What is idea management? How to capture, evaluate, and prioritize the best ideas
Last updated: February, 2025
Great ideas fuel innovation. But collecting a bunch of ideas is not the same as delivering real value. To build products customers love, you need a way to gather, assess, and act on ideas that align with your strategy. That is where idea management comes in. Idea management helps you capture insights, evaluate opportunities, and prioritize what matters most.
Anyone (customers, teammates, and partners) can contribute ideas, so making it easy for them to share is essential. But not every idea is created equal. The real work happens as you sort and prioritize the most relevant ones. This allows you to focus on enhancements that truly improve the product experience or even spark something entirely new.
Capture ideas and drive innovation using Aha! Ideas. Try it for free.
This is an example of an ideas portal created through Aha! Ideas. Many of the basic capabilities in Aha! Ideas are also available in Aha! Roadmaps.
This guide covers the fundamentals of idea management — from why it matters to how you can build a structured process. Feel free to skip ahead to any of the following sections:
What is idea management?
Idea management is the process of systematically collecting, organizing, evaluating, and prioritizing ideas to drive continuous improvement. It ensures you can gather feedback from customers, teammates, and partners in a structured way — so assessing and acting on the most valuable ideas is easier. A strong idea management process aligns with your product strategy, helping you focus on enhancements that deliver meaningful impact while filtering out ideas that do not fit your goals.
Why is idea management important?
A structured idea management process helps you capture and prioritize the most impactful ideas, ensuring your roadmap reflects real customer needs and business goals. Without a system in place, ideas can get lost in scattered conversations, emails, spreadsheets, and support tickets. Managing this flow effectively enables you to:
Align feedback and requests with company goals
Identify broader themes that support product strategy rather than reacting to one-off requests
Encourage people to share their feedback openly
Prioritize ideas for your roadmap in a way that makes sense for the product and business
Communicate transparently about which ideas are planned and which will not be implemented
Drive innovation by inspiring future releases (or even entirely new products)
Where do ideas come from?
To build a meaningful product, you need insights from multiple perspectives. Product managers typically gather ideas from two primary sources:
Customers: Your customers are the best way to tell what is working and what is missing from your product. Feedback can come through direct conversations, support calls and tickets, surveys, community discussions, or our personal favorite: an ideas portal.
Teammates: Your colleagues across the organization engage with customers in different ways and can provide critical input. Some may even be customers themselves if they use the product directly (as is the case with folks across Aha! — we all use our suite of product development software daily). Consider gathering ideas from folks in:
Customer support: Recurring pain points, usability issues, and feature gaps
Marketing: Market trends, competitive analysis, and messaging challenges
Engineering: Feasibility insights and technical innovations that could unlock new opportunities
By leveraging both external and internal feedback, you can stay close to what users want, keep that information organized, and focus your efforts accordingly.
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Who is responsible for idea management?
Product managers oversee the influx and review of ideas, so it is your job to review every idea so you can identify the next great opportunity. You are also responsible for stewarding these ideas from concept to implementation. But idea management is not a solo effort. Teammates across the company engage with customers in different ways and provide valuable insights that can help inform prioritization.
Tools like an ideas portal and AI-powered idea exploration can help streamline idea management, making it easier to leverage feedback at scale. Watch the tutorial below to see how AI can help you surface meaningful insights within your ideas portal.
A product manager's role in idea management
Not every idea is worth pursuing, and it is up to the product manager to determine which ones add the most value. Some ideas may not align with your vision or current roadmap. Others may highlight areas where customers are struggling (often, a request is a symptom of a deeper issue). It is important to ask yourself, "What is this person really asking for?" This helps you uncover the root of a problem rather than just reacting to a specific request.
A clear idea management process helps you:
Assess ideas with clear criteria: Evaluate strategic fit, customer impact, and feasibility to determine which ideas are worth pursuing
Identify recurring themes: Look for patterns in customer feedback to prioritize the most valuable improvements
Provide clear updates: Keep teams and customers informed on which ideas will move forward (and why others will not)
Foster ongoing engagement: Acknowledge and encourage customer participation, even when an idea is not selected for development
How to gather product feedback from teammates
Your colleagues — sales, customer support, engineering, and marketing — are in constant contact with customers and can provide valuable insights. Although an ideas portal is the best way to centralize submissions, proactively gathering feedback ensures you capture ideas beyond what is submitted directly. Here are some ways to do that:
Join team meetings: Participate in customer support meetings to hear firsthand what customers are asking for.
Monitor internal channels: Pay attention to Slack or Microsoft Teams, email threads, and customer tickets where feedback naturally surfaces.
Host structured feedback sessions: Set up recurring discussions with cross-functional teams to review trends and pain points.
Encourage submission best practices: Provide teammates with clear guidelines on how to frame customer requests so they include business context.
By proactively gathering internal feedback, you ensure idea management captures a broad range of perspectives (not just from customers, but also from teammates who engage with them daily). Their insights can uncover gaps in your current offerings and validate new opportunities. This makes your idea management process even more comprehensive and helps you prioritize ideas with greater confidence.
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How to build an idea management process
Managing ideas effectively requires a structured approach. With the right process and the right software, you can quickly surface the most valuable ideas and transition them into your roadmap.
A strong idea management process includes a few essential steps. These make it easy for people to submit ideas, and for you to evaluate them with clear criteria and ensure a smooth handoff from idea to feature backlog. Internal teams also need to be aligned on review cadence and communication protocols.
Purpose-built idea management software like Aha! Ideas can help you achieve this. Our customizable ideas portal gives customers and teammates a central place to submit feedback and track progress. The AI assistant also helps you uncover trends and filter large volumes of input. Overall, this software helps you make more informed decisions — so you can focus on the ideas that drive the most value.
The overview page in Aha! Ideas provides real-time insights into your submitted feedback. In turn, you can prioritize work that aligns with customer needs.
6 steps to building your idea management process
A structured approach makes it difficult to overlook valuable ideas. Below are key steps to follow:
1. Capture ideas: Use idea management software like Aha! Ideas to centralize feedback. A dedicated ideas portal gives customers a transparent way to submit suggestions, see other requests, and vote on the ones that resonate with them.
2. Review every idea: Set a consistent review cadence to assess new submissions. Some ideas will need more context; engage with the submitter to clarify use cases and explore how the idea could enhance the product.
3. Score ideas objectively: Use a value-based scorecard to rank ideas according to impact and effort. Even a simple value vs. effort scale helps prioritize what will bring the most benefit to customers and the business.
4. Identify common themes: Leverage AI-powered analysis to spot trends across submissions and understand broader customer needs. Recognizing patterns helps focus on high-impact opportunities rather than reacting to individual requests.
5. Promote the best ideas to your roadmap: Once prioritized, the strongest ideas should transition into features and end up on your roadmap. Aha! Roadmaps makes it easy to connect ideas to initiatives while ensuring alignment with your strategy and team capacity.
6. Keep customers informed: Transparent communication builds trust, so let customers know when their ideas are planned. And if an idea is not a fit, explain why (kindly). A thoughtful response encourages future participation and keeps engagement high.
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Ideas are endless, but your team's time is not. That is why it is essential to weigh opportunities against what is realistic to deliver. Your strategic goals and initiatives should serve as the framework for deciding which ideas will have the most impact — helping you focus on improvements that truly enhance your product and business.
Refer back to your product strategy and team capacity when determining what to build and when. Prioritizing ideas effectively helps you deliver meaningful, innovative product experiences that align with customer needs and business objectives.
FAQs about idea management
What is idea management?
Idea management is how you turn feedback into action. It is the process of capturing and prioritizing ideas to shape a better product. The best product teams go beyond simply collecting input — they analyze trends and connect ideas to strategic goals. Aha! Ideas gives you a central place to gather insights and confidently decide what to build next.
How do you determine the best ideas to prioritize?
Not every idea is worth pursuing, but the right ones can drive incredible impact. The key is determining whether an idea aligns with your strategy and meets customer needs. Aha! Ideas helps you score ideas based on these factors, making it easier to determine what will add the most value. Features like voting and custom scorecards can help you identify high-value ideas that align with your roadmap.
How can I keep customers and stakeholders informed about idea progress?
Transparency builds trust. When people take the time to share ideas, they want to know what happens next. Aha! Ideas portals make it easy to give customers and internal teams visibility into submitted ideas and status updates. You can use status labels and automated emails to communicate decisions and show how feedback influences your roadmap.
