Product discovery guide : Brainstorm and Prioritise
In this chapter we will go through how to facilitate brainstorming and prioritisation workshop.
This article is part of Product Discovery Guide Series:
Topic • Overloaded Customer Care
- Product Discovery Guide Series : Intro
- Product Discovery Guide: Identify the problem
- Product Discovery Guide : Desk research and goals
- Product discovery guide : Brainstorm and Prioritise
- Product discovery guide : Plan, Deliver and Evaluate
Brainstorm and Prioritise
Now it's finally time to find the best ideas to achieve our goal and solve the problem. In this chapter I will explain how I do Brainstorming and Prioritisation technique Value vs. effort.
For this technique is the best to arrange workshop together with those who are closest to the problem — in my case it was customer care. But you can bring also others. People from different departments can help you to think out of the box.
Brainstorming & Prioritisation Workshop
Duration: at least 2hours
Participants: Product manager, UX designer, Customer care department, Development representative
What do you need to facilitate the workshop:
- Outcomes from previous stages: Problem statement, Desk research, Goals
- Board for brainstorming with empty sticky notes (Miro board Brainstorming empty)
- Board for prioritisation (Miro board Prioritisation board empty)
- Prioritisation cards — print them multiple times so that every participants has one patch (Miro board Prioritisaion cards)
How do I facilitate the workshop + tips&tricks:
1. Organisational matters
Invite all people who should participate brainstorming and prioritisation far enough ahead so that they can also think about the topic.
Write in the invitation purpose of the meeting, goals, agenda and ideal output / outcome so that people know what to expect from the workshop.
If you expect people will think ahead of the workshop about the ideas, write the assignment into the meeting invitation.
2. Workshop facilitation
Introduction part:
I always start with introduction to workshop, say hello to all participants and introduce the purpose of the meeting, agenda and short introduction about myself if the team does not know me that well.
Then I asked the participants what are their expectations from the workshop. It's great opportunity to get the idea, if we all know, why we are here or if there is more explanation needed.
Workshop part
Brainstorming
When I set up the right expectation by explaining the purpose of the workshop and agenda, it's time to start. In this case I went through all the findings we've collected so far: what is the problem, impact, introduced the root cause analysis, goals so that everybody had the same knowledge about the problem.
Then let the fun begins :) Let's do the brainstorming. When I do brainstorming I like to use more specific questions than just “Let's start thinking how to make it better”. The better questions, the better ideas are popping up. When you do brainstorming, focus on ideas which lead to reach the goal and frame the questions about them. In our case our goals are:
- 81% of issues will be resolved within 24hours
- Decrease number of received emails by 70%
- While keeping in mind to remain user friendly and simple
I defined the brainstorming questions like this:
- How might we decrease the amount of received e-mails?
- How might we speed up the resolution of email enquiries?
You see? The questions are related to goals — this way you can brainstorm better and more specific idea than if you just ask general question like “How can we improve the process?”
I started the first round of brainstorming with question:
- How might we decrease the amount of received e-mails?
I gave participants 5 mins time to write down their ideas which lead to decreasing the number of received e-mails.
After time is out, I ask everybody to share their ideas and put them on the board.
IMPORTANT — do not judge the ideas, it's not the time now to say that this idea is nonsense or that it's too complicated.
After everybody shared their ideas, it was time for second round with question: How might we speed up the resolution of email enquiries? I repeated the same process, gave participants 5 mins to think and write down the ideas and then one by one shared the ideas and we marked them on the board.
After this round I gave participants extra 2–3 min to go through the ideas and write down more ideas, if some new appeared in their head.
Brainstorming output looked like this:
Prioritisation
Next part of the workshop is to evaluate the ideas in order to be able to come up with the plan what ideas we try to implement first. I gave each participant prioritisation cards and we evaluated each idea base on question: How much do you believe it will help us to reach the goals?
1 • Evaluate added value
I read aloud the idea “E-mail classifier — sort the e-mails via AI”. I asked everybody to give the number from the cards they have in their hands how much they believe it can help us to achieve the goals. 0 is not at all, 1 is minimum, 4 is maximum, if they are not sure, they also have card “I have no idea”. I gave all of us couple seconds to think and then ask all participants to raise the card with number at once.
If all participants raise the same number, you move the idea to next board (Prioritisation) vertically base on the number.
If people raise different numbers, pick the one with the lowest number and the one with the highest number and ask them why they evaluated the idea with this number. Let people explain why they don't believe in the idea or why they believe it more. After both explained their reasons and talk about it team vote again, usually after the first explanation the numbers are more or less the similar. Team must always decide on one number together.
This part of the workshop is super important because it triggers the discussions around the ideas — is the idea good? Does it bring the value? Do we believe in it? I let people to talk, argue, explain to each other because it helps to understand each other mind, set up the expectations and clarity within the team.
Using prioritisation cards helps you to facilitate the discussion — too often I see on workshops you hear only the loudest and extrovert people do the talking, they tend to talk and don't give space to others. If you give everybody cards, they silently raise the number and you pick people who will discuss around the idea. It gives introvert people opportunity to express themselves, share their thoughts and be visible and part of the decision process. Don't underestimate the power of silent people, they might have the best ideas or thoughts, but unfortunately they don’t get as much space at the expense of the louder ones. Make sure everybody feels comfortable on your workshops and welcomed.
Output from prioritisation of added value then looked like this:
2 • Estimate the effort
Second step of prioritisation is estimation an effort — bring to your workshop anybody who can realistically estimate the effort to deliver the idea (developer, manager, etc) and ask them to estimate the idea. Move the ideas horizontally along the axis based on the estimated effort.
The output then look like this:
3 • Grid — priotisation
Last step of the prioritisation is to put the grid over the ideas.
Grid helps you to set up your Priorities
GRID NOW and WOW
These ideas are called Quick wins or Long hanging fruit. They bring the value but the effort to implement is quite slow. Plan these ideas to implement as soon as possible
GRID HOW
Ideas is grid How brings the value but effort to implement them is also pretty high — plan implementation of these ideas properly, the effort to implement is quite hing therefore take some time to think it through and if possible, slice it into smaller deliverables.
GRID WHY
Ideas in grid Why bring small value but the estimation effort is pretty high — does it make sense to implement ideas like that? Maybe you forgot something, maybe you need to reshape the idea, maybe there is a way to implement them with smaller scope and smaller effort. Do not implement these ideas until you rethink their value and purpose and estimations.
🎉Congratulations! 🎉
You have just successfully prioritised ideas and shape the plan what to start with. However this is not the end.
This stage is just the beginning of product journey. Once you implement the ideas, it's time to get start the process again.
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