Pitching your ideas, and why its important to understand how
Ideas are worthless until you get it out of your head to see what they can do
each and every single one of us had done some sort of pitching in their life…
heck, even a child trying to convince their parents to buy them their favorite toy is a form of pitching. pitching ideas or products to other people is a skill that everyone should have and master. if you could not convince or “sell” your idea, no one would ever know what you want or wishes to do.
in this short post, I will try to explain how to pitch a simple idea to your stakeholders, with a real-life project example to top it off.
lets goo!
So, how should you pitch an idea?
as stated above, an idea could be anything really. from new products to a holiday destination, what to do next summer to the name of our new brand.
but how do you really go about pitching one?
so, in my humble opinion, there are only 2 things to pay attention to when pitching an idea in general.
- identify the problem
- offer solutions
yes, that's it. when you want to state or offer up something as an idea, make sure to at least follow those steps.
uhhh I don't get it? what does it mean?
identifying the problem means knowing what you are throwing out your ideas for. the “problem” could be anything of interest for you and the people that you are trying to convince.
holiday destinations? a new brand name? an update or a new UI?
it really won't matter but the point is that you HAVE to know what or why you are pitching your ideas for.
the next thing to do is that you would offer solutions.
you would offer a solution(s) based on the problem that you had identified in the previous step
- what to eat? why don't we try Mcdonalds today
- sales going down? let's allocate more budget to marketing this year
- low user conversion rates? let us try to fix the UI
the main point is that you offer up a solution to a problem. if your ideas could potentially fix the problems of your stakeholders or provide some meaningful benefit into solving them, then it would have some value.
if not, then you would better of keeping those ideas to yourself.
Pitching an idea in a software project
so recently I have been blessed with the experience of working on a software project with several amazing people and stakeholders and to give you guys a better view on pitching off ideas, I will give examples of how my team would bring new ideas to the UI update for a new feature on the product.
step 1. Identifying the problem
after seeing the current UI, the stakeholders decided that they want to be able to create new documents to increase productivity and provide a better workflow directly on the search page of the application.
Therefore, we proposed a new feature to let the user create documents using buttons.
step 2. offer solutions
in response to that problem, we propose this design to fulfill the needs of the stakeholders.
first, we propose the creation of the documents is done by using a floating button, by implementing this design we put an overlay on the entire UI so that the user would just focus entirely on the action provided.
it resulted in the agreement on the idea of using a button to create documents, but the stakeholders were not necessarily keen on the idea of a floating button, but in the end, it doesn't matter! adjustments and development of ideas are also important in a pitch, thus discussions are inevitable or even encouraged in these types of situations.
take a look at the final design that we agreed on, it had a different placement but the main features and functions were kept as it is.
what matters, in the end, is that you would be able to express your ideas on the current problem, the end result will always be a collective agreement anyway 😄.
Final thoughts
the most important thing about pitching an idea is just that.
you identify the problem, then propose a solution.
if you could implement this in your daily lives, I truly believe that it could be practiced by anyone and everyone on a lot of important circumstances.
that it for today folks! I truly hope that this simple, short yet somewhat meaningful article could provide you some value.
see you next time 🐥
