You have more ideas than capacity, and everyone in the room has a different favourite. I gather the evidence that shows where the real opportunities are, sharpen them into statements you can compare, and leave your team a decision it can still defend in the next meeting.
“Which of these should we build? And how do we know it’s the right one?”
An idea list is not a plan. What turns it into one is evidence about which problem is worth solving, statements sharp enough to compare, and criteria that still hold when the loudest person in the room disagrees.
Three phases, each ending with something the next one needs: evidence, then comparable statements, then a decision. What that looks like in practice is in the German Red Cross case — six research themes condensed into three prioritised problem statements.
Before anything gets ranked, we need to know what is actually there. User interviews, your existing analytics, support tickets and market signals together show where people struggle and where the gaps are — including the opportunities nobody had written on the list.
An idea is not comparable; a problem statement is. Each candidate becomes one sentence naming the user, the need and the evidence behind it. Ideas that cannot survive that sentence tend to fall away on their own.
Then we rank against criteria you agreed on before anyone saw the scores — impact, confidence, effort and strategic fit. You leave with one decision, the reasoning written down, and the runners-up parked rather than forgotten.
Before anything gets ranked, we need to know what is actually there. User interviews, your existing analytics, support tickets and market signals together show where people struggle and where the gaps are — including the opportunities nobody had written on the list.
An idea is not comparable; a problem statement is. Each candidate becomes one sentence naming the user, the need and the evidence behind it. Ideas that cannot survive that sentence tend to fall away on their own.
Then we rank against criteria you agreed on before anyone saw the scores — impact, confidence, effort and strategic fit. You leave with one decision, the reasoning written down, and the runners-up parked rather than forgotten.
Evidence first, then sharp statements, then a ranked decision. You end up with one bet your team understands and a method it can run again without me.
Sprint, two to four weeks
This is the stage before the three questions that follow — when there are several reasonable directions and no agreed basis for choosing between them.
Every idea has a sponsor, none has evidence, and the roadmap goes to whoever argues longest.
You get a ranked shortlist with the reasoning written down.
With limited runway, building the wrong thing first is not a delay. It is the company.
You get the riskiest assumption named before you spend on it.
The initiative needs a defensible basis, not a persuasive deck. What survives questioning is evidence.
You get criteria agreed in advance and a decision you can present.
Not by scoring ideas against each other, because ideas are not comparable — they are described at different levels of detail by people with different stakes. First each candidate becomes a problem statement naming the user, the need and the evidence. Only then do you rank, against criteria agreed before anyone saw the scores. The order of those two steps is what keeps the result from being a popularity contest.
An idea is a proposed solution. An opportunity is a problem worth solving, stated together with the evidence that it exists. „A chat function“ is an idea. „Young people stop before the first contact because they are afraid of being recognised“ is an opportunity — and it admits several solutions, which is exactly what you want this early.
Usually two to four weeks. The gathering stage takes the most time, because interviews have to be scheduled around real people. The decision workshop itself is a day. If the evidence already exists inside your organisation and only needs synthesising, it can be shorter.
There is a workshop in it, and it is the smallest part. A workshop without evidence beforehand produces the ranking the room would have produced anyway, only with sticky notes. The work is what happens before it: talking to users, reading what your own data already says, and writing statements sharp enough to disagree with.
Then this is short and cheap insurance. We write down what would have to be true for that choice to be right and test the riskiest of those statements. Often it holds and you proceed with more confidence. Sometimes it does not, and you learned that in two weeks instead of after two quarters.
A free 30-minute call. No pitch, no pressure — just an honest look at your list and whether I can help.