Series Overview
Getting the most out of your digital product starts with understanding the lived experiences of those using it, and using this to identify any challenges and areas for improvement.
Having this objective approach reduces ‘design by committee’ or ‘too many cooks’ and helps you to avoid following the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion), in favour of delivering meaningful change that has measurable impact.
At Huddle, I run a series of workshops that enable our clients to do just this, and in this Think Like a Product Manager series, I share key takeaways from these workshops, along with tips and advice on how you fit these processes into your existing role.
Note: These articles are not designed for full-time product managers, but rather people who have found themselves with this responsibility and are trying to do this effectively alongside other role commitments.
The series is split into four articles, outlined below.
1. Research
An overview of UX and user research tips and techniques, such as surveys, 1-on-1 interviews, and more.
2. Problem framing
How to make sense of research findings to uncover the right problems to solve and some useful brainstorming tools.
You are here!
3. Solution ideation
Three techniques for problem-solving and coming up with creative ideas.
4. Prioritisation
We will take all of the raw ideation materials obtained so far and rewrite them as discrete actionable ideas.
Easy Ideation Exercises
These exercises work best with several participants from different areas of your team.
In fact, they work even better if you are able to involve your customers or clients. If you have any that you trust to share your process, I would highly recommend you get them involved. Remember, customers and clients most likely would love to know that you are taking their user experience this seriously, and this might even be a PR opportunity for you.
So, as well as winning brownie points from your customers and team, you may need to procure some more actual brownies to lure people into your ideation sessions.
I would set aside another 2-3 hours, and this works best a couple of weeks after the previous session to make sure everyone has had chance to reflect on the process so far.
Some of you may be brimming with ideas and can’t wait to write them down, or you might not be sure what you’re going to write. That’s okay! These exercises are designed to tease out ideas and be accessible for anyone to contribute. The most important thing is to cultivate a “no bad ideas” environment during these sessions. The goal is quantity over quality here (you will prioritise and organise ideas later).
Ideation exercise #1 (8 mins)
Crazy 8s
Crazy 8s is a popular Product Management exercise which just requires a sheet of A4 paper each and a pen.
Given a How Might We question, you will fill 8 boxes on your page with ideas and thoughts surrounding the question.
Step 1
First, take a How Might We statement that you will all focus on (or, you might want to offer 3 statements at a time and allow people to pick one to focus on).
Everyone should then separate their A4 paper into 8 boxes, like this:
Step 2
Now, here’s the catch – you next need to set a timer for 8 minutes. You only have 1 minute per box. So after 8 minutes, the whole exercise is done. It’s not called Crazy 8s for nothing…
Start the timer, and try to fill all 8 boxes with something.
Crazy 8s tips
The exercise should be very relaxed. As with any creative exercise, focussing on the end result or “trying to come up with good ideas” is the best way to make people shut down and not want to write anything, for fear of it being a “bad idea”.
Instead, try to think of this exercise as just getting out all of the ideas on paper, good and bad. You might throw away most of it, but you have to get the bad ideas out to make room for the good ones to emerge.
There’s really no wrong way to do this, you could:
- Fill each box with a different idea
- Focus on one idea and explore different aspects of it in each box
- Start with one idea and iterate on it with each box, improving it, refining it, etc
You can also record the ideas in any way you like:
- Sketch designs or layouts
- Draw ideas/comics/storyboard
- Write bullet points
- Sketch flow charts or diagrams
- Any combination of the above
Ideation exercise #2 (20 mins)
Round Robin
There are pros and cons to coming up with ideas solo, like in the previous exercise.
It’s good to combine this with a more collaborative exercise – the Round Robin.
Step 1
For this exercise, you will also need a sheet of paper and pens. For this exercise you will also focus on one or a couple of How Might We questions. This time, split your page into 4 equal-sized boxes:
Step 2
Now, set a timer for 5 minutes. In these first 5 mins, you will decide on a single How Might We question to address, and fill the top left box on your page with ideas. Again, this is very flexible, you can:
- Focus on one idea in detail
- List a few ideas
- Draw things
- Write bullet points
- Do a diagram
It’s really up to you – just constrain yourself to the single box in the top left corner.
Step 3
After 5 minutes is up, everybody will pass their sheets of paper around to the left, so everyone will receive the ideas from the person on their right.
Next, you will have another 5 minutes to fill in the top right box – crucially you should expand on or develop the previous ideas. In order to make this collaborative, you should be taking what’s already there and improving it, refining it, building on it, or any of the above. You shouldn’t just fill the box with new, unrelated ideas.
After four rounds of this – so 20 mins total – you will have several pieces of paper with a collaborative combination of ideas.
Discussion and
next steps
After either of these exercises, you should take time to reflect, discuss, allow people the opportunity to explain their ideas, and generally just let the ideas marinate and gel together.
It can be tempting to just sweep up the ideas into your arms and march out of there to start implementing them, but you want this process to feel as inclusive as possible so don’t skip this step. Everybody needs to be brought in, understand what’s going on and where others are coming from. Only then will you get true buy-in from the team which will pay you dividends later.
After some free discussion, a really useful exercise is to allow people to vote on their favourite ideas that have emerged.
Now, there are two ways of doing this, depending on what you think your team will respond to.
Dot voting
A collaborative method of doing this is dot voting – each team member receives a certain number of “dots” which they can add to any of the ideas (you can choose how many).
Let’s say you give everyone 5 dots. Each person is then free to distribute these dots however they see fit, to ‘vote’ on their favourite ideas. They could put five dots on five separate ideas, or they could put all five dots on one idea if they really love it. At the end of this process, you simply write down all the ideas in a list in order of the number of dots they received.
People can add dots to a specific line or drawing (e.g. a specific suggestion or functionality), or an entire panel of a Crazy 8s or Round Robin (e.g. a more broad idea).
Private voting
Alternatively, you can allow people to vote privately and then reveal their votes at the same time.
To do this, number all of the frames of the Crazy 8s and Round Robins, and then ask people to privately write down 5 numbers on post-its which represent their five favourite ideas.
You should then collect up everyone’s numbers and shuffle them. Then, read them aloud in turn (without showing people the handwriting on the post-it). As you do, place dots yourself on all of the ideas that come up.
Review
The purpose of these exercises is to explore a wide range of possibilities and potential solutions to the problems or challenges identified.
Remember the goal isn’t to come up with the best ideas, but simply to get all ideas out on paper. And don’t skip the discussion, reflection, and team bonding that comes with this process! It is a valuable part of the exercise.
You may want to run these exercises a few times in order to cover all of your How Might We questions. Once you have come up with ideas across all of these, and got some initial idea of priorities through voting, you are ready to move onto the final step – prioritisation and roadmap planning.
What’s next?
In the next article, Impact vs Effort Prioritisation, I will explain how I make sense of research findings in order to uncover the right problems to solve. Check it out.
