Ideas Prioritisation with Impact/Effort Matrix in AC Ideas Ultimate

Dear friends, 

We continue the series of videos about ideation management with our product AC Ideas Ultimate. Today we’re talking about ideas prioritization.

Ideation management, first of all, is about ideas prioritization, because besides generating ideas they also need to be correctly estimated and selected.

We use ideas prioritization to bring the best ideas into reality: ideas that receive a great response from your partners and clients, ideas that everyone is looking forward to.

Imagine that you have hundreds or even thousands of ideas. Some of them are more popular than others. What ideas to implement right away? What ideas can be implemented later? What ideas are worth spending valuable resources which are always limited? These are the questions that product managers ask themselves every day

AC Ideas Ultimate features

Our AC Ideas Ultimate app can help you to make the right decision on the basis of objective indicators, not intuition. You can track votes, comments, the sum of opportunities.

We allow also to restrict the number of votes per company and estimate the cost of each idea in resources. 

• The first point is Voting.

This is the easiest and the most obvious way to prioritize ideas. Each user can vote for the ideas they like. The more people who vote for an idea, the more demand there is for the idea.

A more complex way – is to allow upvotes and downvotes, as with this method we can see the ideas that are rejected. 

If your clients are big companies with many users, as well as small businesses with few users, you can equalize their impact by limiting votes by Account.

• The second point is Importance = income.

Ideally, the implementation of a certain idea should improve the position of the company. Some people may consider success to be the number of users, the company image or something like that.

Others, including us, consider that implemented ideas should generate income. The fastest way to assess this is by linking to opportunities. 

For example, you have a potential lead who says that he is ready to sign a contract with your company if certain functionality is implemented in your solution.

Therefore, we allow associating the opportunity with a specific idea. We can link the ideas with opportunities and the new “Sum of Opportunity” column appeared so each idea that was connected with the opportunity now has monetary value.

Further, ideas can be ranked and evaluated in monetary terms: how much income the embodiment of specific ideas can generate.

• The next point is Effort.

Many people want flying cars, but they are difficult to make. In our package, we allow assessing the complexity of implementation of an idea. Each business has its own complexity that can be evaluated by various criteria (time spent, costs, human resources).

That is why we give you the opportunity to evaluate and assign the complexity yourself. We’ve also added an effort field from 1 to 10 to the idea for this.

To make sense of all the metrics in a clear and intuitive way we provide Effort/Impact Matrix.

Now, when we assessed the importance of a particular idea (by the number of votes or comments) and understand the complexity of the embodiment of the idea, we can look at the appropriate matrix that we have in the AC Ideas Ultimate package.

You can find this matrix on the dashboard that comes with the package. By default, the impact is calculated as the number of vote scores and number of comments received for this idea.

Here you can find the “low hanging fruits” – ideas that have high priority for customers and require minimal effort to implement. This matrix works with various ideas statuses, categories, and zones.

As we said earlier, you can calculate impact using different parameters. As parameters you can use the opportunities, the annual turnover of the accounts that voted for ideas, the potential of these accounts, are regular customers or not — any indicators that correspond to your business activity.

Go to the Dashboard component (which you can place as you wish) and override the impact using the formula field or any other custom field. For example, you can take the Sum of Opportunity field as a custom impact.

Save and activate this dashboard and now your matrix will display the income you can get from the implementation of an idea.

Once again, you can use ANY formulas and fields in this matrix with the AC Ideas Ultimate package.

Find your low-hanging fruits and make the most of the benefits of the ideation process with our app.