You’re right — ideation is key, and especially now that so many applications look more and more alike. Discounting the engineering efforts required, it’s easy to track competitors and pile on features as best practices emerge around the most useful ones. But to take inspiration from the marketplace, rather than from your own DNA, is to sell yourself short.

Ideas that fall from the sky, as in the lightning bolts that will have you leaping out of the bathtub screaming “Eureka!” come only once in a while, and are too spontaneous to plan into any dev cycle! But the ideas that extend and enhance your product are lurking around every corner: they’re ideas waiting to happen because they make so much sense. Those are the kinds of ideas whose value you recognize when you see them. Not only because they make sense to you and your product, because you can recognize them.

Use your peripheral vision and you’ll better catch what’s right in front of you!

cheers,
adrian