Remote ways of working: Asynchronous ideation

The pandemic has undeniably created many constraints for our (and I believe many others) product organization. Anything from communication challenges due to not sitting in the same room, creating empathy for colleagues that you have never met, and navigating a cascade of extra sync meetings.

But while is undeniable that we have had our challenges, I think that the constraints of not sitting in the same room, have also forced us to think outside the box. And what many times come from constraints and necessity is- innovation!

If I look back at the way we were working before March 2020, there is one thing that made its entrance in our Hemnet PM toolbox and I could not live without now: asynchronous ideation.

At the very heart of this concept is the idea that different people prefer different ways of sharing and reflecting on problems. This is not a piece of news for anyone, yet while we were all sitting in the same space, many times we forced our product team to come up with ideas and share them exactly at the moment of the workshop.

We value diversity in so many ways in product development, yet the most common practice is still to put everyone in the same ”ideation box”. If it sounds really wrong, it is because it is.

But I myself would have never realized it if I would have not been forced to think in another way because of digital constraints.

With the burst of covid-19, I didn’t have the luxury of having those half-days-long ideation sessions, with post-its and everyone in the same room. Who can bear 4 hours-long meetings looking at a screen and keeping attention, creativity, and momentum going? Even with pauses. Even with stretches. Seriously, who?

So instead of panicking (oh well, a bit of panic was there in the beginning), I started to approach the problem from another perspective.

If the final outcome of an ideation session is that everyone should have had the time to lift their ideas, is it really the only way to do it by using one sitting?

The answer is..well you guessed..NO.

The magic trick is to see the final goal (creating ideas) as a process and not as a meeting. And once you realize that, everything becomes more clear.

Pre-pandemic ideation process:

1. Set the stage:
   Prepare some pre-reading material so the participants could get familiar with the topic. Also read: nobody should be surprised about what we talk about in the meeting

2. Long ideation meeting:
   Start with a summary of the pre-info and questions, talk about the process, bring out your post-it, and start to produce ideas. There was also discussion about ideas, but it normally was late into the process and everyone got pretty tired by the end of it.

3. Sum up and next steps that might lead to another session

This is how I think about ideations now:

1. Set the stage:
   Give context becomes a multiple-step process that is designed to accommodate different needs. I normally do some written preparation (usually in Miro) and a short video

2. Async ideation:
   Sharing of all the content above, and giving some days to let all the participants write their ideas in the Miro board. This allows everyone to go back to the material, take some time to digest, write their thoughts.

3. Async clustering of ideas:
   As the facilitator, you prepare the Miro board so that the ideas are already organized and you do not have to do it while the entire group waits for you (oh, the stress taken away from finding the right words there and then)

4. Sync discussion:
   Here is the twist - the together time is spent on discussing ideas, going deeper into them, and actually explaining. You can do this phase with the entire group or with smaller sub-groups depending on how many introverts you have. And the beauty is that you can do this remote or even physically - hello hybrid work.

5. Async sum-up and next steps:
   This might lead to another session sync or async depending on the nature of it

The big gain of this process is that it caters to different needs, it takes away much of the stress from participants and facilitator, it allows time for reflection, which in its turn leads to better ideas.

If you have not tried it yet, just do it! I promise you will not regret it. And let me know how it goes!

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