Analytic Techniques for Spies (And Product Teams): Structured Brainstorming
A former intelligence officer shares an invaluable strategy for generating innovative ideas.
Before making my transition to tech, I was an intelligence officer for a three-letter US intelligence agency. My job was to assess the capabilities and intentions of US adversaries and to predict their behavior to give policymakers, defense officials, and the White House a strategic edge in negotiations and forewarning of catastrophic events.
While there are glaring differences between the role of an intelligence officer and that of a product manager — such as intelligence officers needing to know how to avoid the surveillance of foreign intelligence services — there are a few relevant similarities.
Both professions require their practitioners to gain a deep understanding of the needs and motivations of their target audiences. And both benefit from being able to predict the behavior of their respective stakeholders. In the Intelligence Community, we used Structured Analytic Techniques (SATs) to accomplish this.
What are Structured Analytic Techniques (SATs)?
SATs are methods for overcoming shortfalls in human cognition, specifically cognitive biases and the brain’s tendency to overgeneralize complex scenarios. SATs help overcome these shortfalls by encouraging multiple viewpoints, enhancing communication, and forcing teams to be more rigorous with their analysis.
SATs enable product teams to overcome biases, increase collaboration and communication, and generate multiple viewpoints — all of which will help product managers identify problems worth solving and novel solutions for solving them.
Many SATs exist. There are SATs that will help you identify indicators of impending change (Indicators and Warnings Analysis), identify black swan events (High Impact, Low Probability Analysis), see beyond the horizon to identify future market trends (Alternative Futures Analysis), and a framework for assessing the validity of multiple hypotheses (Analysis of Competing Hypotheses).
Here, I’ll set the foundation for you to use more advanced SATs by providing a step-by-step guide for conducting Structured Brainstorming, a prerequisite for nearly every other SAT technique.
So, what is it Structured Brainstorming?
Structured Brainstorming is a regimented creative endeavor that helps teams put their heads together to generate diverse ideas and viewpoints. It consists of two phases: convergent thinking and divergent thinking. Below is a step-by-step guide for conducting both phases.
Step 1: Set the objective
Little is more frustrating than joining a brainstorming session without a purpose. In my experience, teams use the term loosely to mean getting together to bounce ideas off one another. This is not brainstorming; it’s usually a waste of time.
To avoid this, be crystal clear about what you seek to achieve by formulating a prompt (or question you seek to answer) for the session.
For example, say you’re building a mobile app to connect people through their love of reading. Your user research has proven that people enjoy social reading (book clubs and discussion groups on GoodReads and Facebook). You’ve also learned book club admins and managers of social reading groups are the key determining factor for robust engagement and growth within these social reading groups.
Accordingly, you’ve decided to focus on this user segment for your MVP and have identified admins’ main pain point, which is that they are unable to effectively engage their groups in the virtual Covid-19 world.
This reinforces additional analysis you’ve done and you’re fairly certain the root cause of the overarching problem you want to solve (admins’ inability to engage their groups virtually) is that they do not have adequate tools for hosting social reading events and engaging their group members. While you’ve done a competitive analysis and read your research team’s analyses, you haven’t figured out what you’re going to build.
In this scenario, your brainstorming prompt may be:
How can we help admins of social reading groups drive engagement within their groups?
Step 2: Gather materials and team
Schedule an hour-long meeting. Ideally, reserve a room with a whiteboard and adequate room for your team.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s likely that you’re working remotely. Luckily, Structured Brainstorming can effectively be conducted remotely. If your team is remote, use Google’s Jamboard, a virtual whiteboard that allows users to create virtual sticky notes. You can use this in lieu of physical sticky notes.
Materials
- One stack of sticky notes for each person (use Jamboard if virtual)
- A timekeeping device
- One writing device for each person (use Jamboard if virtual)
Team
The quality of your outputs will be proportional to the diversity of your brainstorming group.
This cannot be overstated. So, while you want to avoid having more than around 12 people (think Jeff Bezos’s two-pizza rule), take even greater care to ensure you have the right people in the room. This includes everyone from your core product team (usually design, engineers, and the product manager), as well as Product Operations, UX, and Research (if you’re lucky enough to have them).
Step 3: Divergent thinking
It’s showtime. You’ve assembled your team and disseminated the brainstorming materials. Kick off the meeting by reiterating its purpose. Then, write the prompt on the whiteboard (or Jamboard).
Set your timer for 15 minutes (this can be tweaked depending on your needs) and tell your team to write as many answers to the prompt as possible, using one sticky note for each response. Tell everyone to write the first thing that comes to their mind and to not worry about their ideas being polished. Have each person place their sticky notes on the whiteboard, as they complete them.
Ideally, you want raw, original, out-of-the-box ideas.
The best way to do this is to protect ideas during ideation (don’t worry, you’ll scrutinize them soon enough). In order to create a safe space for idea generation, team members should remain silent during this phase to avoid groupthink and undue influence on the ideas of others. Also, stickies should NOT include the name of their author.
Step 4: Convergent thinking
Now that you’ve captured individual responses on the whiteboard (or Jamboard), select at least one (but not more than three) team members to bucket each note into thematic categories. Have them create a new label with a few words or a phrase for each category. This should take between 10 and 15 minutes.
You may find that some notes fit into more than one bucket. That’s OK. Just duplicate the note and place one in each bucket. You may also find that some responses are completely irrelevant and do not fit into any bucket. You can discard these.
Step 5: What’s next?
The purpose of your brainstorm will determine what you will do with your outputs. For example, if you led a brainstorm to identify problems worth solving, you may use your outputs to conduct a root cause analysis or to inform another round of brainstorming focused on solutions to those problems (as was the case in the example above).
Speaking of the example above, you might use the themes you identified to guide your team’s roadmap. Of course, you’re unlikely to have the bandwidth to tackle all of the issues or themes you identified, so you’ll want to prioritize the most important themes — those you can ship with the least amount of effort, the most amount of impact, and that are aligned with your company’s mission and business objectives.
Final thoughts
Much of your success as a product manager will depend on your ability to make sound decisions, to weigh multiple viewpoints, and to effectively solve user issues with compelling solutions. SATs can help you do each of these things while also building a collaborative product development culture. And now that you’ve mastered Structured Brainstorming, you can take the next step with more advanced techniques.
