It’s important to believe in your ideas, prove to yourself they are useful, identify metrics that can quantity benefits, build a proof of concept, and fail fast.
It is also important to have the right expectations for your ideas and know that only 1 out of 10 ideas succeed. 90% of your ideas will fail but the return you get on the remaining 10% is much higher than the downside of 90% of failed ideas
Below are the steps you can take once you have an idea. The idea could be a new tool, a new feature, or a new process:
Share the idea with as many people as you can. Hearing diverse perspectives will help shape your idea and debunk your assumptions.
Quantify the value of your idea. Ideally, target ideas that have a meaningful impact either on the business or on the productivity of the team.
Get permission to spend 20% of your time validating a proof of concept. Include your leads as the success of the idea depends on how many folks are backing it.
Make a detailed proposal showing the proof of concept, propose a timeline, effort estimate, and cross-functional dependencies.
Fail Fast: you can get too attached to the idea. If you see no clear benefits and it is hard to make progress then give up. There are many ideas out there and the timing of the idea matters more than the idea itself.
Voila: once the prototype is built, stakeholders are convinced and agree on investment then you are set to take it to next level by giving it all to make the idea successful.