Who Should You Invite To A Brainstorm?
Who should you invite to a brainstorm? Let me say upfront that anyone can come to a brainstorm and contribute valuable ideas. That’s because there are no bad ideas, and any one of us is capable of thinking of something brilliant. That said, after conducting and leading strategic brainstorms for 30+ years at Beyond Design, I emphasize that certain people should always be in the room if you want to maximize your output.
The People Who Belong in Every Brainstorm
Your Dream Brainstorm Team:
- Research and Development Leads
- Marketers
- Engineers
- Designers
- Management
- End Users
- Industry Experts
- Team members with deep company knowledge
Why These Voices Matter in the Room
Think of them as your specialists; the exact right people for the job. When you say, “I know a guy”, these will be your guys. They’ll have answers to the critical questions that pop up mid-session: “What do our end users actually say about this?” “Have we tried this approach before?” “Can R&D create something that does X?” Because of the wide array of questions that can pop up in a brainstorm, you need the right voices in the room to generate viable ideas; Ideas that can actually be built, marketed, and sold. When you bring the right people together, the magic happens, and innovative ideas come to life.
Now, why do we gather all these people? It’s because they all bring a unique perspective to the table. Having specialists across these categories means you’ll generate a lot of new concepts, but more importantly, you will create viable solutions to real problems. When your R&D person mentions a technical constraint, your engineer immediately knows how to work around it. When your marketer identifies a positioning opportunity, your designer can visualize it on the spot. Or when your end user says, “I’d never use it that way,” you can pivot in real time instead of six months down the line.
The Stakes of Your Brainstorm Guest List
Facilitating industry experts’ collaboration and literally sticking ideas up on the wall results in breakthrough thinking. The engineer sees a manufacturing efficiency that becomes a product feature. The end user mentions an unexpected use case that opens up a new market. The person with tribal knowledge remembers why a “new” idea failed in 2015, and what’s different now that might make it work.
Inviting the right people to your brainstorm also avoids making expensive mistakes! Ever had a brilliant idea make it halfway through development before someone says, “Wait, our customers would never pay for that,” or “We did that already, and it flopped!” Those are the moments that cost time, money, and morale. So don’t let them stop your team and have the right people in the brainstorm to help stress-test ideas as part of the brainstorming process. This catches the fatal flaws early when they’re easy to fix and solve around.
From Sticky Notes to Viable Innovations
The results are BIG IDEAS that stick and can be executed on with a strategic design roadmap. Ideas that your team believes in because they helped create them. Viable ideas that account for real user needs, technical feasibility, market realities, and business constraints all at once. That’s the difference between a brainstorm that fills a whiteboard with colorful sticky notes and a brainstorm that fills your product pipeline with viable innovations.
At Beyond Design, we’ve refined this approach over three decades of working with clients across industries. We call our proprietary method the Strategic Design Process (SDP), and getting the right people in the room is step one.
If you are interested in conducting a product design brainstorming session or want to learn more about Beyond Design’s SDP, contact us today at info@startbeyond.com!
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