Brightidea · Programs

As Product & Design Lead in Brightidea’s innovation lab, I was responsible for the development and launch of “Programs Pro,” a new product designed to expand our reach into the mid-market. Over the course of a year, I led a series of product experiments to refine methodologies that empower small teams within large organizations to generate and implement impactful ideas within their departments. This eventually culminated in Brightidea Program becoming the company’s leading product in terms of sales.

Responsibilities

• Collaborated with the General Manager and Sales/Marketing Lead to conduct market research, analyze customer needs, and develop a comprehensive product strategy and roadmap that guided the development work
• Directly configured, templatized, and packaged new workflows on the Brightidea platform, enabling new small-team use cases
• Designed and collaborated with the Engineering Lead to develop new features and a streamlined set up experience, resulting in 10x reduction in onboarding time

Mission and Goal

To further our company mission of “creating a world where the best ideas win,” our team focused on democratizing innovation by empowering every team to contribute their best ideas. We aimed to expand Brightidea’s reach into the mid-market by offering tailored, cost-effective solutions. This strategic shift would make our powerful innovation platform accessible to a wider audience, ultimately driving greater innovation impact.

Guiding Principles

As a startup-within-a-startup reporting directly to the CEO, our guiding principles were borrowed heavily from Y Combinator and Paul Graham:

• Talk to customers!
• Launch fast and let ideas evolve, aka “action produces information”
• Target 5-7% week-over-week growth (WOW)
• Do things that don’t scale

Outcomes

To successfully expand into the mid-market, we focused on delivering affordable solutions with streamlined onboarding and self-guided learning resources. Over the course of a year, we achieved the following:

• Developed Innovation Program Management (IPM), a new methodology designed to accelerate employee-driven innovation within smaller teams. This framework provided the tools to get started with innovation management, and templates for running the highest-impact innovation activities.
• Launched Programs Pro, a product based on the IPM methodology, and iteratively improved it based on user feedback. This evolved into Brightidea Programs, which became the company’s top-selling product, demonstrating the strong market demand for accessible innovation solutions.
• Created a blueprint and playbook for product-led growth (PLG) at Brightidea, enabling self-service adoption and organic growth. This approach was later implemented for Idea Box and Whiteboard, demonstrating its effectiveness across multiple product lines.

For more behind-the-scenes on how our innovation lab paved the path to PLG, see our CEO’s article on productled.org.

Product Highlights

New Homepage Experience

Our legacy product used a CMS and site builder that was slow, hard to use, and error prone. We developed the seeds of a new Home page consisting of a personalized feed and built-in onboarding.

A New Innovation App: Explore

We observed users bending our templated optimization crowd-sourcing challenge to facilitate open-ended exploration of new market opportunities, so developed a tailored app around this use case called Explore.

Always-on, Personal Idea Management

Employees often have brilliant ideas outside of formal innovation activities. “My Ideas” provides a dedicated space to capture and nurture those sparks of inspiration whenever they strike.

This personal idea repository empowers employees to:

• Capture ideas instantly: Jot down thoughts, add photos, save links, ensuring that no brilliant idea gets lost
• Organize and develop concepts: Categorize ideas, add notes and attachments, and refine concepts over time
• Submit to innovation programs: Easily share ideas with colleagues or submit them to relevant programs when the time is right, such as hackathons, problem-solving challenges, or optimization programs

The Pitch Program

Finally, we conceived a central, recurring program to ensure ongoing customer success that we named The Pitch Program. This is a scalable competition in the style of Shark Tank, great for engaging employees in order to find the most impactful ideas. I presented “How To Run a Successful Pitch Program” at Synthesize 2018, and we also developed the content into an ebook for customers and prospects. The existing Pitch app was refined to support a programmatic approach, and a roadmap was developed for future updates.

Inspired by the popular “Shark Tank” format, The Pitch Program is a scalable competition designed to engage employees and uncover the most impactful ideas within your organization. It provides a structured framework for soliciting big ideas and funding winning projects.

To support our customers in running successful Pitch Programs, we developed a comprehensive set of resources, including:

• A presentation on best practices: “How To Run a Successful Pitch Program” presented at Synthesize 2018.
• An informative ebook: A downloadable guide for customers and prospects.
• Enhanced app functionality: The Pitch app was updated to support a recurring approach and improved executive reporting