Jason Cohen created a list of “wild” questions to generate ideas in business1:
- If you were forced to increase your prices by 10x, what would you have to do to justify it?
- If all our customers vanished, and we had to earn our growth and brand from scratch, what would we do?
- If you were never allowed to provide tech support, in any form, what would have to change?
- What would be the most fun thing to build (has to be related to our product and market)?
- If our biggest competitor copied every single feature we have, how do we still win?
- What if we are forced to ship a full, completed (at least MVP) new feature, in just two weeks, that would delight and surprise some fraction of our customers. How would we do that?
- What if you were forced to charge customers in a completely different manner?
- If you were not allowed to have a website, how would you still grow your business?
- What if you made your most introverted teammates’ dreams come true: No more synchronous meetings, ever again?
- If we could never talk to our customers again, how would we figure out what to build?
- What if it didn’t matter how unprofitable you were?
- What if you could change anything, regardless of what anyone thinks or feels?
- What externality has the potential to kill the entire company?
- What if you could only ship one thing this year?
1. Cohen, J. Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas. (2022).