How to run a successful ideation workshop as a PM
How to run a successful ideation workshop as a PM
Product Pill #5
Ideation workshops sound simple enough. You just need to get a bunch of people in the same room and give them some problems to solve right?
Everyone can come up with ideas, but to get the most from your audience there are some helpful tips and tricks when it comes to planning and running an ideation workshop you should know as a PM.
In today's article, I'll cover the why, when and how:
Why ideation workshops are important
When to run an ideation workshop
How to plan and run a successful ideation workshop
Why ideation workshops are important 🤔
Ideation workshops are an integral part of a PM's toolkit because they enable effective cross-team communication and collaboration, which inevitably leads to more impactful features and better products.
As a company scales and product teams are in charge of a smaller part of the product, they can fall into the trap of building products in knowledge silos. Effective ideation workshops allow you to share findings across teams and helps create a common understanding of user problems, which in turn enables other teams to design better features.
Bringing stakeholders from different teams together in one room (whether it be virtual or in-person) with the intention of brainstorming ideas allows you to crowdsource innovative solution as a PM. Having a mix of unique perspectives (e.g., marketing, customer success, core product teams etc.) can help you unlock creative solutions you wouldn’t have otherwise thought of.
When to run an ideation workshop 🗓
Hopefully now you're convinced why you should be running regular ideation workshops as a PM.
But when should you be running ideation workshops? Ideation workshops are generally most effective after you've conducted some initial user research to better understand the problems your users experience.
Once you start identifying patterns and recurring problems, then you can be confident you know enough about your users to start thinking about solutions. A common pitfall is rushing straight into brainstorming ideas without having a clear enough understanding of the problem.
A general rule of thumb is if you hear the same issue twice it may be a coincidence, but if you hear the same issue three times it's likely a problem which could be worth workshopping ideas around.
How to run a successful ideation workshop 🎯
Now you know why you should run an ideation workshop and when you should start thinking about organising one, so the final piece is how to actually facilitate a successful workshop.
I've distilled the process of organising and running an ideation workshop into 6 steps:
Identify key stakeholders and book in a timeÂ
Create an agenda
Share resources with attendees
Create a presentation
Facilitate the workshop
Distribute resources, review ideas and take action
1. Identify key stakeholders and book in a timeÂ
This step is fairly self explanatory. When considering who to invite to the workshop, keep in mind that it's powerful to get a diverse range of representatives from different areas of the business to add unique perspectives to the discussion.
In the recent workshop I ran, I included stakeholders from customer success, marketing and growth, engineering, design, data and other product teams.
Ideally, you want to give your attendees at least 2 weeks notice to maximise attendance. It's a bit of a logistical nightmare to orchestrate, so I suggest anticipating which week you will likely run the workshop based on how your research is progressing and putting a placeholder in your stakeholder's calendars. The workshop can run for 60-90 minutes depending on how many people are included. It's best to overestimate, so block out 90 minutes in everyone's calendar.
Make sure you're providing context on why you're running the workshop and let your attendees know you will provide further information closer to the date of the workshop.
2. Create an agenda
Now that your stakeholders are aware of the workshop you intend to run, establish a clear structure for the workshop
Your workshop should cover the following points:
Objetives
Cover the purpose of the workshop
Set the stage for people to put their thinking caps on
Context
Target users and research methods
Problem deep dive + Q&A
Summarise the key problems and who these problems impact
Provide an opportunity for the team to ask clarification questions so they are clear on what problems they're solving during ideation
Solution brainstorming
Get your attendees across the brainstorming methods you plan to use
Communicate any relevant constraints
Idea voting (optional)
Allow the team to vote on their top ideas
Give people an opportunity to present the top voted ideas
Wrap-up
Share the next steps your team will take to action the ideas
3. Share resources with attendees
When you have a clear understanding of the structure of your workshop, share the agenda with attendees and communicate any expectations.
If there is any preparation material they should read (e.g., interview insights), make sure they know where to access the material and you give them enough time to complete the readings so they can adequately prepare for the workshop.
4. Create a presentation
Creating a compelling presentation can make a huge difference when it comes to engaging your participants and brainstorming effective solutions.
Here are a few tips to take your presentations to the next level:
Keep the colour pallet light to induce creativity - now's probably not the time to channel your inner goth...
Sprinkle the presentation with some emojis, memes and GIFS to add some light-heartedness - no one likes a boring presentation with nothing but numbers and words
Keep it engaging by using personas and telling a story - putting problems behind a face does wonders to get people more invested
Keep it real by using quotes from interviews - there's nothing more compelling than hearing what users actually said about your product so use this to your advantage when communicating the key problems
6. Facilitate the workshop
If you've followed the steps above and done your preparation, running the workshop is the easy part!
I highly recommend using Miro to run the actual brainstorming component of the workshop and preparing a Miro board beforehand.
I've included an example of the Miro template I designed for the ideation workshop I recently ran. The board was clearly labelled and split up by the key problems, which made it easy for participants to input their ideas in the right place.
The timer feature in Miro allows participants to easily keep track of how much time they have and participants can easily vote on their top ideas using the emoji feature, which allows the workshop to run much more smoothly. FigJam is also a great alternative to Miro.
6. Distribute resources, review ideas and take action
After the workshop has concluded, distribute any relevant resources such as the workshop recording, slides and Miro board to the broader team so they can also benefit from the insights.
Review the ideas with your team and determine which ideas you would like to implement.
Follow up with participants to gather more information on the ideas if necessary and start working with the design team to create low-fidelity prototypes to get feedback from users as quickly as possible.
Happy workshopping!
Ideation workshops are a powerful collaboration tool if planned and run successfully.
I hope you found the information above useful and that you can start applying it to the way you approach your work as a PM.
If you took away something useful please do share it with a fellow PM!
On a final note, I would appreciate if you took 2 minutes to leave some feedback on how you're finding these articles!
Thanks for reading!