Ideation Workshop - Create a complete product backlog in 7 hours

Have you ever wondered how to quickly create features, epics, or user stories with minimal effort? The magic word is ideation workshop!

This blog post reveals the secret to efficient and effective idea development in just a few hours.

Protagonists:

Customers of the product/service
Affected stakeholders
"off-topic" participants

Supporting role:

Workshop moderator

Plotline:

Ideation Workshop – Get to your Product Backlog in 5 steps/7 hours!

Sounds simple? It is!

1. Preface – The Foundation for Creativity (Hour 0)

Have you ever found yourself mentally drifting back to your workday during a workshop, making it difficult to focus on the topic? In this case, a mental break is needed to unleash your creativity. By choosing an unconventional and context-free workshop introduction, we distract our
participants from their everyday problems. How about surprising your workshop participants and having them build a marble run out of paper and tape for 15 minutes? Important: Avoid puzzled looks and explain to the participants that they are investing time in a seemingly pointless activity to escape their daily worries.

2. Once upon a time, there was a status quo (hours 1 and 2)

Unlike brainstorming, in the ideation workshop we do not directly address the desired state, but rather deal with the following questions:

ANALYZE CURRENT STATE TEMPLATE

What obstacles/problems does our customer currently in connection with our product/service offering?

What benefits/positive aspects does the current situation have?

What tasks does our client need today in connection with this topic? The tasks do not have to be directly related to the actual activity.

Important! Each participant in the group will work individually for the next 15 minutes and jot down their thoughts on sticky notes. This ensures that all participants can contribute their ideas and that no important topics are overlooked.

Each participant then presents their collected points on the aforementioned questions and assigns them to one of the categories. Identical or similar points are grouped and combined.

The points already mentioned often lead to further content, which is developed further in a second round lasting approximately 10 minutes. As before: Everyone works individually, followed by an introduction and grouping.

We repeat this cycle until we run out of points.

3. Product history (Hours 3 and 4)

Now comes the third part of the ideation workshop: We will now develop solutions for the points listed previously. We will ask ourselves:

TEMPLATE SHOULD DETERMINE CONDITION

What we can offer our customers to reduce workload related to this topic
, or how we can make their everyday life easier.

How we can solve his current problems

What we need to do to ensure that the current benefits for our customers are maintained or even improved.

Here too, the rule is: Everyone works individually for about 15 minutes, then shares their ideas and they are combined. Idea generation continues until we run out of ideas.

Important: As with the current state analysis, the categorization is secondary, because every idea counts and is valuable. The questions primarily serve to stimulate thought. If we identify points for which no solutions have been outlined, we will discuss whether this is even necessary.

After about four hours, our protagonists are exhausted and deserve a break. I therefore recommend interrupting the ideation workshop here and continuing the story with renewed energy on another day.

4. Are you all here? – Yes! Establishing a shared understanding (Lesson 5)

Since the initial brainstorming session is usually quite extensive, we now invest sufficient time in formulating these ideas.
Afterwards, the formulated ideas are discussed and agreed upon in a workshop session with all participants. This step is not a standard part of an ideation workshop, but it is extremely helpful in creating a shared understanding of all solution ideas and laying the foundation for a successful outcome.

5. The Happy Ending (Hours 6 and 7)

The final stage of the ideation workshop involves collaboratively establishing a ranking of all the collected solution ideas. That's right, a ranking, not a prioritization! We don't want 99% equally important must-have goals, but rather a sequence in which the ideas can be explored in greater depth and addressed.

TEMPLATE MATRIX FOR RANKING ALL IDEAS

For each idea, we create a Post-it note with the idea number. Then we compare the benefit of each idea with the ideas already ranked. This leads to a reordering of the ranking after each idea. We also consider who benefits most from the idea (the customer or our company).
Our goal should be to consciously choose "one side," even if an idea often benefits both parties. A benefit for our company doesn't automatically mean that this idea is less valuable than an idea that offers significant benefit to our customer. For example, if an idea allows us to provide more competent advice to the customer, this idea has significant benefit, even if it only indirectly benefits the customer.

And the moral of the story? With little time investment, we can achieve a relatively complete backlog using an ideation workshop and can now, as is common in the agile world, gradually deepen and detail our ideas.

And they lived happily ever after – until they reprioritized the backlog.

– The happy ending –