The Secret to Kickass Project Kickoffs
A Brief Guide to Product Ideation Workshops
In the previous post, I briefly touched on product ideation workshops and their importance in getting internal validation on key product feature concepts. Product ideation is probably the most important phase of the product development cycle. However, if not done properly, many things can go wrong in the kickoff phase. Often, stakeholders that come from different backgrounds may perceive the project in vastly different ways, which causes misalignments of vision and execution, buried hidden requirements, and confusion that will create trouble and delay later on in the product design process. A product ideation workshop is the best environment and opportunity to align stakeholder interests and help create a valuable shared understanding within the team. In this post, I’ll share a brief cheatsheet that can help you plan and facilitate your team’s next ideation workshop and generate actionable outcomes that drive the following project execution.
Before the workshop
Gathering initial requirements
The first step in facilitating a great project ideation workshop is to make sure you and the team are prepared for it. Investing some time before the workshop to gather initial requirements is a good way to start preparing for the upcoming ideation workshop. There are several important questions you need to find out through initial requirement gathering:
What are the business objectives associated with the feature release?
Who are the stakeholders of the feature, and what are their roles and responsibilities in the project?
What are the key constraints you and your team have to work with?
What is the planned project timeline?
What are some examples of other products that can be used as references?
What customer insights are there that may influence decision making?
Invite the right people
It is hard for ideation workshops to generate the desired outcome if you don’t invite the right people. Start considering who you should invite to the ideation workshop based on the RACI framework of the project from initial requirements.
Since some of your colleagues may have busy schedules, it is best to plan the schedule early to minimise last-minute conflicts.
Set expectations
When inviting people to the product ideation workshop, it is often better to include a brief description of the session and what to expect from it. Inform your colleagues what to prepare before the session (or no preparation required) and what outcomes are to be expected. You should also emphasise that since this is only brainstorming, it is not expected that the team would have all the answers by the end of the session. After all, the product ideation workshop is just the beginning of the product design process, and the priority is to discover problems rather than trying to solve them all at once.
During the workshop
Aligning your problem statements
Now it’s time for the workshop day. To start the session, you should first remind your colleagues the objectives of the project, sharing tips on effective brainstorming, and “warm up” the room with some fun activities. You should then lead the discussion to align the group on a set of specific problems that the proposed feature is trying to address.
One common pitfall of brainstorming sessions is that people are usually very focused on coming up with solutions, and can lose track of the real customer problem that prompts the feature in the first place. You can prevent that from happening by capturing all aligned problem statements on a series of post-it notes and paste them on the wall as a physical reminder for the rest of the session.
Idea brainstorming and voting
This is obviously the key part of the ideation workshop. In this section of the workshop, each team member will be working on their own, in silence, to brainstorm as many ideas as possible to solve the problem statements. A variety of brainstorming tools and techniques can be used here and you can go creative to encourage people to go wild with their ideas. Some of the popular technique are Crazy 8’s, Mind Mapping and Mash-ups.
After the individual silent brainstorming exercise, each team member takes turns to present their top three best ideas to the group. Spend some time to allow people to go through and understand each presented ideas thoroughly and ask everyone to vote for their favourite ideas. Remember that at this stage you are not deciding on the one best idea to move forward with, Instead, you are eliminating ideas that are infeasible to execute or irrelevant to the problem statements.
Prioritise ideas
Once the list of top ideas has been picked, it’s time to put on the analytical hat and prioritise features strategically. In order to prioritise effectively, reflect on the product’s key goals and focuses, and use tools such as the Effort Impact Matrix to decide if an individual feature is a Must have, Should have, Could have or Won’t have for the current project timeline.
Next steps after the workshop
By the end of the workshop day, the team should have a clear idea of the most important features to focus on in the design exploration and prototyping phase. Don’t forget to set up follow-up review meetings with relevant stakeholders and schedule customer interviews to validate your design concepts before committing resources for development.
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