How should we run a product brainstorm?
As a product leader you have a lot of ideas in your head. If your team is small, you probably put your ideas straight into the product-development cycle without gathering information from others or asking around. You could instead run a brainstorm and involve the team in the product much more easily.
Of course, as the team grows, your role shifts from the person who generates new ideas to the person who organizes new ideas. Many of the good and great ideas will come from inside your team. In practice your job becomes pulling the best ideas out of a mass of thoughts presented in product team meetings.
That is where the product brainstorm comes in. Wikipedia’s definition of brainstorming is: “a creativity technique, individual or group, in which a list of ideas generated spontaneously by the members is collected in an effort to reach a conclusion about a problem.”
At Instacart we run brainstorms so we hear all the good ideas and lose none of them. That is how every team member is involved in building the product roadmap, and their views and suggestions are heard.
How to run a product brainstorm
Step 1: Set the scene
Good ideas require awareness and an understanding of your goals. Talk about the metrics you want to move and the problems you want to solve. Ask your team for ideas that get you there. If you are running the brainstorm to improve the current product, make sure every team member has used the product recently and knows it. Printing screenshots of different product pages and bringing them into the meeting room is also a good idea. Let people in the room see the workflow inside the product. People should also have product discovery knowledge, and it is one of your jobs to make sure of that before the meeting starts.
Step 2: Agree on a framework for evaluating ideas
From the start of the meeting, team members should know how the best ideas will be chosen. Is the best idea the one with the largest impact on the topic at hand? Or the one that is small but has a good effect? Or some mix? With a shared understanding of how the winning idea is chosen, team members think more like product people and the meeting produces better results.
Further reading: A customer-development guide for product managers
Step 3: Plan a real brainstorm
To run this meeting well, there are a few important elements to watch.
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First, creating a positive environment is the key to running brainstorms correctly. This meeting is not the place to criticize others about the size, requirements, or difficulty of an idea. Your only effort should be that the team generates a very large number of ideas aligned with the topic and your requirements. As the person running the meeting, intervene and prevent a negative atmosphere or drifting away from your requirements.
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Second, participants should feel safe and at ease. You should say that there is no bad idea, and that ideas should all be heard without prejudice or criticism. Anyone can offer raw ideas; you do not need to have thought through every aspect before you speak. Ideas that are heard get completed by others, and in the end everyone helps mature that raw idea.
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Finally, move between individual work and group discussion. Ask participants to list their ideas at the start of the meeting. Then ask them to read their ideas one by one for everyone. As ideas are heard, newer ideas are created. Splitting participants into small groups creates healthy competition and makes it possible to present distinctive ideas.
Step 4: Organize the ideas
At this stage a lot of ideas have been produced. Put similar ideas together and organize or group them by theme. Then present these groups to the team and ask for feedback and help. You have almost certainly found far more ideas than your team has time and capacity for. Share with the team that the selected ideas must be prioritized, and that not all of them will make it onto the product roadmap.
If you have experience running a product brainstorm on your team, please share it with us in a comment below.