A PM’s Reflections on Facilitating a Remote Brainstorm

Facilitating brainstorms is one of my favorite aspects of my job as a PM. You get to pull a cross-functional group out of their day to day, gather everyone in a room and generate ideas to solve the toughest problems your customers face. These meetings afford opportunities to be creative, try out new exercises and allow everyone on the team to be in the driver’s seat. They’re motivating meetings!

…But with everyone sheltering-in-place, how could this be accomplished? It seemed bound to go off the rails.

IN fact, it went very smoothly. Here are a few things I learned:

1.Pre-work for you: make sure you set up your board ahead of time. For our brainstorm I planned to do an individual brainstorming activity, Crazy-Eights. Just as in a room you might distribute post-it notes, on Miro you can pre-set your board with post-it notes for everyone. Bonus suggestion: if this is your first time using Miro (it was mine) I’d pair up with another team member before the meeting and run through some brainstorming with them on Miro. I paired with my designer and we thought through how Crazy-Eights might work. We played with the post-its, the different drawing tools, and (of course) the emojis. This short collaboration gave us both confidence that our brainstorm would be successful.

2. Give the group homework: since this was our team’s first time using Miro, I asked everyone to create an account and login before the meeting. This saved time and although we still had to spend a few minutes familiarizing ourselves with the board, we didn’t have to wait for people to login.

3. Things will take longer: while it’s general rule of thumb to give yourself more time than you think you’re going to need for a brainstorm, tack on even a little more when you’re remote. In our case, we were new to Miro and we needed time to figure out how to navigate around, draw on the post-its, move the post-its, etc. I budgeted an hour which was not enough (we had to have a separate 30 minute session later on). However, one thing to keep in mind is that if you schedule a session that’s too long people will begin to multi-task. I didn’t face this problem (we were go-go-go in our session, but we also ran out of time).

4. You’re going to need to be a more vocal facilitator: remember, you’re not in a room and especially when you’re all looking at a Miro board — and not the camera — it’s hard to read faces. The expressive cues and eye-contact that might allow for more natural facilitation are gone. You’re going to need to cold call people and be aggressive about it or you will face silence and burn time. As the facilitator I found myself saying things like “Ok, can someone who voted for this idea share more about why they voted that way?” OR “Ricardo, what do you think?”. While it may feel like you’re playing the High School teacher everyone wanted to avoid, as the facilitator you’ve got to spark conversation or move it along and this is harder when everyone is remote.

5. Thoughts on Miro: Overall I think it’s a great tool. We generated over 25 ideas to solve our user problem and then as a team used emojis to vote down and discuss 3–5 top contenders we’re planning to test. A few notes:

• Miro allows you to zoom and pan across an infinite board space. This was really helpful as it allowed me to give each team member their own “private” creative space for individual idea generation. Note: I say “private” because team members could see each other’s spaces if they panned or zoomed, but when hovering over their own space no one else’s was in view.
• You can create “frames” or designated spaces in Miro. I created a frame for our team’s “Collaboration Space” which I used during our discussion of ideas. We pulled ideas team members wanted to discuss from individual “private” spaces into this “shared” space.
• Drawing on post-its on Miro is hard. If you’re going to ask people to prototype, I would skip the post-its and create a different board.
• Some functionality (like the timer and voting) is paid. I don’t fault Miro, I just hacked it. Mark time on your phone. Vote using emojis.

Thoughts, questions?