Do you and your product development team find yourself staring at walls or ceilings, tapping pens on the table, jotting down notes and crossing them out repeatedly when brainstorming and prioritizing what features your product might include? My conversations with clients regarding the features they want to include in their product design are usually more problem-themed than celebration-themed. Creating the right mix of the most important, relevant, cost effective, user friendly features is a very difficult balance to strike. Sometimes, just developing a number of possible features in the first place can be daunting. Check out Creating Passionate Users blog posting on throwing a product/feature design party. Here are the party-planning steps:
The basic idea looks like this, although there are a million ways to modify it:
1) Pick 9 people, ideally from different parts of your company and
including some customers. (If you don’t have a company yet, pick 9
friends–preferably those who don’t know each other well)2) Buy/borrow/find at least 20 “input materials” including books,
magazines, a short film, graphic novels, etc. (a list of possibilities
is a little lower in this post)3) Assign (randomly) at least 2 “inputs” to each person. Do NOT let
them choose (it’s important they not be allowed to gravitate toward
things they’re already comfortable with)4) Give the group 30 minutes to generate 4 ideas (if it’s a
feature/upgrade party, then 4 different features or feature sets… if
it’s a feature implementation party, then 4 different ways to implement
the already-decided feature, etc.) These 4 ideas don’t have to come
directly from their input materials, although participants should be
highly encouraged to describe at least one new thing they learned that
inspired their idea.5) Round One begins: split into 3 groups of 3 people (see chart
below). Each person gets no more than 10 minutes to “pitch” four ideas
to the other two in their group. There are 12 total ideas for this
group, so allow about 30 minutes. Record (anonymously) the selections
of each person, which represent a “vote” for the ideas.6) At the end of Round One, each person must select their two
favorite ideas from each of the other two members of their group. So if
Group One had Fred, Mary, and Sue… then Fred must select his two
favorite ideas from the four that Mary pitched, and his two favorites
that Sue pitched.7) Round Two begins: reconfigure the groups so that each person is
now with different people (see chart below). Instead of pitching their own
four ideas, each person pitches the four ideas they chose from their
previous group members. Again, they have about 10 minutes to pitch the
four ideas. Remember, the point is that each person is no longer
pitching their own ideas!8) At the end of Round Two, each person must again select their two
favorite ideas from each of the other two members of this new group.
Record (anonymously) the selections of each person, which represent a
“vote” for the ideas.9) Round Three begins: reconfigure the groups again. Each person in
the group now pitches the four ideas (two from each of the two members
of their most recent group) they chose in the previous (Round Two)
round.10) At this point, each person has pitched a total of 12 ideas:
* Round One: pitch your own four ideas
* Round Two: pitch four ideas from your Round One group to your new
Round Two group — two ideas from each of your previous group’s other
members.
* Round Three: pitch four ideas from your Round Two group to your new Round Three group, as before.11) At the end of Round Three, again each person selects their top two favorite ideas from the ones pitched by the other two members. Record these as a vote.
12) You should now have a total of 108 votes. Choose the top 9
vote-getters (you’ll have to be creative about tie-breaking… you
could choose more than 9, for example).13) Give each person a copy of the 9 ideas, and send them back for another round of “inputs.” Again, assign each person different materials from the ones they used at the beginning.
14) Give the participants 30 minutes to use their inputs and flesh
out a single idea from the nine. Their one idea can be a modified
version of one of the nine, based on their “research.” Their one idea
could be a mashup of two or more of the nine ideas. It cannot, however,
be something completely new. Participants should be prepared to explain
how something they got from their inputs helped in some way (not an
absolute requirement).15) Now it’s up to you what to do with the ideas. You might choose
just one, or take all 9 “winners” with their pitches back to another
person or group, etc.
What about intellectual property? That might be a concern if not all 9 people are within your company. But it shouldn’t stop you dead in your tracks. Would all 9 people be willing to sign NDAs? Are they trusted friends that have no interest in the ideas that come out of it? Could you limit the idea session to only one aspect, feature, or problem regarding your product? Chances are, you have far more to gain than lose in this process.