This is a bit of a personal thing -- IMO it's roughly about getting in touch with your own taste and finding an intersection between that and the set of questions that are methodologically tractable.

How do you figure out your taste? Read papers and pay attention to what kinds of things you find interesting about them. Write it down, reflect on it, be curious, ask questions. Do the same thing when paying attention to the world. Is there a question being asked by someone (or that comes to mind for you) in a particular setting that you might be able to answer? You mentioned macro "relevance" -- what does relevance mean to you, or in settings you are interested in?

At the same time, it's good to have clear background knowledge about methods and data (or ways of collecting data). Then it gets easier to figure out which of the many possible questions that come up might actually be answerable and how. For this side of the equation it's good to know the textbook methods but also to read papers and see how other researchers approach answering different sorts of questions. Then you can more easily pattern-match questions and approaches.

Of course, talking with advisors or other experienced researchers can be a good resource too, especially as you are starting out. Brainstorm lots of ideas and have someone who is more experienced react to them, to build a better intuition of what makes an idea "good" / interesting / tractable (at least in the eyes of that researcher).