Identifying and Prioritising Ideas With Impact with Wowzers.

Written by Nick Brock

July 26, 2023

#BackToBasics

Do you ever worry whether you’re prioritising the right thing to grow your business? There are 101 things you could do, but should you?

The truth is, many entrepreneurs and business owners obsess over ‘little chores’. Itches that feel good to scratch but yield little long-term benefit.

But it’s not just business owners. Left to their own devices, team members are prone to whittle away hours on activities with diminishing returns.

You need a way to identify and focus on high-impact work. And at the same time, put a halt to activities that don’t drive impact.

In this article, we’ll explore Wowzers idea rating methodology, Rate&Rank, and how it helps you identify the keepers from the stinkers.

Why rate and rank ideas?

Ideas are two a penny. Many entrepreneurs have hundreds of ideas. What they lack is the resource (time, knowledge, money) to execute them.

The reality is you can only do so much, so what you choose to do is paramount.

You need a methodology for accessing and comparing ideas so that you can make an informed decision on what to prioritise and, crucially, what not to.

What are the benefits of rating and ranking ideas?

Applying a methodology that can help you quickly and easily distinguish the great ideas from the also-rans has several business benefits, namely:

#1 You have a semi-scientific way of deciding what to work on next. Once which is impact-centric. This is particularly important when there are multiple strong ideas, and nobody can decide which one to prioritise.

#2 You can remove emotion from the decision-making process. Otherwise, we tend to favour ideas that feel good to solve but have limited business impact.

#3 You give everyone a voice. Otherwise, what tends to happen is the person with the highest authority or is the best at selling their idea sways the vote.

How Rate&Rank helps you identify and prioritise ideas with impact.

Rate&Rank. It’s what it says on the tin.

Get your team to rate your ideas, prioritising those with the highest score. These will be the ones that, should they prove successful, have the greatest likelihood of driving impact for your business.

Rate&Rank is our semi-scientific methodology that invites your team to rate ideas based on five criteria, namely:

Probability: Likelihood of success.
Impact: Impact on your business if the idea was successful.
Ease: How easy is it to pull off based on knowledge and resources.
Time: How much effort is required to deliver this idea.
Happiness: How motivated are you to pursue this idea.

You rate each idea using a logarithmic scale. For example, Probability gives your five options – “certain”, “likely”, “possible”, “unlikely”, and “rare”. (We used a logarithmic scale because we found that numerical scales (1-10) caused confusion as to whether 1 or 10 was high or low in given situations).

Once you have rated the idea for each criteria, your final score is calculated and added to the average for the idea as a whole. What you rated is kept private. You can see who else rated but not what they rated. This helps prevents team members from pressuring others to manipulate their score.

To see which ideas have the highest score, sort your ideas on any WowzersWorkflow board by Rate&Rank score. The ideas with the highest score are the ones you should pursue, as they are mostly likely to deliver the greatest impact.

When to rate ideas?

Whenever you have multiple ideas and want to know which to pursue. This is particularly important when brainstorming around goals/objectives or when you have a new campaign and want to figure out what to do.

How should you go about rating ideas?

Every work item in Wowzers can be rated. However, not everything should. Work that must be done for legal or statutory reasons are great examples of work items that should not be rated. We term critical work that does not deliver impact “hygiene”.

So now you know what not to rate, but how should you go about coordinating idea rating?

Well, ideas don’t rate themselves. Left to their own devices, your team are unlikely to take it upon themselves to rate them too. We suggest blocking out time in the diary to bring the team together and rate each idea in turn. Wash and repeat for every idea you want to rate.

Who should rate ideas?

In an ideal world, everyone involved in delivering the idea, and at the very least, it should be a representative from each team involved in delivering the idea. For example, for a marketing campaign, someone from dev, marketing and possibly legal, as well as the business owners.

Anything else I should know?

To rate an idea in Wowzers, first create a workflow board and capture each
idea as a card. Ensure the Rate&Rank block is enabled. Then follow the
tips in this article to start rating your ideas.

Want to rate and rank your ideas? Sign up for Wowzers, and we’ll get you’ll
be working on your best ideas in no time.

*Wowzers.io is the idea, goal and project management solution that helps busy business owners identify the activities that move the money needle. One tool for all your work and teams. Tried and tested on our own businesses. Learn more.