How to Turn Ideas into Features: A 4-Step Guide from Concept to Launch
A practical, collaborative guide on executing ideas and turning them into features with your product team
Ideas are everywhere; the magic is in the execution.
More often than not, Ideas come rushing at us from all angles and we want to internalize them, make sense of them and see them come to life. This is the tough part many PMs and founders struggle with—and like you, I’ve been there countless times, until I discovered a hack: simplifying the execution framework into straightforward workflows.
Having personally repeated this framework’s success across 4 [completely opposite] verticals, there are high chances that if you adopt these steps, your execution would be 5-7X better than it currently is.
First, Validate Everything
A rule of thumb is that no idea should proceed to production without being validated as solving an important problem, usable and stable.
This means – the user must enjoy value, should very quickly understand how to use it, must align with your business goals and of course it must be technically possible.
Here’s my recommended validation process:
The Product Manager [PM] is responsible for gathering feedback on all current features, as well as validating any new features being discussed.
The Design team is responsible for building mockups in readiness for validation. Once the feature is validated, the design sprint should get them ready for development.
Organizational Leaders - Chief Technical Officer [CTO], Chief Product Officer [CPO], Head of Product [HoP]- should closely monitor the balance between introducing new features, addressing overlooked issues, and taking necessary actions to drive efficiency.
It is recommended to have daily stand-ups, preferably in the mornings. Any collaboration tool of your choice will help adapt your daily, weekly and monthly workflows from idea through validation and development to ultimately shipping an elegant product for your users.
Shipping Valuable Features From Simple Ideas.
A critical component for success in executing ideas is your workflow. Very often, I find product organizations with workflows resembling the below pathways:
Current Development
Planning
Issues
Backlog
Let’s breakdown each workflow.
1. Current Development
Primarily, this should be everything that helps you move things along and it can be compartmentalized into the following sub categories-
Active Design:
This is the starting point for all validated features. Here, documentation is handed to design for commencement of work.Prioritized for implementation:
This entails your prioritized list of what engineering should work on next. Features that do not typically require any design go here directly [such as bugs, re-factoring etc.].Active Development
Everything currently under development.Testing [Unit / Integration]
When development is done, everything moves here for testing.Production ready
If testing succeeds, all items goes here. [Some startups run soft launch(es) here].Launch
I recommend you house everything that will and has gone live under this category.
Tips for best practices
It is important to note that a lot of feedback should be shared throughout the development process, so items should naturally move back and forth between each categories a few times before getting shipped.
Your priority should be that all actions are correctly placed. Remember, forward is not always progress.
2. Planning
A practice I highly recommend here is for the Product Manager, Product Designer and CPO/CTO to align weekly- preferably midweek- on feedback gathered from users, research learnings and re-visit old product ideas that could be contextually useful currently.
This list will help you follow through that flow:
Potential Experiments:
All your great new ideas for features begin at this stage.Ongoing Experiment:
The Product Manager validates [or invalidates] the features with a preselected segment of users.Validated and Prioritized:
If a feature gets validated, your designer is now ready to flag it as “Active Design” on Current Development.
3. Issues
Most product managers want to build perfect products. The stark reality is that issues/ bugs can suddenly show up. An excellent strategy for managing this is to keep two simple lists:
Inbox
This is the ‘dumping’ space for all issues found. I typically ensure an in-house independent engineer verifies all issues found at this stage.Confirmed (Prioritized)
Once verified as something we should assign man-days to, we move this to “Current Development”.
Tips for best practices
As you probably know, color-coding incoming issues can be incredibly helpful for prioritization and maintaining your team's psychological balance. Here’s an example of how my team used to do it:
Unlabelled = Non-critical.
Purple = Look at this when you have some time.
Orange = Attend to this when you are done with current task.
Red = Leave everything and solve this right now.
4. Backlog
Remember that the Product Manager, Product Designer and CPO/CTO meets weekly and ideally, the backlog should be an important action point during this meeting.
Many times, I have found it life saving to zoom out of all that is happening and move to refactor or optimize existing code. An important action for the CPO is to introduce all items that need attention in the coming week, to ensure everything runs as smooth as possible.
Usually, the list should comprise of :
Frontend
Backend
Operations
An important note is to always attach tasks to people, so everyone knows who is responsible for each of the tasks and for addressing pressing issues.