1. Talking to customers 👂️ 2. Talking to employees who talk to customers (e.g. sales, customer support, marketing) 🤗 3. Observing your customers, through data and user research 🧐 4. Spending quality time with previous data dives and user research 🔬 5. Using the product yoursel️f 🕵️♀️ 6. Thinking in a quiet place 🤔 7. Having small discussions with teammates 💁♂️ 8. Working backwards from your long-term vision 🤩 9. Looking into what caused users to churn 📉 10. Looking at competitors 👀 11. Looking at adjacent markets 😏 12. Looking at analogous businesses in completely different markets 🔭 13. Creating user journey storyboards 🎞 14. Having hackathons and watching the demos 👩💻 15. Catching technology shifts 📱
#### Where great ideas rarely come from:
1. Large brainstorms — bad source for big new ideas, but has other benefits such as getting everyone on the team involved in the process 🎯 2. Staying heads down for too long — give yourself space to go big and wide on occasion 🙃 3. Copying what your competition is doing — don’t assume they actually know what they are doing 😝
If there’s anything missing that you’ve found valuable, I’d genuinely love to hear it. Tweet me or leave a comment below.
Sincerely,
Thank you to everyone who contributed your great suggestions on [this twitter thread](https://twitter.com/lennysan/status/1135563031352471552), particularly [Gustaf Alströmer](https://medium.com/@gustaf), [Alistair Croll](https://medium.com/@acroll), [Blake Robbins](https://medium.com/@blakeir), [Carey Caulfield](https://medium.com/@careycaulfield), [Lin Classon](https://twitter.com/lin_IRL), [Justin Jones](https://twitter.com/devpuppy?lang=en), [Henry Vazquez](https://twitter.com/hvasquez), and [Jatin Bhatia](https://twitter.com/JBhatia001)🙏