Step 4 — Generating Ideas (Part 2)

Blog 6/10

The brainstorming sessions gave us over 100 great ideas, including some quick wins and some bigger game changers.

As a team we had to upload our three top ideas for each of the four ‘How might we’ statements to Sprintbase, the platform we’re using to guide us through the Design Thinking process. With five of us in the team, this meant fifteen ideas for each statement. Here’s an example…

After adding all the ideas, it was time to narrow down the best ones by casting our 25 votes, and it took two rounds to get it right. The first time we did this we played it too safe. The ideas were all quite similar, all very practical and within our influence to implement.

Luckily for us we had our coach from Treehouse, who challenged us and encouraged us to be bolder. The ideas we landed on the second time round were more innovative and pushed boundaries. It was obvious everyone in the team felt much more excited about them.

We also aimed for a manageable mix of ideas — some were quicker wins, such as adding a button in our HR system so employees can flag their career status (I’m open to hearing about opportunities, or I’m not interested in hearing about anything right now). Others, such as spending one day a week working on a project outside your job role, would take longer to implement as this is very different to how to how we currently work.

Next week we move on to building prototypes (yes, physically building) for our ideas, so we can get feedback quickly from customers and stakeholders and adapt if we need to.