Coming up with new ideas can be fun and exciting, but it’s also intimidating - there’s often a lot of pressure when you’re staring at a blank page and need a solution that really works.
Running a structured process to generate new ideas can help you develop the best concepts, whilst including engineers and other stakeholders.
There’s loads of ways you can run ideation depending on your personal preferences, team setup and problem you’re trying to solve. This guide is designed to give you an overview of running a simple, high quality process, and accompanies our template.
Hustle Badger ideation session template Get the ideation session template: Figma | Miro
What is an ideation session?
Ideation sessions are just one step in the product development process, and are used to generate a range of ideas that designers and product teams can then work on further.
An ideation session is a structured brainstorming meeting designed to generate a wide range of creative ideas and solutions to a specific challenge or goal. It usually involves participants from diverse backgrounds to ensure a variety of perspectives and expertise.
The session encourages open communication, free thinking, and the exploration of new possibilities, with the aim of producing innovative concepts that can be built on and developed.
Various techniques such as lightning demos, group sketching, and storyboarding are used to draw out the best ideas and help everyone think creatively. We’ll run through a toolbox of activities you can use in this article, as well as show you how to pull them together into a coherent whole.
Done well they make good use of everyone’s time to supercharge the design process, then let designers refine on the ideas generated. The combination of group input and design expertise tends to lead to the best solutions that you can then test on real users, while bringing others on the discovery journey.
Why is ideation important?
Why teams put effort into running well structured ideation sessions:
- Better solutions - ultimately the process allows you to develop more novel and functional solutions. This is particularly important when you’re dealing with thorny problems that you haven’t solved before, and are key to unlocking user value.
- Stakeholder buy-in - including stakeholders in your creative process can give them transparency on what you’re doing and the challenges you’re thinking through. It also gives them an opportunity to inject their ideas into the process in a collaborative manner. As a result, whatever solution you end up with is likely to have more buy-in from them.
- Diverse perspectives - ideation sessions deliberately pull in a diverse range of perspectives by including people from different functional specialties. This allows you to consider the problem from multiple angles and come up with a broader variety of solutions.
- Increased creativity - the activities in an ideation session stimulate everyone to be more creative, whether they are designers or people who might not consider themselves as naturally creative.
Running an Ideation Session
Ideation sessions have three main parts, revolving around a sketching session:
- Prep - creating the conditions for a great sketching session
- Sketch - coming up with new ideas in a visual manner
- Develop - refining the ideas you’ve come up with
Within each of the three parts you can put one or more of the activities we cover to create your own overall workshop:
- Prep
- Energizers
- Context
- How might we … ?
- Lightning Demos
- Sketch
- Sketching
- Develop
- Identifying themes
- Storyboarding
- Assumption Mapping
- Wrap up
These activities are designed to act as inspiration for your own ideation sessions, and you can mix and match them as you like. All of these are in our ideation template.
The length and contents of an ideation session can vary significantly depending on the time you’ve got, the team involved and the problem you’re solving. A start up team of 3 removing friction in onboarding might spend a few minutes on ideation if they do it at all. A scaled tech company launching a major new strategic project might spend several weeks on discovery before building anything, of which 2-3 days might be mainly ideation. The modules you would choose in each situation will vary accordingly.
Whilst ideation is best done face-to-face, some of these activities can be done remotely and even asynchronously. We’ve indicated which activities lend themselves more to this, so you can make the most of in-person time if this is limited.
Get the Hustle Badger ideation template: Figma | Miro
Principles
Whilst there are lots of ways of running an ideation session, the following principles will help you get the most out of it:
1. Have a clear problem
It’s critical that you’ve got a clear problem in mind to solve before you run an ideation session. Otherwise the output will be unfocused, and the time will likely be counterproductive, causing confusion rather than driving the team forwards. The sections below on context and “how might we .. ?” statements help make sure you’ve got a tight problem to focus on.
2. Have a facilitator
Make sure you’ve got someone leading the session and telling everyone what to do. They can take part in the exercises with everyone else, or decide that they’ll focus solely on facilitating the group.
3. Invite the right people
Aim to include 6-12 people in your session, with as broad a range of perspectives on the problem as possible. Whilst designers will naturally want to be involved, engineers and stakeholders from outside the team can bring different, valuable points of view. If you work at a very large organization and want to include more people for buy-in, then run multiple sessions, each with 6-12 participants.
4. Psychological safety
Everyone needs to feel comfortable coming up with fresh ideas and being heard. If you’ve got one senior stakeholder that can’t appreciate others’ input, or someone being very negative throughout the session, then you’ll lose all the benefits of having multiple people together and the diverse perspectives they bring.
Dealing with negative participants
If someone is shooting down ideas as soon as they pop up then this will kill the vibe, making everyone reluctant to speak, and greatly reducing the effectiveness of the ideation session.
Preempt this as much as possible by laying out ground rules at the start of the session. Then, if this is still a problem, try reminding people of these ground rules by saying something like:
“I agree that’s a really important concern Tim, but let’s save our critiques for later and give everyone a chance to speak. We want to generate as many new ideas as possible and let them cross pollinate each other now, and we can select the best ones later.”
The only exception to this is if the stakeholder fundamentally disagrees with the problem you’ve focused on, as they will likely think the whole ideation process is a waste of time and won’t be able to positively engage. In this case you still need to address their behavior upfront, but it will be a matter of judgment whether you ask them to disagree and commit, or stop the session so you can thrash this out with them more privately.
