How to master creative brainstorming

Project management hacks for startup founders and their teams

What are the odds of standing out with your product without collective creativity? Or simply without a creative approach toward shaping your offer or your product features?

If you dare to turn the chaotic innovative energy your team has into a powerful tool to scale the product and attract customers, use creative brainstorming.

No matter what your current stage of product development is. Whether you're just validating the idea, preparing to run your first ad campaign, or testing the rebranding, brainstorming helps get the most powerful messages into the light.

Let’s see how to do it effortlessly.

Start preparing solo

Usually, when we speak about brainstorming, we think about a group of people sharing their ideas, but the whole process can start with a solo persona doing research. It has some advantages:

• You can choose a comfortable time and place for brainstorming
• You can search for inspiration without any constraints
• You don’t need to feel pressure about sharing your ideas with others
• You can focus on researching instead of creativity

The most important part here is to research your customers, the market, the industry, and the trends to come prepared for the team brainstorming later. By doing this, you can structure the whole process better, digest the ideas of others faster and apply them easier to your needs.

Choose your team wisely

Try to bring together a diversified group of people with different sets of skills, mindsets and experiences. It will make a session more successful.

For example, if you’re planning to brainstorm for visual creatives for the ad campaign, don’t forget to include the copywriter to have a person who can quickly merge the visual element with text in mind and provide a professional opinion on the matter.

Send the agenda prior to the meeting

Having no agenda always means that some part of the session will be eaten up by a general explanation.

Having an agenda, on the other hand, apart from having more time for actual brainstorming, helps others to do the homework as you do. When everybody comes equally prepared, the process is way more productive. So never skip the agenda explanation.

Make sure everybody understands the target audience

While creating an agenda for the meeting, describe not only the purpose of the session, but also the target audience you’re aiming at, the means you have to attract it, and the actual measurable results you’re looking for.

Putting everybody on the same page makes the collective creativity during the brainstorming session even more impactful.

Follow basic brainstorming rules in the process

As you start brainstorming, some ideas can sound stupid or unrelated, and some too expensive to implement. Remember that all the ideas are part of the process and you need to consider them all to find the jewel.

• There is no such thing as a bad idea. Don’t criticize other people, try to build something more relevant on top of the ideas of others instead.
• There is no such thing as a too-crazy idea either. You can scale unrealistic ideas with great potential to your capabilities later.
• The more ideas, the better. You can cross the irrelevant ones later, but it is way easier to work with a huge pool of ideas.
• Nothing is final about the ideas during brainstorming. You’re just working together to shape the perfect solution in the early stage of the concept.

Choose a technique for creative brainstorming

There are lots of techniques you can use for group brainstorming sessions, but don’t pick more than one for each session. There are no right or wrong techniques here, just pick the one that you like the most.

Mind mapping

Place the reason you came to the session in the middle and start to put ideas around it. Create at least four sub-topics for your main idea and narrow it down or expand it even further. The final map will look like a system of roots. Add the ideas to these root threads as long as they continue to flow.

When nothing exciting is popping out anymore, look at the map to find the ideas you want to elaborate on.

Working with content swipe files

If you’re choosing this technique, the homework you did will come in extremely handy. Basically, what you’ll be doing as a team, is looking at each other’s findings and research to find what can be applied better to your product.

Analyzing the gap

Not all ideas must be completely innovative. Instead of coming up with a completely new creative idea, you can analyze your competitors and find the gaps in their offers/content/ads. When you do, you can focus your session on filling this gap with your ideas.

Giving bad ideas a green light

This technique helps your team relax and be more open-minded toward something completely new. There is no pressure if you can come up with the most outrageously stupid ideas right from the start. As you continue to provide bad ideas, you may also come up with a golden one.

Rapid ideation

Give your team 5 minutes to write down as many ideas as possible. The only limit is the time, any idea is welcomed. Such a technique can work great for deadliners and people who provide better results with some obstacles in the present.

Take notes in the process

No matter who is responsible for the curation of the session, it’s better to take notes in the process, to never miss any detail. If the meeting is online, the whole thing just gets easier — hit the record button right at the beginning of the session to review the whole thing later.

Decide on several ideas at the end of the session

It’s a common rule for startups, especially those in the early stages of development, that nothing is set in stone. Everything can change drastically, so you need to keep several ideas for several scenarios up your sleeve.

Look at each idea as a means to experiment, something that needs to be validated.

Summarize your session in a written form

Even if you were recording during the process, it’s better to summarize the whole session in a file right after the end of it, while the memory is still fresh. Outline the ideas you come up with, underline the chosen ones, and write down why these ideas were picked.

Experiment with different ideas in short iterations

As soon as your team brings the ideas to life, try them out. Experiment with different timing and delivery options, and chunk your audience into pieces to show them various ideas as a part of the experiment.

You can stay with basic A/B testing or come up with other techniques to find what idea works best. Don’t spend much time validating your ideas, as soon as you see results (or no results), you can understand what ideas to improve and what to cut. Try to work in weekly iterations.

And when it’s time to improve some of the ideas to have even better results, you can assemble a new brainstorming session and repeat the process with a narrower focus.

The bottom line

The brainstorming process is different for every individual on the team. So if you’re seeing that the technique you’ve chosen doesn’t work well, turn to another one. Don’t waste time trying to adapt to the process that you’re struggling with.