How can I find impactful project ideas and articulate them faster?

I think what you're doing is very reasonable and is more or less how I would approach things in a mature product org. What's the bottleneck here? Is it collaborating with user research, getting buy-in, or just coming up with the raw ideas to begin with?

One approach to make this process go faster is to just try things directly. Instead of trying to pull metrics, collaborate with UXR, consult with designers about whether the idea adheres to your product's design guidelines, etc, you simply do the following after you come up with an idea through your personal intuition/product sense:

1. Build a hacky prototype
2. Record a sick video demo of #1
3. Share #2 in a Workplace post and get feedback. Ask if you can run the experiment behind a 1%/1% A/B test
4. There's a decent chance leadership reading your post from #3 will feel bad making you throw away all the code away, so they green light your experiment (it's small and you can always just shut it down)
5. If your experiment is metrics-positive, congratulations!

This is what a prodigy engineer teammate of mine did constantly back at Instagram Ads, growing from E3 -> E6 in a little over 2 years. He's actually E8 now (so E3 -> E8 in <6 years, which is insane).

The problem is that if your org is super top-down, this strategy might not work.

Here's another good thread about coming up with ideas: "How do I come up with innovative, impactful ideas and bring them to my team?"

I like this one too: "How can I come up with big initiatives, especially those at a Staff level?"

Product ideas can take a long time to mature (Meta is so massive and bureaucratic now), so it's important to have an open mind and looking for engineering-oriented scope as well.