The 5x5 Product Manager Guide to Online Brainstorming
Your quick guide to running great brainstorming sessions with distributed teams
Writer Introduction
Let’s start some storms.
Maybe your company is trying to do something This “5x5” guide will get you started. We’ll share: new. Something different. ■ 5 online brainstorming use cases Or you’re stuck in a rut and need to shake things up. ■ 5 principles ■ 5 techniques Or maybe you just want to get a group of smart, talented ■ 5 examples colleagues together to spark some innovation. ■ 5 ways to learn more OperationsJulie But—there’s always a but—your team isn’t all in one place (whose is anymore?). We’ll also drop in some shameless plugs for Freehand as we’re convinced it is the world’s best tool for running Congrats: you’re in the Online Brainstorming zone— online brainstorming sessions. Not because we made the perfect time to design and run a fast, furious and fun online it (that too) but because it’s designed for anyone and brainstorming session that can unlock everyone’s creativity everyone to start using today—without any training or and generate ideas that just might change the world. licenses or complicated toolbars. Product Manager
But this isn’t a sales pitch. We’re here to get you going.
Let’s do this!
Marketing
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 2 But first, a definition:
What’s brainstorming?
We’re going with Wikipedia here:
Brainstorming is a group creativity technique designed “ to find a conclusion for a specific problem by gathering a list of ideas spontaneously contributed by its members. ...a group of people generate new ideas... by removing inhibitions. People are able to think more freely and suggest as many spontaneous Love that: “Specific problem”. “Spontaneous”. Nailed it. The entry goes on: new ideas as possible. All the ideas are noted down without criticism and after the brainstorming session the ideas are evaluated.”
Writer Even better: “Removing inhibitions”. “Without criticism”. Boom.
That’s the power of brainstorming in a few words.
Excited yet?
Designer
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 3 But first, a definition:
Why brainstorm at all?
Brainstorming is an incredibly easy way to do some important things that every business depends on: Everyone is creative!
Generate new ideas fast Get everyone involved Brainstorming works because it Brainstorming creates the sparks that Assemble a diverse group—with people unleashes the creativity that’s boiling start (friendly) fires. from different teams, different roles and and bubbling inside every single one levels of experience—then stand back: of us. If you don’t think everyone is Let go of assumptions interesting things are about to happen. (And creative, you haven’t been to a great Because the single biggest obstacle to because more people were involved, they’re brainstorming session lately. It’s what innovation is an unconscious allegiance way more likely to embrace the outcome). makes us human (also thumbs). to “the way we’ve always done things.” Reduce Innovation Friction Most innovation stalls at the very beginning: because no one took the time to explore new possibilities and imagine weird and wonderful futures.
We have nothing against the Comfort Zone. But it’s not where insanely great ideas get born. For that, you need to break from your daily work routine and get storming.
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 4 But first, a definition:
Why now and why online?
Virus or no virus, remote and hybrid work are The good news: the tools are definitely here! here to stay. Online whiteboarding—the essential ingredient for great online brainstorms—aren’t just “as good as” physical, squeaky ones: HR We’ll all be working on teams where members they’re way, way better. aren’t in the same time zone much less the same room. Why online is better than ‘meatspace’ whiteboards
■ There’s no space limit – No edges. No top. No bottom. We think that’s a great thing: it opens up the talent pool, Just glorious space. And unlike a physical location you increases diversity and supports the kind of flexibility can involve anyone wherever they are without worrying that makes work happier. (Fun fact: InVision has always about how full that meeting room is going to be. been a fully remote team—it’s a great way to work!) ■ You can copy and cut and paste and move stuff around to your heart’s content (without needing a degree in design) ■ You never have to erase the results so you can keep using But there’s a potential downside to working from the brainstorm as a resource to refer back to whenever you anywhere: collaboration can suffer. Most of us are need—and to keep adding to. not yet used to effective online collaboration. That’s changing fast. ■ It’s way more secure than a board in a room with, like, glass walls, so only those with permission get access. ■ It’s stupid-proof – No one can accidentally use that permanent marker, ruining it for everyone (looking at you, Natalie). Operations
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 5 But first, a definition:
“
Having tools that allow for digital brainstorming and virtual iteration is crucial in a remote team setting… Brainstorming does, in fact, require a whiteboard— but that whiteboard doesn’t have to be physical.”
Ana Ferreira Head of Design Doist Here’s the thing: As online brainstorming becomes bigger and bigger (trust us, it’s exploding), the online whiteboard tool you choose for your company becomes a really big decision.
The right online whiteboard tool is a critical part of every collaboration stack. You need to find one suited for the purpose. One that includes everyone, even your most phobic technophobes.
Let’s start the 5x5 part:
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 6 Writer
Let’s get started 5 online brainstorming use cases Brainstorming is good for a zillion things. Here are five:
Research
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 7 5 online brainstorming use cases
Brainstorming for Customer Experience
Innovating in CX is the most important innovation you can do. That’s why sales, marketing and customer service teams are all over brainstorming for things like:
■ Campaign planning ■ Message flows ■ Product launches ■ Content ideas ■ Event planning ■ New ways to overcome objections...
Check out Asana’s Marketing Project Plan template— an incredibly powerful way to go from a standing start to a focused strategy.
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 8 5 online brainstorming use cases
Brainstorming for Distributed Product Teams
The Doist Design team has eight members spread over 6 countries. Online brainstorming is baked into their collaboration stack, for things like: Designer ■ New features ■ New product ideas and designs Super useful ■ Planning launches ■ Creating user flows ■ Swarming product challenges…
This Product Launch template is a great place to start. What story do you want to tell?
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 9 5 online brainstorming use cases
Brainstorming for HR teams
Brainstorming is a people thing. HR teams are embracing it to bridge the distances in remote work for things like:
■ New cohort team-building ■ Employer brand ideas ■ Job spec development ■ Well-being program ideas ■ Onboarding and remote interviews ■ Group activities…
Automattic even hosted their annual holiday party on Freehand. Think big!
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 10 5 online brainstorming use cases
Brainstorming for Operations
Ops people make the working world go around. And they do it by aligning teams and integrating work. Brainstorming helps them do it:
■ Workflow ideation ■ Re-thinking processes ■ Solving ops problems ■ Assigning roles and responsibilities ■ Aligning stakeholders on OKRs...
Check out this Problem prioritization template by New Haircut, the innovation strategy firm with the world’s coolest name.
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 11 5 online brainstorming use cases
Brainstorming for IT departments
Remote and hybrid work wouldn’t be possible without the unsung heroes of IT. Not surprisingly, they’ve also discovered brainstorming for their own processes, including:
■ Ideas for new support channels ■ Collecting stakeholder needs ■ Migration planning ■ Platform prioritization ■ Consolidating the tool stack ■ New ways to leverage legacy tech...
Of course, security is hugely important to IT people— so you need a whiteboard tool that gets that.
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 12 5 Principles of Online Marketing Brainstorming
To make sure your next brainstorm is effective and engaging, follow these Writer simple principles:
Product Manager
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 13 5 Principles of Online Brainstorming
Prepare and be clear
You need to start with a clearly defined question or issue. It can be focused—“How can we improve Product X?”—or big, hairy and audacious— “How can we change the world?”—but it has to be clearly defined for all. HR That’s where your pre-brainstorm preparation comes in. Set the question and clarify the rules of the session and timings for each part. Having a lead who can own this prep will send the signal that this will be productive for everyone. When you’re prepared, people come ready to get to work. Marketing
Research
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 14 5 Principles of Online Brainstorming
Brainstorming session 01
Embrace diversity
A diverse team dramatically increases the number and quality of ideas you generate. Invite people from different departments and with different backgrounds and perspectives—diversity Product Manager generates more ideas faster! Designer Think about neurodiversity too: because your session is online, introverts, extroverts, and in-betweenoverts are all on a level playing field.
Writer
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 15 5 Principles of Online Brainstorming
Keep it simple “ Don’t try to do it all at once. Keep your goals, exercises and idea capture as focused as possible. I want a toolset that’s as close to the Most importantly, choose a really simple, intuitive online whiteboard. Your participants shouldn’t have to learn anything frictionless experience of a Sharpie new. If they can type, drag and drop… they’re in. (This is one place where too many bells & whistles can end up backfiring). and a Post-It Note as possible.”
Brainstorming Templates will speed you up even more. Greg Storey, They’re brainstorming methods used by high-performing COO, teams with the board all laid out and ready for you. Lexblog
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 16 5 Principles of Online Brainstorming
Minimize criticism
There are no bad ideas in brainstorming. The idea is to generate as many ideas as possible before engaging people’s critical faculties. Comedy improv groups know this as the “Yes, and” mindset.
A dedicated facilitator can make sure the group says in idea generation mode. You might want to start with an icebreaker - there’s a template for that here.
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 17 5 Principles of Online Brainstorming
Follow through
The value of a brainstorm should last well beyond the session itself. Capture the results: and share them in Slack or Microsoft Teams to spread the ideas to the widest possible group. You can always come back and iterate in the future. (Whiteboard integrations are key here). A great brainstorm never dies!
Or use presenter mode to turn the session into a live (or recorded) presentation.
Marketing Operations
Designer
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 18 5 Online Brainstorming Techniques There are dozens of well-known Writer brainstorming exercises designed to lower people’s inhibitions and get the ideas flowing. Here are five of our favorites: Product Manager
Designer
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 19 5 Online Brainstorming techniques
Research Online Crazy Eights For freeing up people’s imagination, sketching can be better than writing—and sketching fast is a great way to silence our inner critic. That’s what Crazy Eights is all about.
How to do it:
■ Prepare the online whiteboard, giving each person an area marked off into eight sections. ■ Meet on Zoom, Microsoft Teams or another live video or chat app and make sure everyone understands the goal and the question. ■ Ask each person to make eight sketches, each taking one minute. ■ Each person presents their sketches to the wider group. Marketing ■ Cluster/Discuss/Prioritize and advance the best ideas!
This Crazy 8s Brainstorming Template contributed by the Developer Lightning Design team at Salesforce
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 20 5 Online Brainstorming techniques
Online Brainwriting Designer
Using one person’s ideas as inspiration for the next person is Tip: Try asynchronous – You don’t all have to be together a great way to get over that ‘blank page’ problem. Brainwriting for a great brainwriting exercise. Pass the baton across generates lots of ideas quickly—and since it starts with time zones and regroup in a few days, avoiding video solo work, it suits all kinds of people (not just those who conference fatigue. Pressure is off to keep your video Writer feel comfortable speaking up in meetings). on all the time. (An antidote to Zoom fatigue!)
How to do it:
■ Give everyone their own area of the whiteboard. ■ Start the timer—for, say, 4 minutes—and ask each person to write as many ideas as possible in response to the question. ■ When the time is up, each person passes their ideas to the next person, who gets 4 more minutes to respond, expand, Product Manager explore and add new ideas to. ■ Review as a group, using Freehand and your chosen video meeting platform.
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 21 5 Online Brainstorming techniques
“5 Whys” Online Designer
5 Whys came out of lean manufacturing and kanban Tip: The Fishbone Diagram – If you’re looking to methodologies but has swept out across every other brainstorm around the root causes of a problem or discipline and market. Why? Because it’s so simple and incident, the Ishikawa or Fishbone Diagram can help. so powerful. A great way to get a whole team to get creative Use it to brainstorm possible causes by type of cause about everything from root causes to customer needs. (People, Process, Equipment, etc). Create a blank fishbone in Freehand, invite the team and you’re off. How to do it:
■ Open a blank or prepared Freehand. ■ Put the problem or question at the top. (Could be anything: “No one knows what we do” or “Users aren’t progressing from freemium to paid.”) ■ Spend 5 minutes together generating answers to Why. Developer ■ Pick one of the group’s favorite answers and, again, ask “Why?”. ■ Repeat three more times. ■ Discuss all the ideas generated and capture themes in a separate area of the whiteboard.
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 22 5 Online Brainstorming techniques
Writer Step-Ladder Brainstorming
The Step-Ladder technique encourages people to share ideas A study by the Journal of Applied Psychology found without being overly influenced by others. It’s a good way to that a decision made using the stepladder technique add energy and momentum to an online brainstorming session. surpassed the quality of their best individual members’ decisions 56% of the time. In contrast, conventional How to do it: group decisions surpassed the quality of their best members’ decisions only 13% of the time. ■ Before the session, share the problem and give people time to think about it. ■ Invite the first two participants to the Freehand, asking them to brainstorm ideas and capture them with virtual sticky notes on the whiteboard. ■ After a set time (5-10 minutes), add a third participant. The new person shares their own ideas with the original pair before hearing their ideas. They then discuss, adding and organizing the stickies. ■ Keep adding people, one at a time until everyone has joined. Product Manager ■ Discuss and prioritize!
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Card (sticky-note) sorting
Most brainstorm sessions generate a lot of ideas—that’s what KPMG Digital Village helps companies transform they’re for. But it’s not always obvious what to do next. Card through innovation. They use Card Sorting to gather sorting can be a starter exercise on its own (using pre-made perspectives, explore new approaches and identify stickies or filling them in as a group) but the technique really themes. Check out their Card Sorting Freehand shines when you’ve got a whole lot of stickies and aren’t sure template here—it’s for information architecture how they relate to each other. exercises but is easily adapted for anything.
How to do it:
■ Spread out all the sticky-note ideas generated in a previous round. ■ The facilitator or a participant starts reading them out loud, working as a group to sort them into clusters or categories. ■ Discuss the ideas, themes, issues and relationships that the clustering reveals. ■ Prioritize and break out into teams to process each chosen category a bit further. (This is getting good).
Designer
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 24 5 examples of online brainstorming Marketing in action Online brainstorming is taking off across every kind of company Writer and in every industry and discipline. Five quick examples: Product Manager
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 25 5 examples of oinline brainstorming in action
How brainstorming teams at Xbox set the context
Here’s the checklist Xbox teams use to get everyone ready to brainstorm online: HR
Purpose: Why are we here? What is the thesis/theme of this brainstorm? Product focused? Inspirational? Are we looking for breadth or depth?
Time Horizon: What is the time horizon we should consider?
Research: Is there any user/business data to help establish context and background? Marketing
Desired output: Are we striving for higher fidelity on a Product Manager specific issue or clusters of data to inform something else?
Here’s the full Brainstorming Template contributed by the team at Xbox. ready to use in Freehand.
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 26 5 examples of oinline brainstorming in action
How the UX Collective “ uses Crazy 8s for product design sprints We’ve come up with a cool variety of ideas. Boby Haryanto shows how product teams use Crazy 8s to run sprints in Freehand, Sketch and Google Meet. His article But generating ideas is not the final step. How to Do Crazy 8s Remotely was published on UX Collective. It’s only the beginning.” It’s a great intro for any team in any department.
Boby Haryanto, on UX Collective
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 27 5 examples of oinline brainstorming in action
How a Spanish consultancy “ went remote without losing momentum At first I thought working remotely was Grabbing a marker pen and launching into a whiteboard session was always part of the culture for Spanish product consultancy, temporary, but now that it may become a Jeff. So when work went 100% remote, they jumped into permanent arrangement, I’m starting to think Freehand to keep the ideas flowing. more about solutions that will help our squad work more efficiently. We’ve started using Freehand to brainstorm as a team in real time, which is working well.”
Elisa Babiano, Product Designer, Jeff
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 28 5 examples of oinline brainstorming in action
How XPLANE does “ empathy mapping.
David Gray founded XPLANE, the visual thinking company, to help people make better, faster decisions and create We used to call this exercise “The Big Head” more lasting, sustainable impact. He has written three books because the whole idea was to imagine what on design, change, and innovation. His Empathy Mapping technique is taught by the Stanford D School and was covered it’s like to be inside someone else’s head. That in the Harvard Business Review. was and is the primary power of the exercise.” It’s all about taking time as a team to consider the needs of your customers, then coming up with solutions to meet those needs. David Gray, See his (very cool) Empathy Map Brainstorming template here. XPLANE
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 29 5 examples of oinline brainstorming in action
How Publicis Sapient ran Designer a virtual kid happy hour
How many kids does it take to turn a virtual happy hour into Writer total chaos? Turns out about 38. That’s what happened when Publicis Sapient held a virtual happy hour during lockdown for team members with families. Product Manager Creativity is never linear, people:
Thanks Wendy Johansson! (@uxwendy).
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 30 5 ways to learn more
5 ways to learn more
Get in and try Freehand Templates How to Facilitate Freehand for “A Cheerful Guide to Freehand for free a Remote Workshop Everyone course Creativity” podcast You don’t have to start from with John Cleese Run your first brainstorm in minutes scratch. There are so many ways Greg Storey has learned a lot about This is a free course to introduce to hit the ground running, with (with a bit of prep around goals and facilitating remote workshops and you to the power of Freehand. Our Design Better podcast is hugely pre-built templates designed with things like that). brainstorms. He shares all that here. Do you need it to get going? popular among people who know industry leaders for brainstorming, Love it. Absolutely not. Is it fun & easy? they can change the world. This one strategy sessions, meetings, Yeah, it’s fun & easy. features one of the most creative flowcharts, wireframes… Our own (and funniest) people on the planet. Brainstorming template—ready to customize—is a great place to start.
Operations
The 5x5 Guide to Online Brainstorming 31 About InVision About Freehand
InVision is the platform for inclusive collaboration InVision Freehand empowers your entire team in digital product design and development. to create together, all in one place. People who have never used a design tool love Freehand More than 7 million people use InVision to because they can start using it with zero training. power a repeatable and streamlined workflow. It integrates with your other collaborative and That includes tens of thousands of organizations, creative software too. But enough about us. including 100% of the Fortune 100. Hop in and see how Freehand can help you reduce innovation friction and get ideas flowing. Teams trust us for relevant, targeted content and community that allow them to level up skills and tackle unique challenges.
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