Very good post. But I was wondering how you value your ideas up front? Also, any scope for going back and revaluing it (e.g. if it brought in much more revenue than expected, with little work required i.e. little dilution) during your regular valuation meetings?
I'd be interested to know, a year down the line, whether these frequent meetings ultimately were a productive and motivational use of your time? On reading your article, it certainly seems like a good way to do things, but it'd be nice to have it run its course and then view it in retrospect!
As far as valuing ideas up front, we plotted them at discrete points in the creative process. There was one particular "critical" meeting we used early on as a landmark, because a lot of our product ideas came out that day. We would ask ourselves "what % of our value was idea X before that meeting?" Then we would extrapolate it to a year out, to see if the slope of decay looked right to us. With some linear interpolation, we came up with a number along its decay line that represented its value today.
Revaluing things retrospectively isn't something that we've talked about yet but it's certainly a space for further exploration. I think our hope is that there will be enough time delay between someone proposing an idea and its valuation that we'll have some actual customer data or feedback that we can evaluate.
As to the long-term viability of our system, only time will tell :-)
I'd be interested to know, a year down the line, whether these frequent meetings ultimately were a productive and motivational use of your time? On reading your article, it certainly seems like a good way to do things, but it'd be nice to have it run its course and then view it in retrospect!