Bad Ideas and Problems (Remote)

What we love about this handbook section

🖤 Wow, what a way to build psychological safety within a business. Getting people to speak up can sometimes be hard, but actively asking for input and talking openly about bad ideas (and how they dont exist) is brilliant from Remote. This might inspire others to find ways of fostering their own psychological safety too! ** ****Check out their entire handbook for inspiration here: 🔗Remote's full handbook

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Great products are built not by individuals, but by the input of many, through iteration.

Iteration means many changes, driven from even more ideas. Most of the ideas will never become an iteration. And most of the iterations will not stick around for long: quickly replaced by others. With each change, we learn something new. Sometimes we learn that an idea didn't work the way we expected it; other times we learn something due to time passing - or our users changing.

To be able to fuel all this we need many ideas, from many different people, with different view points. If all ideas come from the same group of people, with similar backgrounds, it's unlikely we're able to build a great product.

To build a great product, we need your input (problems, annoyances), and your ideas. Yes - you, whomever you are. If you're reading this, you are the right person to have ideas on how to improve, change and upgrade our products. This is how you can do that:

Share Ideas, Problems, Annoyances - You must share your ideas and problems with people that can help you bring them to life. At Remote, this means sharing your ideas with someone in product or on the #product channel or by creating a GitLab issue. If you don't have an idea, but you do have a problem/annoyance of any size (meaning: even the littlest annoyance counts), share that instead! Sometimes it helps to just state "I'm struggling with X", or "I don't like Y" in a channel where other people can contribute. This will help amplify the pain, allow other people to share they might think or feel the same, and ultimately can be a start of a new idea or solution. No annoyances are too small!
Contribute - You must contribute to other people's ideas when you feel you can bring value. Let them/us know what you think, positive or negative, but aim at making a meaningful contribution. Most ideas will never become an iteration, but some might. Let's make the most of that iteration. In practice: be active about giving input and feedback everywhere. Yes, you can comment on ANY GitLab issue with your ideas.
Explore - Keep exploring and don't limit your input and ideas to anything in particular. Try suggesting a change in the product on an area you're not very familiar with. You might learn something based on the feedback you get on that idea - or you might've just created a new iteration.

There are no bad ideas. Make sure we don't miss any potential iterations, and share your ideas early and often!

If you're less confident about sharing with Product, or want somewhere to share your more abstract ideas, there is always the #terrible-ideas channel (and still none of these ideas are bad).