Brightidea Cloud

Brightidea provides a cloud-based idea and innovation management platform that helps companies ensure the best ideas win. Our engaging employee experience and professional-grade management tools make Brightidea the #1 customer-rated idea management platform for 3 years running. Brightidea has served over 2.5 million users worldwide, and more than $15 billion in customer-reported business impact has been logged on the platform. (All stats as of the time I left the company.)

Role: I started at Brightidea as a Product Designer and transitioned to a Product Management role soon after. As a startup PM with design experience, I often supported my team with UX, UI, interaction design, and research as shown below.

Idea Management Fundamentals

A theme I focused on was idea management fundamentals for managers, sponsors, moderators, and admins.

While we had many of these workflows already covered in the product, a driving insight was that over the recent years, customers had grown from running a single-process idea management program to managing an interconnected system of programs & processes. Second, these processes had gone from being almost exclusively time-bound to being a mix of time-bound and always-on.

This changed the nature of the needs behind many common operations–namely, they were occurring more frequently and at larger scales. We dug into our users’ goals, broke processes down to first principles, evaluated our current offerings, revamped some areas, and built out new capabilities where needed across:

• Move idea(s) between pipelines
• Copy idea(s) between pipelines
• Link ideas
• Merge ideas
• Tagging and categorization
• Search

Platform Integrations

Another area of focus was leading engineering teams to build general-purpose and native integrations for a variety of user goals including capturing ideas, augmenting & extending ideas, and project execution. Customers work with extensive software stacks, and we need to be a node in those ecosystems.

Capturing Ideas

With more and more work occurring on digital platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams, employees are inevitably going to think of and discuss ideas while interacting on those channels. Unfortunately, most of these ideas are lost in the never-ending chat stream or are forgotten when the virtual meeting ends. We have built tools to make capturing ideas as frictionless as possible from these platforms.

It’s also no surprise that employees don’t always get their best ideas during the 8-hour workday. We built Brightidea skills for Alexa and Google Assistant to make capturing ideas on the go or off-hours possible in seconds via voice integrations. Entirely hands-free, Brightidea serves as your external brain by securely saving ideas to your personal repository to manage when your schedule permits.

Prefer to capture your idea by email? We also built email submission flows, known as Magic Inbox, to collect ideas at a single, easy-to-remember inbox: my@brightidea.com. This amazingly simple UX supports extensive company detection, IP & data protection, idea routing, and even new user registration flows. While there is major complexity hidden behind the scenes, all a user needs to remember is “My Brightidea.”

Project Management Integrations

While Brightidea does provide project management tools in the Labs product, they are primarily geared towards zero-to-one innovation projects with small teams. One of the top user requests was integration with apps like Jira, Asana, Monday.com, etc. We built a native Jira integration, a bridge to Zapier, and general-purpose rules-triggered outgoing webhooks to make these types of connections possible.

This is a small sampling of things I worked on at Brightidea related to core products and platform. Read more about Programs and Whiteboard–two new product launches for which I served as Product Lead. Don’t hesitate to reach out to learn more or to discuss idea & innovation management!