By Teresa Torres · producttalk.org · @ttorres on X · LinkedIn
Teresa Torres describes rolling out Kindling, a simple idea management app, across her company to make product input more transparent and data-driven. She wanted an easy tool that everyone would use to share and vote on ideas rather than a feature-heavy platform. She outlines three use cases: letting teams prioritize feedback on their daily pain points, opening company-wide problem solving, and communicating what is being built, why, and when. After under three months, participation was high and many ideas moved toward development. The piece matters because it shows how lightweight tooling can shift product decisions from a closed product team to a shared company conversation.
01Key takeaways
- Use a limited vote budget per team to surface which requests truly matter versus momentary urgency.
- Open idea generation to the whole company, since product problems are not solved by product and engineering alone.
- Use a shared idea space to explain why ideas are accepted, deferred, or declined, reducing repeated frustration.
- Prefer a simple tool everyone will use regularly over a feature-rich platform nobody adopts.
- Transparent idea pipelines shift product direction from what the product team wants to what the company needs.
02Key sections
- Choosing a simple tool
- Torres explains that many idea management apps exist, but she wanted a simple interface everyone would use regularly. She deliberately skipped advanced features like customer access and segmentation.
- Team-level feedback with limited votes
- Each group gets a category to suggest improvements and distributes a limited number of votes. This helps the product team separate momentary urgency from truly high-impact needs.
- Company-wide problem solving
- Torres invites everyone, not just product and engineering, to generate and vote on solutions to hard company challenges, letting the best ideas rise.
- Communicating what gets built and why
- The tool is used to explain decisions, timelines, and rejected requests, so teams can respond to customers and build shared knowledge of what the company does and doesn't do.
- Early results
- After under three months, 25 of 27 employees participated, generating 167 ideas, with many approved or completed and only two declined.
03From the post
“I recently rolled out Kindling, an idea management app, across my company. If you aren't familiar with idea management apps, there's no shortage of them. This blog lists 44. The idea is to get more people involved in idea generation and evaluation. The various software packages are designed”
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.