Understanding Disagreements vs. Brainstorming Different Opinions

Interesting. So, in this case, are you taking action along all paths of disagreement? Or is this about the brainstorming side of things? If the former, we did just that once we had settled on the core of our opposition. We’ll have answers from the usability test we defined in about a week.

If you were diving into that dissent as a brainstorming technique, I’d love to dig into it a bit more. It sounds like you’re assigning “roles” to each member of the conversation and using them as shortcuts past our biases and jumpstarts to new ideas. I’ve given a lot of thought this type of technique, and I am currently playing with a similar paradigm in our weekly product teardowns.

For many years, the product managers at Yammer have held a weekly, wonderful, and pretty boozy session to take a hard look at another company’s product. We look to understand what they’ve done, why they made those decisions, what we think this means for the greater product space they’re in, and what we can learn from them. (For more on this process, take a look at Jens-Fabian Goetzmann’s piece on the Yammer Teardown process.)

Recently, I’ve taken over this weekly routine and started adding something similar to the technique you mentioned.

With ~6 people in the room, I ask for two volunteers: a Positive Polly and a Negative Nelly. Their roles are to only find good or bad things (respectively) about the product.

When someone has their whole mind devoted to finding the good, they’ll find more good than if they were looking at a product with a more open mind. Just so for the bad as well.

In the end, the entire group benefits from getting more surface area covered in the conversation.

(For more on this kind of thing, check out the Six Thinking Hats framework).