You need an #ideation channel

December 09, 2025

A company works a lot like a neural network: ideas propagate, weights shift, and the system learns. The problem is that in most teams, only founders and PMs ever get to adjust the weights. Everyone else is part of the forward pass, but never the backprop.

At V7, we opened this up by creating an #ideation channel: a place where anyone in the company can asynchronously post product ideas. These can be new features, sharp corners that need sanding, or half-baked thoughts that might, in the right person's brain, turn into something genuinely useful.

Each post is a tiny gradient update in the readers' brains. Most of them won't become features. But they all move the collective state just a little bit closer to "better".

Here's what made it work.

Posting

Short Loom videos (1-8 minutes) paired with low-fidelity wireframes (Whimsical ❤️, FigJam, etc.) turned out to be the most effective format. They're the closest thing I've found to asynchronous whiteboard sessions.

The ideal structure is simple:

• Start with the status quo
  Give anyone enough context to follow without being an expert.
• Explain why the status quo isn't good enough
  What's broken? What's confusing? What's annoying?
• Walk through possible improvements
  Include pros, cons, uncertainties, and open questions.

A recent example: a 2-minute Loom from someone on the Talent team highlighting a small but painful workflow issue they kept running into. No polish: just a simple screen recording and a "could this be better?" This kicked off a thread of comments that snowballed into a fix helping several teams.

It's important not to hide unresolved problems; someone else might have the missing puzzle piece. The tone should always stay humble, you're inviting discussion, not dictating the final design.

Videos work because they're high-bandwidth. They let you convey not just the "what" but the thinking that got you there. And since they're asynchronous, you naturally anticipate the questions of the viewer.

Short text posts or vibe-coded prototypes also add value. But full PRDs don't belong in #ideation; that's further down the funnel. High-fidelity designs tend to anchor people on what something looks like, not how it works.

Some ideas will be misguided, and that's fine. They may still spark the right one.

Replying

Replying is arguably more important than posting. It's what keeps the channel alive rather than becoming a graveyard of one-way Looms.

Tell colleagues what resonated, what confused you, or what you think they might have missed. But do it humbly. It's better to ask:

"Why do you see X as a problem, given Y?"

than:

"X isn't a problem."

Fast engagement matters. If someone stepped out of their comfort zone to record a Loom, they should feel heard. Positive reinforcement increases the chance they'll post again.

Everyone's early posts are awkward. Mine certainly were. Like anything else, you get better with practice.

Pitfalls

With everyone participating, it's easy to confuse popularity with priority. A well-liked idea isn't necessarily the right one to build. Ideas are raw ingredients; PMs decide which ones belong in the final dish and which should stay in the freezer for another six months.

Sometimes great ideas simply don't fit the current roadmap. Timing matters as much as quality.

Another pitfall: over-formalizing participation. Don't mandate posting. Most people will lurk and maybe share one idea a year, and that's normal. This is about maintaining an open idea highway, not forcing creativity on a schedule.

At V7, this naturally settled into roughly 1-4 ideation posts per day across the company. Enough volume to stay lively, not so much that it becomes noise.

Also: not everything needs to go through PMs. If a product engineer knows exactly what to do, they should ship it behind a feature flag and get on with their day.

Finally, cross-functional input is essential. At V7, sales and marketing account for 10-15% of ideation posts. Some of our sharpest "why do we do it this way?" moments come from people who don't live inside the product all day.

Conclusion

Small, colocated teams can stay aligned informally. But as you grow, you need a transparent and culturally ingrained way to share ideas across time zones, departments, and levels of experience.

An open ideation channel helps build a culture where everyone contributes to making the product better, even people who work one or two steps removed from day-to-day product development. It gives people permission to think like owners and steer the product in ways no single team could do alone.¹