13 Brainstorming Techniques Every Product Manager Needs to Know
Product teams have a relatively constant need to generate new ideas: new ways to give value to users, flows that are more intuitive than before, feature sets and strategic directions that your competitors haven’t yet mastered. When your role as a product manager requires so many ideas, you can’t really wait for sudden inspiration or simply write down whatever comes to mind once a week.
Enter your new best friend: these wicked brainstorming techniques.
In this guide, you’ll learn more about how to organize intentional and purposeful brainstorming sessions and workshops using key brainstorming techniques. We’ll also cover what makes an effective brainstorming session, and how to use them to fuel your product roadmap.
Let’s dive in.
What’s the Purpose of Brainstorming Techniques?
A brainstorming technique is a structured method for generating new ideas. It involves planning and executing intentional exercises with your team that get you ‘storming’ outside of your usual mental models or overall idea management practices. Coming up with new and innovative ideas is, of course, what fuels your product roadmap.
Here are some of the primary benefits of using a brainstorming technique when you need some new ideas:
- Brainstorming methods are designed to help you and your team think differently. Each technique has its own unique way of helping you search the depths of your brain and tap into your collective knowledge for ideas that you haven’t yet thought of.
- Brainstorming techniques are designed to engage a variety of professionals. As a product manager, you work cross-functionally with web developers, designers, marketers, and more. These techniques help to facilitate teamwork and bring in various points of view for creative problem-solving.
- Creating a time and space for brainstorming supports product timelines. If you sit around waiting for inspiration, how do you know if you’ll actually generate the ideas that you need in time to meet product roadmap deadlines? With brainstorming sessions, you can schedule them as needed so that you won’t be slowed down by a lack of ideas.
6 Tips for More Effective Brainstorming Sessions
Soon, you’ll choose the exact method for your first brainstorming session. But first, let’s establish some ground rules for running an effective ideation session with your team members:
- Choose the right group of team members: Depending on what you’re generating ideas for, keep in mind that it’s not only PMs and designers who have input to contribute. Colleagues such as product marketing managers, business development associates, and customer support may also have valuable insights for your brainstorming.
- Break the ice: Start with an icebreaker to put your participants at ease and create a sense of connection. This is especially important if you’ve cast the net wide and have a group of people that don’t always work together in their day-to-day work.
- State the goal and the reasoning behind it before you start: Once you’ve broken the ice, you need to make sure that everyone understands why you’re gathered. Are you trying to generate ideas for a new product? Or a feature iteration? Whatever it is, state the goal simply and show any supporting data to help illustrate why you’re coming together.
- Take a structured approach: It might be obvious from the content of this article, but using a framework helps bring structure to idea generation sessions. This could be one of the techniques outlined in this article, or it could simply be an agenda with a set amount of time for each part of your meeting. You might also consider using an idea management software to keep track of your process from brainstorming through to prioritization and development.
- Have someone record the session and/or take notes: Not only do you need a list of the ideas that you generate, but key points from the discussion around those ideas will help you take action after your session. Be sure there’s someone taking note of action items and their owners. This will help you move on to the next stages of the idea management process.
- Encourage participants to eliminate distractions: Consider making your brainstorming session phone and laptop-free if it’s in person. For online brainstorming, you can ask participants to turn off notifications and close other tabs to help stay focused on the task at hand.
13 Group Brainstorming Techniques to Spark Creative Thinking
Now, we’ve arrived at the fun part! Choosing which brainstorming technique(s) to use for your next session is pure joy. Why? Because there are so many fun methods out there that facilitate creative thinking and fresh ideas.
Let’s take a look at some of the most effective brainstorming techniques and how they can support your team!
1. Group Brainstorming
Individual and group brainstorming are more like types of brainstorming, and you can apply many of the following techniques in either setting. But for starters, let’s cover this tried and true way to get creative juices flowing. The specific structure may vary, but the concept is that you have a group or team in a shared workspace (physical or virtual) coming up with lots of different ideas and building on them together.
The cardinal rule here is that while the exercise is taking place, there are no bad ideas. Aim for quantity. After you’ve allowed enough time for a large volume of ideas, the team goes through and discusses each, ultimately aligning on what the most promising directions are so that the product team can explore them further after the session.
2. Reverse Brainstorming
Reverse brainstorming is an innovative technique that frequently comes up in ideation workshops structured around design frameworks. In this approach, the facilitator enables creative thinking from the group by asking the opposite question.
For example: If you’re brainstorming ways to decrease cart abandonment in your ecommerce shop, you frame the brainstorming question as: “What could we do to increase the number of users who abandon the purchase flow?”
It may sound strange, but if you try it out, you’ll see that it’s truly magical. By generating ideas for what not to do, you’re thinking in a new way. This helps people to approach the problem from different angles and come up with innovative solutions to problems.
3. Brainwriting
In any group activity, you have the people who are quick and articulate and share their ideas. Sometimes, they drown out the team members who need some time to think before they share. Brainwriting is an easy brainstorming activity that helps avoid the trap where the loudest idea wins and also helps to counteract groupthink.
After setting the goal and agenda, the facilitator gives each participant a time limit to think of their ideas and write them down independently. After 10 minutes or so, everyone comes together to share and discuss their ideas. This way, everyone is thinking independently and also gets the chance to share their ideas.
4. Mind Mapping
Mind mapping is a brainstorming exercise that usually involves a whiteboard and sticky notes, whether physical or virtual. The facilitator starts with one general concept in the middle of a visual representation and then draws lines to related tasks, thoughts, and concepts. This could take shape as a flowchart or any other system to represent how ideas are connected.
For example: If you have a fitness app and you want to brainstorm ideas for community features, your concept in the center may be “how community facilitates fitness” and you may draw lines to things like “accountability” and “sharing stats for confidence building.”
A mind map is a useful way to outline your product’s functionality or any type of workflow. But it can also be a good way to simply connect your thoughts and ideas in a visual representation.
5. Starbursting
Imagine a star with each point having one of the standard question words: who, what, where, when, why, and how. Such a star is the focal point for this brainstorming method, where your team comes together to generate detailed questions around a larger concept.
For example: If you’re building a news feed for the aforementioned fitness community, the news feed would be at the center of your star. The ‘points’ may outline questions like: How can our news feed be engaging enough to browse? Or What is the value proposition of posting to our news feed as opposed to social media?
While it may feel strange to generate a list of questions, the overall purpose of Starbursting is to examine existing products or features and explore new or additional value your team could bring to them.
7. Brain-netting
This is a favorite of remote teams, and for good reason: it’s a brainstorming technique that doesn’t necessarily take place in real-time. You use a digital collaboration tool like Miro or FigJam and have users record their thoughts and ideas on a specific topic on their own time (though we recommend giving a deadline!). Then, you can review and analyze ideas later.
8. SWOT Analysis
This is another method where you can bring your already formed creative ideas as your starting point and analyze their viability with their team. Level 2 brainstorming, if you will. For each idea, you create a chart and jot down the following:
- Strengths
- Weaknesses
- Opportunities
- Threats
This allows you to use your collective perspectives to narrow down a list of ideas and create some concrete action items.
9. Rapid Ideation
The idea here is to favor quantity over quality—a successful session is simply a lot of ideas. The best way to run a session like this is to arm all of your participants with copious sticky notes and to have them write as many ideas as possible on your chosen topic within a specific time period. After everyone contributes their ideas, the second part of the session involves separating the promising ideas from the less promising ideas for further exploration.
10. Stepladder Technique
This is another brilliant problem-solving technique that totally upends the way that teams tend to work. First, you give all of your participants time to generate their own ideas independently according to the topic at hand. Then, you start with two core members of the team who come together and discuss their ideas. They give each other feedback and narrow their thoughts and directions. After that conversation is over, you add one more team member and do the same alignment process with three people. You then add a fourth, and so on.
You can use the stepladder technique in one day, or in several individual meetings over time. Regardless, the idea is that it’s easier and more effective to generate alignment when it’s not a bunch of competing voices all in the room at the same time. Every round of conversations helps sharpen your thinking so that by the time the whole group is together, you’re ready to settle on some action items!
11. Round Robin Brainstorming
With this technique, you can make sure that everyone in the group has a chance to offer a different perspective. Ideally, the group sits in a circle and everyone has a piece of paper or sticky notes. You go in order, and let everyone contribute their ideas. This is especially helpful if you have introverts who might not feel comfortable speaking up on their own.
Tip: You may want to include a minimum number of ideas for everyone to contribute, and give them some thinking time before you share with the group.
12. The SCAMPER Method
Sometimes, your brainstorming meeting will benefit from having a framework for thinking outside of the box, and SCAMPER is a great technique for doing just that. The group goes through each part of the acronym based on the problem you want to solve, each one encouraging you to look at the topic at hand in a different way. Here’s an overview of the acronym:
- Substitute: How might we do X instead of Y to reach our goal?
- Combine: What could we put together to make a better experience?
- Adapt: How can we react to the changing situation on the ground to give more value?
- Modify: What part of the flow can we change up to make it an action more intuitive?
- Put to another use: We already have this technology, what else can we do with it to provide more value to users?
- Eliminate: What can we get rid of to make everything feel simple?
- Rearrange: What can we change the order of to make the experience reflect a user’s mental model?
SCAMPER is a particularly useful method for ideating new features or very substantial UX changes.
13. Freewriting
With this technique, everyone has a set amount of time to write their thoughts on a given topic, and the only rule is: no editing or refining. Write everything that comes to mind, whether it’s random words or full paragraphs. After everyone is done externalizing everything in their heads on paper, the team leader facilitates a discussion and the session ends when there is a list of actionable ideas.
The main value of freewriting is that it’s designed to help people focus more on their ideas and less on their articulation and presentation. It allows ideas that aren’t fully formed or thought through to come to light, often resulting in innovation.
Ready to Start Your Brainstorming Process?
Now that you know how to facilitate an effective brainstorming process and have a full menu of fun and purposeful techniques, it’s time to schedule your first session! Think of the most pressing problem or task that your product team is dealing with and start planning.
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