#ProductDiaries is a documented series of my experience as a product manager — what I’m doing, what I’m learning, and what I’m changing.
What I did:
In our quarterly planning, the engineering manager pointed out that we’ve oversaturated proposed experiments for a certain flow and would not be able to run all of them even though we have developer bandwidth to build more. Accordingly, we wanted to do a team brainstorm of experiments on other surface areas.
I set it up by sharing a spreadsheet with columns of other surface areas and then had attendees had 20 minutes to fill in cells with project ideas. We then regrouped to discuss the list of projects, either to clarify what was denoted/provide more context or to shed light on technical feasibility since this brainstorm included all the designers and developers on our team.
Why I did it:
I went through column by column so the ideas were grouped by the surface area and then summarized high level themes that emerged from the suggestions (CTA change, backend changes, experience personalization). Once we had themes, I verbally ranked the priority of themes by conviction + feasibility. Conviction being user research or analytics that supported a project as being potentially high impact on our customer goals and feasibility being having the technology and time required to build the test.
What I would change to be better:
In the future, I think that I can more efficiently run brainstorms by preparing a deck of context on all the surface areas I know of.
I could also provide a history of what we’ve tried in that area previously + the results but I likely won’t. The tradeoff here being that this can limit people more in their thinking because they’ll reject an idea since it’s “been tried before.” However, times are different so something that failed before can work now (like video tours in 2004 vs 2024) and we can implement it in a new way that works better even if it’s been explored already. The goal of brainstorming is to gather as much as possible and then filter; not pre-reject ideas before contributing them.
I now need to followup with the group on what the themes are, which ones we’re addressing first and how, which ones we’re not addressing yet and why, and a thank you note for all the help!
