Often, I come across candidates who check every other box - they ask thoughtful questions, analyze the users and problem space, and clearly define success metrics. But when it came time to brainstorming features, they fell flat - recycling existing concepts, proposing incremental tweaks, or merely presenting a handful of ideas when prompted for more. More often than not this means "no hire". 


It's okay to not have all of your ideas creative and 10X; what matters is having at least some that showcase your ability to think big and rally teams around an inspired vision.

Here are some powerful brainstorming techniques:

#1 Anchor Ideas to New Technologies
Ask how emerging tech could improve a product. For example:

• How could AR/VR make Google Maps more useful?
• Can we use solar geo-engineering to reduce global warming?

This technique makes it easier to envision future possibilities. Maintain a mental list of emerging tech and associated capabilities that can be mapped to a product:

• Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR): Overlay of digital information, real-time interaction, markerless tracking, spatial awareness, collaborative AR, immersive experience, head tracking to detect user movement, motion controllers to manipulate object in virtual space, room-scale VR, 360-degree VR, Haptic VR (simulate the sense of touch), multi-sensory experience (engage sight, sound, and touch)   
• GenAI: This is one of hottest technologies at this time and of interest to most firms. Some capabilities that can be useful include - text generation, code generation, multimodal capabilities - image, video, and audio as input and output, transfer learning (use model trained on one task to a related task), explainable AI (explain diagnostic to medical professional) 
• Distributed computing 
• Open source: It makes sense to go the open source route when you want to build an ecosystem around the product, offer transparency, gain developer mindshare (vs buyers), and leverage collaborative development. Open source also means built-in freemium model, which is a powerful funnel for onboarding developers. 
• API Economy: Firms either surfacing APIs for others to build or leveraging third-party APIs for experience not core to their business. Example of surfacing APIs is marketplace or platform that firms offers to build application on top their services (Play Store, AWS Marketplace, ChatGPT plugins etc) 
• Blockchain: Decentralized and distributed ledger, transparency (all participants can see transactions records), smart contracts (self executing if conditions are met), immutable record keeping, tokenization of assets, consensus mechanism (agree on single source of truth), 
• Traditional AI/ML: Pattern recognition, object detection, voice recognition, speech detection, face detection, voice typing etc 
• 3D photo and communication 
• Space technologies - colonies on moon and mars: Our life will be changed a lot with some of space technologies in sight such as asteroid mining, self-sufficient space habitats, hypersonic point-to-point travel, space-based solar power, space-based manufacturing in microgravity environments, vertical farms in microgravity environments etc

#2 Use Conceptual Analogies
Many great inventions were sparked by conceptual analogies:

• Airplane - The Wright brothers compared flight to balancing a bicycle, realizing both involve nuanced control in three dimensions.
• Assembly Line - A Ford mechanic realized car production was analogous to a meatpacking plant with carcasses moving along overhead trolleys.
• Velcro - George de Mestral modeled Velcro's clinging hooks after the burrs that stuck to his dog. He observed the hooks gripping fur under a microscope.
• Barcode - Inspired by recognizing that Morse code’s dot/dash patterns could encode product information.

Study products in other industries for inspiration. Identify key similarities, even if not perfect analogies.

For example, improve Maps using ideas from cars:

• Manage rich supplier network for diverse data like traffic or weather.
• Launch navigation modes for different commute needs - scenic, efficient.
• Partner with other map solutions on self-driving standards.

#3 Use Sci-Fi and Fiction
Sci-fi movies and fiction such as Harry Potter can be great inspiration for futuristic ideas (magic). Here are some futuristic product ideas inspired by concepts from the Harry Potter universe:

• Invisibility Cloak: Cloak that makes the wearer invisible with metamaterials that bend light using magic/advanced nanotechnology
• Living Photograph: A digital memory device like Phineas Nigellus photograph in Headmaster's office that stores the digital footprint of a deceased person as a Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) source for multimodal LLM answer how the deceased person would 
• Metamorphmagus Virtual Reality: Full body, physical transformation like the shape-shifting witch Nymphadora Tonks allowing people to change their appearance, age, gender virtually  
• SONAR Detection Wand: Exploratory scanning device that uses ultrasound waves to detect hidden/underground objects without digging like ground-penetrating radar like "Accio object"
• VR Pensieve Meeting Rooms: Group VR system that reconstructs first person, 360 degree memories of meeting rooms from users’ minds for telepresence

#4 SCAMPER
SCAMPER is a creative brainstorming technique that uses different prompts to help generate new ideas and innovations. It stands for:

• S - Substitute - Replace parts of the existing concept with something else
• C - Combine - Integrate two or more concepts into one
• A - Adapt - Modify to suit a different context or audience
• M - Modify - Make adjustments like more/less time, color, cost
• P - Put to other uses - Find new ways to utilize something
• E - Eliminate - Remove elements or simplify
• R - Rearrange/Reverse - Change order, sequence, orientation