There’s a famous Steve Jobs quote that’s stood the test of time. Well there are several, but the one I’m talking about is saying no to hundreds of good ideas.

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

— Steve Jobs

To me the part that gets lost is “saying not to the hundred other good ideas”.

This quote is often shortened as saying no to 1,000 things. Which if there are 999 bad ideas is easy. The harder part is saying no to so many good ideas.

When I look back in my career, our best products came from focusing on one great idea. But there was always a bit of anguish because there were so many other good ideas we had to say no to.

How To Get A Lot Of Good Ideas

Anyone can generate an idea of the top of their head. Often your first idea isn’t the best.

So if that’s the case, how do you get “a hundred other good ideas”?

In the design world, it’s through sketching to explore the solution space.

This is done through a structured sketch session. One that includes a problem statement, some goals, and several rounds of iterations. Following one of those will help you pump out a ton of ideas.

This is a great exercise for product discovery. The key is the structure built around it. It’s not simply sketching out ideas.

Structured Sketch Session

I’ve seen teams just hop in a room and say “ok let’s sketch out some ideas”. They spend 10 minutes, sketch, then another 20 or so talking about them. And that’s it.

That’s the wrong way to approach it. You want a structured sketch session. The specifics vary from case to case but in general they all involve the following:

An Overview of the Problem
This should go without saying, but i’ve seen it skipped in the past. I’ve seen something along the lines of

“let’s sketch a redesign of the homepage”

when really it should be more along the lines of:

“users find our homepage confusing, overwhelming, and we’re seeing a high bounce rate. We know they come to the homepage looking for X, Y, and Z. Ultimately they are trying to accomplish ABC. How might we redesign the homepage to support these goals. Also, if yuo want to explore outside the homepage, that’s ok too.”

Even that should be more fleshed out, but you get the idea.

Background Info
An overview of any research and business goals and objectives you may have.

A Focus
A bit of guidance on where you are going to concentrate your efforts and maybe areas you would like to avoid.

PIllars
General themes and ideas to build around. This can be more metric focused like “increase time on site” or can be more experiential like “add moments of delight for the user”.

Multiple Rounds, Each With A Specific Focus
You want to go through multiple rounds of sketching with presentations after each one. The presentations aren’t meant to be thorough. Just a quick pass where people show what they came up with.

A Wrap Up
The facilitator needs to wrap up the session with next steps. Usually means a plan to wireframe or prototype certain ideas.

How To Say No To Hundreds Of Good Ideas

Once you sketched out a ton of ideas, next is refining the ideas.

It starts with having a baseline criteria to refine ideas. Business goals, or UX goals based on research help here. They don’t have to be specific. In fact, general is better.

They can be the same pillars as the ones you sketched around. Usually you’ll have a little more info at this point so perhaps you want to revisit them.

For example, some pillars could be:

Increase time on site
Increase user engagement
Improve social sharing
Increase conversions
Have moments of user delight

If you’re working with a large group and there are a ton of ideas, dot voting works well here. Have your team go through with dot voting, loosely keeping the pillars in mind.

Digital Dots

Sketch sessions are usually more fun in person, but virtual can have it’s advantages. When you use a tool like Miro of FigJam you can use emojis and stickers (rather than dots) and these can convey a little more info (and fun) than just dots.

Also it’s easy to place stickies with notes as well.

A sketch uploaded into MIRO where team members added stickers as forms of feedback.

Once you go through the dot voting, you’ll most likely have quite a few winners or potentially good ideas. But more importantly, there will be ideas with no dots. Those are ripe for the cutting room floor - or your first No’s.

Rough Scoring

Next take a more thorough pass at the ideas by evaluating the ideas based on those pillars. This is usually a conversation and you’re not looking for exact answers here. More rough guesses will do.

For example you’ll take an idea and say:

“I think this idea is strong in increasing time on site and user engagement. It fosters social sharing and potentially has moments of user delight. But it does seem weak in increasing conversions.”

Having a baseline way to chart this will help. You can assign each pillar a scale of 1-5 and rate each idea.

This helps you get a rough idea across all concepts on where they sit.

If you’re uploading sketches to an app like Miro of FigJam here’s an example of a simple scale you can use to do early assessing:

An uploaded sketch with a simple scale to roughly assess the concept against core pillars.

Refine

You’ll come across an idea and and either refine, edit, or delete ideas. So that idea that overall was good but was weak in increasing conversions. Take another pass at it and see if you can refine it to support conversions. You’ll usually come up with a few ways to achieve this.

At this point, you’ll still have plenty of interesting ideas and concepts to think through.

Not all ideas will be refined. Some ideas you’ll start to drop or put on the back burner. More “saying no to good ideas” happens here.

Build AND ASSESS

As far as refining, this is where you want to start to wireframe and prototype ideas.

Building the ideas out will help you understand the concepts a bit more and allow you to begin testing.

Test and Evaluate

Testing usually comes in a couple ways. The first being “dogfooding” - using your own product. It’s one thing to look at things on a screen, but once you start interacting with a product you get a way better sense of the concept.

The other can be user testing. If this is early in the process you’re probably thinking more about concept testing. So, not getting super hung up on the usability of a product, but rather the concept itself. Does it resonate with users or not.

In most companies a refined idea is a much better way to present ideas to higher ups. Usually sketches and rough wires don’t go over so well. So when you have refined ideas these are usually ideas you have more confidence in and are more appropriate to show to execs.

Building Confidence

At this point, it’s a cycle. You have some ideas, refined them and assessed. You’ll want to continue iterating on ideas, learning and evaluating.

As you go you’ll gather new information. It’s key to revisit any assumptions you may have made, and your pillars.

It’s all about building confidence in a winning idea.

Saying no is more about saying “we’re more confident in this idea than that one.”

Saying no isn’t saying it’s a bad idea or not worthy. You’re just more confident in other ideas.

Revisit What You Know

In a typical product environment, you’re constantly learning. It’s nice to think everything is super linear. It’s not.

Now’s a good time to revisit what you know. Take another pass at your pillars. Revisit any assumptions. What’s changed and what have you learned?

A typical case here is, you get insight from higher ups who help you guide and shape your project. They may impart some guidelines for you to follow.

With this new information, refine your pillars and any other information you are using to select winning ideas.

WELL, What’s Realistic?

Next is what’s realistic. This is where things really get narrowed down. When you look at your team size, skills, scope of ideas, and timeline you’ll get a good sense of what is feasible and what is not.

Get a sense of what you can realistically achieve and go from there.

There’s A Thousand You’s, There’s Only One Of Me

So there’s a quick overview of how to generate a lot of good ideas.

The crux of it is the sketch session grounded in pillars and then refining ideas from there. Of course you’ll have to say no to hundreds of good ideas. That’s where refining and building confidence comes in.

And eventually through that process of building confidence you’ll get to that one awesome idea.

Hope this helps!

HOW TO SAY NO TO GOOD IDEAS