Innovation brainstorming 1 - Level Up

Fuel innovation within your team by discovering proven strategies to inspire creative thinking and encourage "outside the box" ideas. Learn how to tap into your team's full imaginative potential and drive forward-thinking solutions.

If you've ever pulled your team together to solve a problem, you've probably run into some of the following problems: 

  1. Groupthink
  2. One dominant team member or uneven participation
  3. Lack of context of the problem space
  4. Fixed mindsets
  5. Idea ownership/bias

To combat these problems and get your team to be more creative, I use a technique called Level Up, and it's a better way to brainstorm solutions that focus on improving a customer experience.


When to use it?
  • When you want to generate new solutions
  • When your team is stuck on a customer experience problem
  • When your team is not being creative enough
  • When you're looking for a fun team exercise
How:

Most teams fail in step 1 of brainstorming: Setting the stage and priming your team. You need to align your team on a specific product outcome or area of the customer journey to focus on.

  • Business Outcomes to Product Outcomes <Insert Link>
  • Map - simple user journey mapping <Insert Link>
  • Strategy Sprint - What to focus on and why <Insert Link>

For this guide, i'll use an example product: A Recycled Fish Tank E-commerce Store.


As the product manager, you explain to senior management that users are generally satisfied with the product, feel good buying a recycled product, and enjoy the cost savings compared to buying a brand new fish tank and stand. Customers are not overly excited about the product and the experience is so similar to every other fish keeping purchase that they have experienced in the past. High product ratings are given based on price and customers are disconnected from the brand after initial purchase.

Ultimately, senior management is interested in reducing the Cost Per Acquisition(CPA) of each customer to improve profit margins. Based on this goal and the insights you provide, the team decides that the experience needs to be significantly improved to increase number of extremely positive testimonials and word of mouth which will ultimately decrease the CPA. After this session with senior management, you align on the following targets: 

Business Outcome: Decrease Cost per Acquisition (CPA)

Product Outcome: 
Increase number of extremely positive testimonials

Instead of jumping right into ideas that might increase the number of positive testimonials, you need to choose a "Target Opportunity" in the customer experience to impact. The target opportunity is a pain-point, desire, or unmet need that a customer has. As the product manager and customer expert, you lay out your customer journey to your team and review your qualitative research you've performed with users.

Reviewing the customer journey map and the customer interview snapshots will help your team focus on a specific area of the user journey that is most likely to help you reach your desired product outcome. Remember, product outcomes are the customer behaviors that we need to influence to help us reach our desired outcome. To align on the area of the map: 

  1. Place the business outcome on a white board
  2. Place the product outcome on the white board
  3. Place the customer journey on the white board
  4. Place the customer interview snapshots on the white board
  5. Give each team member a single dot vote
  6. Ask each team member to independently vote on which area of the map is the most important to influence if we want to increase the chances of reaching out goal


Your final user map and target should look something like this:




It's finally time to create solutions! This innovation brainstorming exercise is called Level Up. It will help your team to generate creative solutions to improve that target on your user journey map.

1. Have the team split a piece of paper into 5 sections or give them 5 pieces of paper. (I prefer 5 sheets of paper) 


2. You’re going to give them the existing solution, represented by the current user journey map, and do a quick demo of how a user would currently go through that process if possible. Define the current experience as a level 5 experience solution that addresses the outcome.

3. Ask them to come up with a level 6 experience. What improvement would make the user give us a level 6 experience? Have the team draw out their solution on the first sheet of paper. I typically give 2 minutes for each sheet.

4. Continue to ask the team “What improvement would make the user give us a level 7,8,9,10 experience?” cycling through a new sheet for every level.

5. Once the solution generation is done, ask each team member to come place their different experience improvements up on the white board. Don't give each team member more than 1 -2 minutes to put these concepts up and talk through them.

6. Finally, have the vote on the top 3 solutions created that they would actually like to test in some way to see if it will really improve your product outcome.

Congrats! Now it's time to create, validate, and implement your solutions.
There are 1000 unique ways to solve a single problem. Brainstorming creates a massive amount of ideas that COULD solve a problem, but it gets old, and there are problems with the way most teams brainstorm:

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