How To Make Brainstorming More Effective💡

While doing creative work, it is difficult to come up with new ideas all the time. So try to manage all the views of the team and picking the top ones that you want to go forward.

Today, we are going to share with you how we come up with new ideas and brainstorm for our projects — more specifically, how we came up with a name for a new Facebook Group.

Bring your team together in an open space that has a wall or a board nearby. Get some snacks (be careful — if they are too delicious, you might be more focused on eating than on thinking!) and do a briefing on what this brainstorming session will be about.

A couple of weeks ago, we wanted to create a Facebook Group that will bring together developers, designers and tech enthusiasts from all around the world. We got hyped with the idea! However, we were missing a key element:

We didn’t have a name.

1. Note Alone

We decided to bring together the whole team for a few minutes and have them think together for a title.

We started by bringing some snacks & drinks. We explained what the brainstorming session would be about, what we would use the Facebook group for and who the users of that said group would be.

Post-its and pencils were handed out to everyone, and a timer was put into place — 5 minutes to come up with ideas.

2. Stick Em Up

After the time was up! Each of us read their thoughts and placed them on the wall. The result was a wall full of ideas!

3. Vote Alone

Everyone receives 3 votes — well, usually we use stickers, but this time we decided to just go with writing a circle. We read all the suggestions and everyone picked their top 3 ideas, assigning a point to each of them.

4. Prioritize

Now, we organized the post-its from top to bottom. Some ideas didn’t get any points; 5 of them got the most points. It is at this time that the decision maker — in our case, Ricardo, the Decider — picks his favorite idea out of the top ones, explaining why he did so.

The Decider has 5 votes, plus 2 than the rest. Also, he or she is in charge of making the final call.

We finally had a name — “Tech Me Up!”. After this, we make a list of all the ideas we had and what score each one of them was given, for future reference.
As you can see, doing a brainstorming session isn’t that hard. All you need is 15 to 30 minutes, a good team, and positive energy!

TL;DR: For those who don’t like to read…

You can do a Brainstorming session by following these steps:

1. Gather some snacks and drinks for your team in an open space with a wall or board
2. Hand out pencils and post-its to everyone and explain what the brainstorming session is about and details about the project or thing you are going to brainstorm about
3. Give 5 minutes for everyone to write his or her ideas in the post-its
4. After the time is up, have everyone stand up one at the time and place the post-its on the wall, explaining why he or she wrote that idea
5. Let everyone vote on the top 3 ideas, with a 5-minute time limit.
6. After the voting is done, organize the post-its, from most voted to least vote.
7. After some discussion with among the team, the Decider (CEO, Project Manager, etc.) will pick the idea, they like the most.
8. Save the other ideas in a Pandora’s Box for future references.
9. Profit.

Of course, you may want to change some of the rules, but we recommend you not to! Its a proven method by AJ&Smart on their Design Sprints. They know better!

We hope this brief explanation of how we brainstorm was useful to you — keep on brainstorming!

Ricardo is the CEO of PICUS. Obsessed with becoming “Design Sprint Go-to-Guy” in Portugal. He organizes meetups at his hometown, occasional speaker, and overall a tech enthusiast. Follow him on LinkedIn or Instagram!

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