We’ve all been there. You helped facilitate a great brainstorming session with your client. You’re celebrating your swift methods of guiding a room full of otherwise political combatants to find common ground, to agree on their mission as a business. And as you look across this new horizon of possibility, you look down and realize you are standing in a sea of sticky notes.

You know what I’m talking about: The aftermath of a brainstorming session. It’s as if the ball just dropped in Times Square and you’re swimming through the air, thick with confetti. But these ain’t no confetti. These are moments of brilliance. These are ideas that are going to help your client climb to the top of the competitive heap.

And then there’s the hangover. Those dozens and dozens of sticky notes aren’t going to magically digitize. It’s your job to do something with them. And then you have your own stroke of brilliance: Microsoft Excel. Yes. I will put all of these into a spreadsheet, you tell yourself. And I can create a fancy algorithm to rank them for priority, you continue thinking. No, I’ll just Google it! There’s gotta be a spreadsheet that someone else has created!

And then you sigh.

Whether this situation has happened to you on client work, or with your internal team, or maybe through a product development process you manage, there are many inherent problems with this. Excel is where many things go to die, and ideas for improving your business, your product, your thing, are no exception.

This is why I’ve been working with my friends at Refactr to create Haystack MileMarker, a tool that helps companies capture ideas, prioritize them and create plans to execute on the best of them. We believe there needs to be a much easier way to capture all of the great ideas that organizations and their customers have. We believe there has to be a better way to organize them and create greater visibility of them. And most importantly, we believe there needs to be a better way to prioritize what’s good and what’s not so good. We believe that Haystack MileMarker is the answer.

As we’ve thought about how to position Haystack MileMarker, I’ve tried to convince myself that “idea management” isn’t the right category to stick it in. Sure, it’s got idea capture and organization. And, heck yeah, it’s got the ability to score or vote for ideas. Planning and promotion of ideas, you ask? Sure, we’ve got that covered.

But it is so much more than “idea management.” It’s a product management tool. It’s a software roadmap tool. It’s a community feedback tool. It’s an employee feedback tool. And, yes, it’s an idea management tool.

So, how do we wrap up all of that goodness into one phrase that perfectly describes it? Well, it’s safe to say that…we’re open to ideas.

(BTW – Our public teaser site is up (http://getmilemarker.com) and Haystack MileMarker will be ready for beta by early December January. Email me if you want to know more or if you want to participate in the beta.)