Once an idea makes it to the top of the list, the first thing that's done is for a product manager to talk to the stakeholders to flesh out the idea and to come up with a set of “requirements.”
These requirements might be user stories, or they might be more like some form of a functional specification. Their purpose is to communicate with the designers and engineers what needs to be built.
Once the requirements are gathered up, the user experience design team (assuming the company has such a team), is asked to provide the interaction design, the visual design, and, in cases of physical devices, the industrial design.