Product Manager Skills Get

When a team intends to create ideas or try to solve a problem for a new product, you often hear the loud horn, "Let's brainstorm it!" You called a group of people to clarify the basic rules of brainstorming (no criticism, Welcome crazy ideas, combine ideas to create new ideas) Then let people shout their thoughts one by one.

Brainstorming is often the preferred method of conceptualization, but it has many problems, from the participant's fear of assessment to the continuity of the process - only one idea at a time. Brainwriting is a simple replacement or complement to face-to-face brainstorming and tends to generate more ideas in less time than traditional brainstorming.

What is written brainstorming?

When I was teaching the postgraduate course "Prototyping and Interactivity Design," I started a lesson in a creative way. Because brainstorming is a well-known and popular technique, it is often very difficult for me to start a discussion about how to get brainstorming going, so writing-in-brainstorm becomes an effective , And is sometimes the preferred alternative to brainstorming. The "brainstorm" may be a bit funny because everyone is unfamiliar with it.

Instead of asking them to (in an orderly way) shout out their ideas, the Written Brainstorming Act allows participants to spend a few minutes writing ideas on a particular piece of paper on paper; and then, Have each participant pass on their ideas to others, read them, and add new ideas. After a few minutes, you continue to ask participants to pass their paper over to others and repeat the process. After 10 to 15 minutes, you can collect the paper and post it for direct discussion.

In my experience, the idea of ​​"writing brainstorming" tends to outweigh the amount you expect from a face-to-face brainstorming because you've reduced your anxiety by as much as a dozen at the same time in subsequent parallel sessions Add items, and reduce the amount of time spent communicating in a brainstorming session, saving creative time.

If you allow participants to "brainstorm" them, they can generate many ideas at the same time instead of one at a time.

When to use

Written brainstorming can be used in the following situations:

Groups are too large to effectively brainstorm. You can do it in a 500-person meeting by leaving a large card on each seat, asking a question, and having each viewer pass the card over to others, taking a minute to write down the thoughts and then repeating three times.

There are some members of your group that are not good at verbal expression.

Where organizational culture or managers do not accept whimsical or deviant ideas.

Your time is limited. When I had only ten minutes to get feedback from the product team, I used to use mind-passing to brainstorm a web site visit. I ended up with more than 50 different questions, eliminating the need for a formal brainstorming session.

You lack an experienced host. Brainstorming, as many bloggers claim, is hard to do. In contrast, a written brainstorm needs your questions, time and gathers answers.

You worry that loud or persuasive members affect others, just as they did in the traditional brainstorming.

Written brainstorming can be used to understand how different groups think about a problem. You can also try separate "brainstorming" sessions with different internal teams. If you ask different teams to think, "What are the most important issues our customers face?" You may find developers and user experience teams have different opinions, and the UX team and product manager have different perspectives.

In my experience, there is a stronger difference than "brainstorming" when it comes to brainstorming.

"Mind-conveying" can help you better understand how different groups or departments think of a problem.

When does not fit

Although Written Brainstorming is simple enough to be used on many occasions after demonstrating its productivity, in some cases you may want to avoid written brainstorming. At times, your colleague may find it hard to express ideas through writing. If you are working on complex issues then you may want to choose to brainstorm a group or adopt another conceptual approach that elucidates and discusses.

If you're building a team then you might want to choose a traditional brainstorming because participants are more familiar with that approach (than the strangely written "brainstorm") and social interaction promotes team building. If you are in a culture that has strict rules on which methods and procedures to follow, you may want to avoid "brainstorming in writing." The "written brainstorming" may be a bit radical for anyone following a highly structured product design and development process.

how to proceed

My first suggestion was to search for "brainwriting" on the web and study some YouTube videos and essays describing tips and tricks for "mind-passing." There are several ways to writing a brainstorming book: interactive written brainstorming, 6-3-5, the inspirational card method, and remote spreadsheet. We will discuss the basic steps for each method.

Interactive

Here are the basic steps in an interactive mindset:

Introduce its process.

Distribute paper for everyone and write down the idea.

Provide a clear and clear statement of the problem. (You can print a statement on the top of a piece of paper, project it on a slide, or write it on a whiteboard).

Describe the timing of Mind Transfer (for example, the first three minutes followed by four rounds per minute for two minutes), and the process of transferring the paper (for example, counterclockwise along the table). Chaotic process of paper delivery may undermine the credibility of the method and waste time.

Anyone who has any questions about the problem statement or thinking process can ask questions.

Remind people to read existing ideas quickly before writing their own ideas and freely add, edit, or merge ideas. Let people know there's spare paper in the room if they run out.

Start the round. Announce the end of each round and then have people pass on their paper to another person.

At the end of the session, collect "creative cards", post them and comment, add ideas or reviews.

6-3-5 style

In this method, six participants are given a form for each and they are asked to provide three ideas for solving the problem within five minutes. Participants are invited to think and combine ideas from others. Ideas will be silently noted to prevent interaction between participants. After the first five minutes, each participant passes a form like the one below to an adjacent partner who then reviews the previous thoughts and complements the new ideas.

This process is repeated six times, with potential 6x3x6 (or 104) ideas. In practice, I find that people usually come up with more than three ideas in five minutes, so you can create a 6-6-5 table.

A 6-3-5 written brainstorming table (question statement: "How do we handle long lists in our own applications?")

Inspiration card method

This method allows participants to keep writing ideas on notes or cards, and when they finish a card, set them aside. When other participants need inspiration, they can take a few cards from their colleagues and continue. Each card can only write one idea.

A variation of this approach is "one idea, fast passing", where each person writes an idea on a card and then passes the card to another participant to add another idea. If a participant does not have any cards to look at, he can grab one from a stack of cards and keep writing. This process will continue until the link leader announced the "end."

Spreadsheet analysis

If you want to do remote "written brainstorming," you can use Google Spreadsheets as a tool. You need to create a list of participants, and then ask everyone to enter their ideas into a separate spreadsheet. Because everyone can type ideas in their cells, others will see the idea and use it as a source of inspiration for new ideas. This process can foster some competition, which is also very interesting if implemented in practice.

Practical tips and tricks

Here are some tips and tricks that I've summed up in a decade or so of writing brainstorming:

If you are using handwritten paper or card, please print or write neatly.

Ask people to provide concise information about the idea so that it is understandable after two weeks.

Ask participants to do some simple homework to prepare for "brainstorming" (and brainstorming). Homework can make the link more effective. You can send questions to the participants and make them think ahead of time about the three ideas. Make sure your homework is fun, if you can.

Write a description of the problem or idea of ​​the problem on all pieces of paper, or on a whiteboard, and write on a slideshow if implemented remotely. If you are using Google spreadsheets, mark the question at the top of the form.

Ask participants to avoid using jargon or abbreviation that they can not understand after one week.

Make participants clearly share the inspiration card rules. If you let people pass the card to others, specify the direction of delivery to avoid confusion.

set time. Most smartphones have a countdown timer well suited for writing brainstorming.

Combine brainstorming and "brainstorming" with other ways of thinking. Brainstorming may not be efficient, but sometimes social aspects of brainstorming create a sense of teamwork and creativity.

If you intend to create an affinity map of these ideas, you can prepare some paper that is full of notes and then remove it when you are ready to graphically represent it. The chart below shows six sheets of paper from a "brainstorming" session titled "How to Improve Remote Collaboration." Each page has six sticky notes on it, and participants can write ideas on the topic. After written brainstorming, these notes can be sorted into categories using the affinity chart method.

You can use affinity charts to organize and interpret data from a "brainstorming session." (Big picture)

How to make everyone use it

Written brainstorming is for most organizations. The following five methods can be used to promote "written brainstorming":

The first selling point is its scalability. You can collect data from a handful of design teams as well as meetings from as many as hundreds of people without the high costs and detailed planning.

It requires no great convenience or rich social psychology skills. All you need is a short script, cheap supplies, remote tools like Google spreadsheets, and 10 to 30 minutes to do this.

It works well. Unlike brainstorms that use their serial way of generating ideas, everyone can write their own thoughts at the same time.

While written brainstorming is silent when implemented, everyone can be inspired by the idea of ​​seeing others.

Perhaps most importantly, the amount of ideas generated using "written brainstorming" often exceeds that of brainstorming.

Enjoy your written brainstorming experiment now!