How We Used Kindling at AfterCollege to Engage Everyone in Idea Generation

Teresa Torres describes how she rolled out the idea management tool Kindling at AfterCollege so that everyone in the company could contribute to idea generation and evaluation. The approach worked because it had clear use cases (company goals, open-ended submissions, and department needs), a voting system that created scarcity, and transparency about how ideas were chosen and where they stood. Her core point is that involving everyone is hard in practice, but with thoughtful structure it produces better ideas, builds trust in product decisions, and reduces the pressure of urgent requests.

01Key takeaways

• Give idea generation clear use cases, such as goal-based campaigns, open submissions, and department requests, so people know when and how to contribute.
• Seed campaigns with your own ideas so contributors can react and build on suggestions rather than facing a blank screen.
• Use limited votes to create scarcity, forcing people to weigh which ideas matter most, while keeping final roadmap authority with the product team.
• Explain why ideas are accepted or declined; visible reasoning builds trust even when people disagree with the outcome.
• Publish clear idea statuses from open through completed, and update them on a regular cadence to give the whole company cheap, reliable visibility.

02Key sections

Clear use cases

Kindling was used for three purposes: time-bound campaigns asking for help reaching quarterly goals, an open category for any idea at any time, and department categories for internal needs. The product team seeded campaigns with its own ideas so people weren't starting from a blank page.

Voting as feedback, not a mandate

Each person got a limited number of votes per category, creating scarcity that forced prioritization. Voting informed the product team's decisions but did not dictate the roadmap, and ideas revisited because of strong support sometimes proved valuable.

Transparency and procedural justice

The team explained its assessments of each idea, including why ideas were declined or lost to similar ones, and invited pushback. This openness widened the team's view of problems and helped people accept decisions they disagreed with.

Setting expectations through idea states

Custom statuses such as Open, Accepted, On Roadmap, In Backlog, In Development, On Staging, and Completed told the whole company where each idea stood. A short weekly update kept this visible with little overhead.

Friction as a filter

Asking people to submit requests through the tool instead of acting on them immediately gave urgent-feeling requests a day or two to prove their importance, which helped the team separate true priorities from momentary demands.

03From the post

“It’s easy to talk about idea management. It’s much harder to do it in practice. Including everyone in idea generation in a way that is productive takes effort. Collecting feedback on each idea can be tedious. But we know involving everyone in idea evaluation leads to better outcomes.”

04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.