Learn about “HOW MIGHT WE” in a Sprint
Steps to choose one specific target of your sprint efforts.
It works this way:
Each person writes his or her own notes, one at a time, on sticky notes.
At the end of the day, you’ll merge the whole group’s notes, organize them, and choose a handful of the most interesting ones. These standout notes will help you make a decision about which part of the map to target, and they’ll give you ideas for your sketches.
We had the same concerns ourselves when we first learned about the How Might We method.
When we tried it, we came to appreciate how the open-ended, optimistic
phrasing forced us to look for opportunities and challenges, rather than getting bogged down by problems or, almost worse, jumping to solutions too soon. And because every question shares the same format, it’s possible to read, understand, and evaluate a whole wall full of these notes at once.
Take How Might We notes
- Every person on the team needs his or her own pad of sticky notes (plain yellow, three by five inches) and a thick black dry-erase marker.
- Using thick markers on a small surface forces everyone to write succinct, easy-to-read headlines.
To take notes, follow these steps:
1. Put the letters “HMW” in the top left corner of your sticky note.
2. Wait.
3. When you hear something interesting, convert it into a question
4. Write the question on your sticky note.
5. Peel off the note and set it aside.
Each person will end up with a little stack of notes — you’ll organize them
later.
Each How Might We note captured a problem and converted it into an opportunity.
What’s more, each question could be answered in many different ways.
Organize How Might We notes
- As soon as the expert interviews are finished, everybody should gather his or her How Might We notes and stick them on the wall.
- Just put them up in any haphazard fashion, like this below:
- Now you’ll organize the notes into groups. Working together, find How Might We questions with similar themes and physically group them together on the wall.
- You won’t know what themes to use ahead of time. Instead, the themes will emerge as you go.
- You’d pick those notes up and put them near each other. Bingo. You’ve
got a theme.
This process could go on forever if you let it, but the organization doesn’t
have to be perfect. After ten minutes, the notes will be sorted enough to move
on to prioritization.
Vote on How Might We notes
To prioritize the notes, you’ll use dot voting. It’s one of the favorite shortcuts for skipping lengthy debate.
Dot voting works pretty much the way it sounds:
1. Give two large dot stickers to each person.
2. Give four large dot stickers to the Decider because her opinion counts a
little more.
3. Ask everyone to review the goal and sprint questions.
4. Ask everyone to vote in silence for the most useful How Might We
questions.
5. It’s okay to vote for your own note, or to vote twice for the same note.
At the end of the voting, you’ll have clusters of dots on a few How Might We
notes, and the whole wall will be prioritized.
When the voting is over, take the How Might We notes with multiple votes,
remove them from the wall, and find a place to stick them on your map.
The prioritization process isn’t perfect: There’s little time for deliberation,
and early votes will sometimes bias later votes. But it leads to pretty good
decisions, and it happens fast enough to leave time for the most important job of the day:
“ Choose one specific target for the rest of your sprint’s efforts. ”
Thanks for Reading!
Feel free to clap and share your thoughts :)
