Asynchronous Product Brainstorm
Use this remote-friendly template to facilitate a brainstorm with your team. Learn more about this template.
What is an asynchronous brainstorm?
An asynchronous product brainstorm is remote-friendly and happens when teammates contribute virtually, whenever it works best for them. A discussion is held on a Guru Card in response to prompts that encourage creativity. Stakeholders contribute to main topics and add comments under existing topics as sub-bullets.
What are the benefits of having it through Guru?
Everyone feels free to contribute, not just the most senior (or most extroverted) people in the room
Multiple people can write at the same time
It's easy to add code, links to examples and references, screenshots, and embeds to share your thoughts
Guru prevents information overload by integrating directly with all of the apps you love - information is easy to find quickly without changing browsers or logging in to yet another tool
Guru provides team's a single source of truth that's free to share with any teammate for visibility
What do teams brainstorm with this template?
Product ideas
Development process improvements
Team culture
New features
How to kick off a remote-friendly brainstorm:
To edit this Card, get the template above. Update the title for your brainstorm topic.
Include a description about what is being discussed along with any helpful background people may need.
Include an end date so people know by when they should add their contributions.
Leave Card "unverified" while it is happening for quick indicator that a brainstorm is active.
Identify specific contributors with an emoji placed before their contribution.
Include a legend of contributors and their emojis at the top of Card.
Use +1's to agree with another contributor's point and identify ideas that have broad consensus among participants.
To add a +1 to a point simply put [your-emoji] and the end of the line. If someone has already added a +1 you can add your emoji next to theirs.
Brainstorm follow-up:
Distill brainstorm contributions into outcomes that identify any decisions or actionable items on the Card.
Verify the Card and send it to the team as an announcement.
Example brainstorm:
Describe what we are discussing for this example.
Explain why we're having the discussion in the first place
Include links to background material so everyone has equal knowledge about the subject being discussed.
Brainstorm TOPIC: Dinner plans
The development team is hungry and looking to innovate on the product
Links N/A
End date: Discussion ends
May 16, 2013
CONTRIBUTORS
😺- Jim
🐶- Pam
BRAINSTORM DISCUSSION:
Where should we get dinner?
😺I think we should get Chinese for dinner
🐶We had Chinese twice already this week, I feel like something different. What about pizza?
😺I could do pizza!
🐶We should create an app called restaurant roulette that just picks a place for us so we don't have to do this over and over +😺
OUTCOMES
Building an app that randomly picks a restaurant to eat at would be useful
We're getting pizza!