How I run Ideation workshop to hear “the voice” of the team.

I missed a step in my previous article on purpose. I was planning to write a separate article about that and here it is.

When I was completing my UX training by Chris Nodder I liked a technique called “Ideation” and I have decided to hack it and to use it for my own purposes – as a product person.

So here’s what I did:

Booked a room:

I booked a meeting room for 2 hours. There is no special requirement for the room – you just need a table, a few chairs and a projector. You can also do it in a quiet working space with no cubicles or in a non-smoking bar.

Provided some sweets:

I’ve bought some sweets, to help people concentrate on the topic while doing something with their brains, their hands and their jaws. Later I realized that it would have been nicer if I had brought fresh fruits or something more healthier (I’ve red that in a book called (Design)“Sprint” written by a couple of Google Venture folks).

Provided the tools:

I bought colored pencils and I printed out lots of templates to be used during the workshop.

Ran the workshop:

So, yes, the workshop – the idea was to get different people together working on a task to get some ideas and fresh views.

I invited people from different teams – I got a couple of QA guys, a few of Business Analysts and a bunch of programmers.

Then I randomly divided them in teams. And I gave them the task – a short list of user requirements with the question: How would you do this? Use your imagination and the template to create a simple prototype for just 15 minutes.

There were a few basic rules:

• The requirements must be always visible on the screen
• You can ask me questions if you have any (I was the customer)
• Don’t talk, just prototype and eat sweets.

After this 15 min period, every team had 2 min to present their work in front of the others. There was no opportunity to ask questions during or after the process.
Here are some of the results:
  

As you can see – you can do whatever you want, but you have to be able to explain it after that to the rest of the team and to focus on how it fits the customer requirements.

Anyone can prototype!

We repeated this with a few more requirements and at the end we had a lot of ideas to discuss with the rest of the team.

The outcome:

The goal of this workshop was to hear “the voice” of the whole team. Some guys are shy (mostly the developers, oops) and can’t share their ideas while we are discussing in a meeting.

The output was to generate ideas and to show great approaches on how we can solve a customer pain point.