objective or goal to an item in the idea bank, or estimate the complexity of the work required to implement it.

Idea banks allow teams to delay research, refinement and consolidation for inessential feedback.

Learn more about the Idea Bank

Related and complementary tools to the Idea Bank

Next article: Impact Estimation Tables