How do you brainstorm ideas with your team remotely？
I want to reach out to see if anyone else is thinking about similar problems. We are a remote team and we are recently thinking about how we can brainstorm better to encourage really creative, innovative ideas.
Before COVID-19, we used the old way to run brainstorming sessions. Usually, get everyone in front of a whiteboard and talk and draw. Or sometimes a question is raised, and everyone goes on to think about it by themselves. When they think of something, they can just turn around and talk to their teams.
A lot of that doesn’t apply anymore when we are now working remotely almost 100% of the time. We are able to coordinate really well when it comes to organized, structured work like writing reports, submitting PRs, or drafting user stories. But creative thinking usually comes out best for us in an unstructured setting(in shower, driving, walking your dog or even sleeping).
When being remote, sometimes unstructured talking sessions lead to no results or no actions forward. Now, this might start to sound contradicting, but we are experimenting with different ways to actually come up with a structured process to brainstorm.
What we want is a process that gives us the space and time to have deep and meaningful thinking but also gives us a good way to communicate the ideas to our teams and in the end a way to reflect on the ideas so they actually move us forward.
I want to ask if anyone has similar experiences, what are your thoughts on this issue? Why do you bother? How are you dealing with it now? What else have you tried?
Any thoughts or comments will be greatly appreciated! Thanks! ;)
Hey @eg21 Although I've never been a huge fan of virtual brainstorming, There comes a time when you just have to collaborate with people to A. help them understand, or B. help you understand WTF is going on.
Recently I started using Figjam, but for the most part, me and my company mostly use
Google docs for content collaboration and copywriting,
Figma for UX ideas and collaboration,
We work concurrently with Plasmic.app for frontend,
We make videos with Loom —alot, and the team quite likes this but for realtime brainstorming as you're asking we jump on a google meet with any of the visuals above and just start talking and taking notes.
To us, brainstorming and idea generation that helps us come to a final decision, is just baked into the our daily workflow.
We've enforced a transparent and collaborative team environment for years so everyone has access to everyones working files so they can see the work in progress, jump in at any time and comment, or just generally know what's going on.
In fact, when someone doesn't have their work shareable or it's hidden away from the team, that person generally gets called out.
Thanks for your thoughtful inputs!
Actually, my team used Miro, Loom, Figma - the same tools as your team did as well. My complaint is giving valuable ideas more deep thinking time and presenting them in an organized way. Miro is good for posting ideas, but it's hard to navigate and present them clearly. Figma is more designed for UX persons, not us (I call myself a maker - doing everything possible to make things happen). Therefore, I'm trying to see if anyone has the same complaints about it.
another thing is culture - as mentioned, encouraging people to talk about their ideas is very important, nudging and influencing them is what I did as well.