How do you come up with ideas for new features (products)?

Feedback from users!

Agreed talking to customers, friends, family and from my own personal problems. It's amazing though what you can get from a few open ended questions to others.

So far I was mostly building the features I need myself. Because I'm actively using my product. But recently I started thinking more from the target audience perspective and try and narrow down the features for the niche. Following the competitors also helps. Nice if your competitors have some kind of roadmap or public feature request board.

Weirdly enough my ideas seem to come from a place beyond me. Have you ever been in such a state of Flow that it seems information is coming straight out of the ether? Well that's where I get my ideas. I've written books while in this Flow State and it is there that concepts, connections, and strings of information seem to come. I absolutely love when I can get my mind into the Flow State as it is there that time seems to always be working in my favor. Have you ever experienced this Flow State for yourself? I know that I'm not the only person as I've read about elite athletes speaking about being in the zone or flow state. What do you think Sveta? Michaelson

Visualize your existing ideas if they aren't already implemented - I've found it helps drive feedback, which as others have mentioned is a key factor for driving innovation.

I get product ideas from: - Customer Survey: Chatting with them or via surveys for first-time products to understand pain points - Market Research: Updates from industry publications subscribed to - Competition: See what they are doing and how to improve. Building up on this, I built a database of model maps and notes of tech products in my market to ease study and innovation, which I'd be sharing as a learning tool at trybidhaa.com soon (Open to sharing updates here https://twitter.com/trybidhaa)

At Specify , we started experimenting with Shape Up a few months ago. We define key elements before we consider them ready to work on. It helps us shape new, significant product ideas and features. For further inspiration on the topic, I recommend reading this AMA session with @rjs, Head of Product Strategy at Basecamp and author of Shape Up ✌️

Hey Sveta, personally, I usually find my startup ideas by experiencing aproblem first and then creating the tool to solve that said problem. For example, I started selling on Amazon and was looking for a tool to be able to compare prices of a retail product to do arbitrage (buy low, sell high on Amazon). The thing is that i didn't find any tool under 80$/month, so i made my own (https://arbitragehub.app/) so that i could solve the problem of small sellers that can't have access to expensive tools and data.

Hey Sveta, - I think talking to people and having discussions is something that always sows some ideas in our minds. New features are created to ease the flow for people and these can only be known if we talk to different users and people - Researching and analyzing the trends is another way to get some ideas. These two have proven to be the most helpful for me and people around me in getting some ideas for our projects.

I get inspired by - user feedback - competitor research - my own experiences of using other products - dev communities & groups