How Remoter goes about the creative brainstorming phase

Remote creative brainstorming means you can use your colorful markers… by yourself.

Remoter’s about to embark on a huge content production journey, but what you haven’t seen is the amount of behind-the-scenes and pre-production efforts churning for the past months. Add on the fact that I’m organizing/scheduling availabilities with people (attempted months in advance but in reality, it’s more like a week or two in advance) in different countries around the world. Logistics can be a nightmare.

Last month, we reached the creative brainstorming phase. We asked ourselves, “what are we planning on creating with these companies/organizations/communities/consultants, etc.?”

This is the first time I’ve ever personally ‘brainstormed remotely.’ Meaning, no whiteboards, no dry-erase markers, and unfortunately, no physical interactions with the teammates. I thought I’d do a quick post about what we learned through trial and error, creating our now defined & clockwork process.

Adapting what’s out there

Using Frog’s CAT, excerpts from the Universal Methods of Design and this blog post from Miro, I extracted portions that I found useful for our needs.

Out came the creation of the Easy -> Impossible template, which can be downloaded for free here. Using that, we make sure to categorize whether we believe our ideas are ‘easily achievable’ or ‘impossible.’ For the ones that we deem impossible, we take a step back and either try to frame it/think of alternatives that make it possible, or scrap the idea.

Keyword Research

This allows you to see what people are searching for and find the sought-after topics. What are some long-tail keywords people are typing to get to what the need? What’s the monthly search volume? We’ve got our own list, categorized by main topics (e.g., HR, Legal, Finance, Culture… etc.) and sub-topics (e.g., hiring remotely, employee engagement, etc.) Within this list, we are also able to see where some companies overlap and create more collaborative pieces between participants.

Remoter’s process

1. Alignment
   As I’m the point of contact for all the project participants, I run my 2 teammates through a brief summary of who we are brainstorming for. Other things I tell them include my take on my point of contact’s time flexibility (did they seem very busy? Or did they seem very open to blocking off more time for us?), and a bit about the participants and their respective endeavors.
2. Set time limits
   We’ve agreed to timebox ourselves for 5 minutes, no matter the activity.
3. Go offline — (asynchronous brainstorming)
   We do our brainstorming separately on post-its, notebooks, pen, and paper. We find it easier for ideas to flow when we’re physically writing it down on a piece of paper and timebox ourselves for only 5 minutes.
4. Get together again — (synchronous brainstorming)
   We spend 5 minutes (timed, yes) to put our ideas into the Easy -> Impossible chart in real-time.
5. Consolidation
   When I am consolidating the brainstormed topics and cleaning the team’s ideas, it’s fastest if I do this alone. I divide the topics up into an effort chart so we can see what would be the easiest to achieve, and what would take more time, scheduling and efforts. It’s laid out on the Easy -> Impossible template.

Products

In the middle of our first ever brainstorm session, I realized that we needed a consolidated list of products we’d be creating for the participation. We couldn’t just stray away willy-nilly; there needed to be some kind of consistency with the items we were creating, how we’d go about it, etc. as to achieve order.

As our main strategy of keeping podcast as king, a majority of our ideas will be to repurpose the audio stories into visuals — stills (quotes, infographics, graphics, comics), videos (motion graphics, gifs)- and text (supporting points in articles, longer-form answers, individual interview pieces/photo essays, quotes).

TL;DR — Full Team Brainstorm — Run Time 50 minutes:

Full Team via Google Slides:

• 5 min. Brainwriting
• 5 min. Populating Easy/Med/Impossible

Team Leader via Google Slides, Sheets & Docs:

• 35 min. to…
• Consolidate everything
• Divide everything into the efforts chart
• Take the topics and split them within the keyword research list (“sort all the ideas into our different categories and see where some companies overlap, where we can have collaborations between participants and mix up some of the products to make it more interesting.”)
• Create the final consolidation document for participants to see

Full Team via Google Docs:

• Approximately 10 mins for the team to check and approve everything, make comments, etc.

Do 1 or 2 at a time

When we first started, we brainstormed for about 12 companies over 3 days. It took about 2 to 3 hours every day, and we came together super early in the morning to finish it before our daily stand-ups. As difficult as it was, we mustered out all the final topic/product consolidations. Perhaps it nearly killed us but now, we’re able to control it and do 1 or 2 at a time and not drain ourselves like that again.

Final Note

If you’ve participated/are participating/are interested in participating in the future, now you know our process. And the time it takes to go through everything. Phew!

Thanks for reading! Why don’t you subscribe to our Remoter newsletter? At the end of every month, you’ll receive updates on the state of remote work as well as interesting new content from Remoter. Best of all, we’ll be providing you with an insider’s view of all the exciting projects we are embarking on. You can sign up here.