This post is fantastic —Brainstorm Sessions seem like a great way to get cross-functional teams aligned early! As a BA on a clinical trials product team, I’m a bit hesitant about the 10-minute topic limit, though. We often brainstorm solutions that sound straightforward but unravel into crazy-complex implementations due to regulatory or technical constraints. Those quick discussions can lead to a ton of follow-up calls to sort out feasibility.
I wonder—have you ever found that extending the time for thornier problems upfront saves time later, or does the tight structure still work best for keeping things focused?
Thank you so much for the appreciation! Happy to see brainstorming sessions resonate with others!
As with any framework, the key to making it bring the most value is to adapt it to each team's circumstances. For us, 10 minutes was the sweet spot to avoid getting lost in the sauce and going into more of a refinement and less of finding the solution path. We also tried to break problems down into more manageable pieces to avoid this. For more complex topics that cannot be broken down, it might stick you in the follow-up loop - so feel free to try it out with a more generous time frame, or even without it at all. Do let us know how it went!
Thanks for sharing! Especially when starting on a new product area, I have longer sessions where I introduce the entire team to opportunity solution trees (inspired by Teresa Torres), from there we start to define the outcome, e.g. “ to run more and better experiments”, and then we start to define opportunities and later solutions. This works pretty well since the link between the solutions and the expected outcomes is quite visual.
This post is fantastic —Brainstorm Sessions seem like a great way to get cross-functional teams aligned early! As a BA on a clinical trials product team, I’m a bit hesitant about the 10-minute topic limit, though. We often brainstorm solutions that sound straightforward but unravel into crazy-complex implementations due to regulatory or technical constraints. Those quick discussions can lead to a ton of follow-up calls to sort out feasibility.
I wonder—have you ever found that extending the time for thornier problems upfront saves time later, or does the tight structure still work best for keeping things focused?
Thank you so much for the appreciation! Happy to see brainstorming sessions resonate with others!
As with any framework, the key to making it bring the most value is to adapt it to each team's circumstances. For us, 10 minutes was the sweet spot to avoid getting lost in the sauce and going into more of a refinement and less of finding the solution path. We also tried to break problems down into more manageable pieces to avoid this. For more complex topics that cannot be broken down, it might stick you in the follow-up loop - so feel free to try it out with a more generous time frame, or even without it at all. Do let us know how it went!
Thanks for sharing! Especially when starting on a new product area, I have longer sessions where I introduce the entire team to opportunity solution trees (inspired by Teresa Torres), from there we start to define the outcome, e.g. “ to run more and better experiments”, and then we start to define opportunities and later solutions. This works pretty well since the link between the solutions and the expected outcomes is quite visual.