Brainstorming

Early on in your venture, brainstorming sessions provide you with the ability to conceptualize how your project engine will run, what will feed it, and what you might recapture to keep things running smoothly.

Credit: Clay Banks

The main objective of a brainstorming session is to identify a problem or purpose, discuss related ideas, flesh out potential solutions and then distill that into a vision to implement.

While there are many ways to express your feelings and thoughts about what you would like to build, let’s establish the basic expectations for a project that must be met to transform someone’s vision into a successful operation:

First, it has a clear purpose - there is no question about the role that the project serves, and the operation is unapologetic about what it can or cannot do.

Second, it has a simple structure - all side interests and side products have been isolated and pushed back into their own product or project timelines that are separate from this one. While this usually happens early on in the session, you’d be surprised how many tangents become apparent as more details are fleshed out.

Third, it has factors that make it sustainable - every business process transforms resources, and there are means for recapturing limited resources. No one wants to run out of resources before the first solution leaves production – benefiting from resource or energy feedback loops is essential.

Fourth, it has factors that make it scalable - the solution takes advantage of patterns, tools and industry practices that give it an edge, and allow readily available resources to be allocated and released on-demand with the ebb and flow of commerce.

Establish a clear purpose.

The quality of the purpose you assign to your project is dependent on:

  • The quality of the question you are trying to answer, and
  • The precision of the definition of the problem you are trying to solve.

The brainstorming process is not just about throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks, but planting a clearly defined problem to carve into - ideally bringing social proof that other people recognize that a problem exists, and that no universally accepted industry solution has yet been found.

If you are having trouble getting to this point, it might be worth looking at “problems with your problem.” When is a problem not a problem worth pursuing? How do I know my purpose is not really a business, but a passion project?

Are there no current solutions to the problem? - Make sure it is really a problem for a large enough group.

Is there only one solution on the market for the problem? - A lack of competition often suggests a thin market to engage, but other factors like cost of entry, advantages of economies of scale, prohibitive licensing and regulation, limited availability or accessibility can also play a role.

Is your problem or purpose more complex than you thought? While engaging the steps that lead up to the project you’d like to build, you often uncover intermediary or accessory tasks that are unavoidable prerequisites. Sometimes these market opportunities are worth prioritizing over your ultimate vision of what you would like to accomplish.

Following steps that branch off of your core problem may mean that your ultimate end goals need to be pushed further down your timeline, but this provides you with a realistic near-term goal to focus on that will benefit you and other people like you who are trying to reach similar goals.

On the other hand, you will likely also discover distracting tangent projects that you can prune from the conversation. Do not throw tangential purposes away.

Set them to the side in a “future projects” box. You will want to revisit them once your initial project fulfills its primary purpose. For now, we must start somewhere, and that first step should be doable.

In any case, the clear purpose or aim of your project is:

  • necessary,
  • simple,
  • difficult for others but not for you.

You likely have a great project candidate if others usually complain about engaging the topic or problems, whereas it excites you, and it feels like solving this problem or serving this purpose was what you were born to do.

Develop a simple structure.

I find it helpful to think of projects or processes like an hourglass, with the top being a broad-lipped container for what you invest, the pinchpoint being what you do, and the expansive bottom being the expanse of product that you need to try to flip back into resources.

If you have trouble visualizing interacting objects in your head, putting a structure to paper can be very helpful. When I speak with clients, I typically use mindmapping tools or concept mapping tools. It is one thing to be able to recognize a missing piece from a puzzle, or a broken piece on a vehicle or piece of furniture. It is quite another to put together a picture of what collection of bits you need to actually produce something.

Many people who hire developers like to leave the entire process up to the engineering-minded folks. To their mind, there is this black box, where you put something in one end and you get something out of the other side. Sometimes it is because they heard someone say they needed that black box, or they saw a news program about how everyone has black boxes now, or we are running out of black boxes so you’d better hurry and get yours.

A website sometimes gets lumped into this category – as one big black box, where visitors come in and money comes out. But when I talk through a big idea I prefer to use concept maps, which are typically objects connected by action. A concept map can quickly illustrate and describe establish relationships between resources, and sometime you may see connections between steps in a process that aren’t obvious when you try to do a linear flowchart or write-up. If writing out a stream of consciousness is a ski lift, concept maps are like ski park maps.

Concept maps establish the topology of a project. Generally you have a central event and you have actors that engage the central event and it affects an external result. For example, if you have a website, it likely is not just a single black box - it is a number of different interfaces arranged in a way that makes it easier for your visitor to consume and interact with information. Search engines, galleries, contact forms, knowledgebases, blog entries, calendars and so on are all blocks - each one demands a certain kind of attention and you have a certain expectation of what each block should produce.

These boxes are about interaction and production. What do we expect the end result of an interaction to be? If a person is reading our blog posts, what is the aim? Do we want them to be inspired to create something? Do we want them to subscribe to our newsletter? Do we want to ask them if they need to go deeper into a topic? Do we want them to think about hiring us to do what it is we’ve talked about?

It is important to flesh out both how one walks up to the box and what their take-away is. If you aren’t sure what a person is supposed to take away from the given process, then it may cost you resources or distract from the direction you want that person to move in. A feature without intent is a part of the machine that takes away from the momentum of the project. The potential energy - the sand - flows through the hourglass and empties into the void - there is no opportunity for recovery.

On the other hand, when you have baked intent into every aspect of the core project, the boxes generate value. Each box is built with anticipated inputs and clearly defined output. Producing income means producing outcomes. This becomes vary important later when you want to measure the outcomes and formulate metrics and baselines for gauging performance.

Map out sustainable factors.

Once you have a clear set of expected outcomes, you have the components needed to plan event chains and look for feedback loops.

Event chains turn your website experience into a more curated or guided experience, and capture visitor momentum. For example, if a person fills out a contact form and the end result is just a thank you message, there’s no momentum. If a person fills out a form, and then is asked if they’d also like to set up a call back time to handle the issue, or be added to an announcement mailing list, you’ve carried the momentum of the visit further.

When such an event chain can be tied back into a workflow process you already use, now you can piggyback on those resources and use them for multiple purposes. Connecting these event chains back into areas that will engage more participants in the beginning of the process is what makes a project sustainable - it is not just about burning through resources, but recycling and rerouting by-products of your original process to keep momentum and engagement high.

One example of this is when you visit an e-commerce website that gives you feedback on the popularity of a product by indicating how many people are also watching it or reading about it, or when a person has purchased the item. By demonstrating engagement, you keep the energy of the process high, but you are also using the results of a desirable completed end process to inspire new engagement.

Determine how each part operates at scale and at what limits.

Determining how scalable your events are is about finding the sweet spot for the number of clients you want to be able to serve responsibly. Most scalability factors happen on the back end as you work through the different components of the operation and estimate what service levels you could provide.

Begin with the estimates of what you believe it will take to start a project. Armed with these baseline expectations, ramp up the productivity resources and where peak productivity limits are going to change. It will be hard to assess the quality of assets and resources you have and their suitability for the project without setting those expectations. As the project plays out, you will find that adjusting the goalposts is really the hardest part of running the project as it grows.

Your concern as an entrepreneur is often not just what gets done, but how it gets done - and it is common for those expectations to change as objectives change. That’s a natural part of growth (or survival).

If you find an event that does not scale beyond a certain point, it may be necessary to consider alternative routes or even break up the event into parts that are scalable by themselves. It may be necessary to retool your process, but if you can engage this at the brainstorming and conceptualizing stage - before you’ve already sunk resources in a particular direction - it makes retooling and refactoring a more nimble and agile process.

Once you have purpose, structure, sustainability and scaling plans, it’s time to start plugging what you have into the equation and what you need to make your solution real.


Would you like assistance evaluating or fleshing out your idea or narrowing down a manageable business aim? We can provide you with collaborative brainstorming sessions where we can help stratify and prioritize your ideas so that you can start out with something manageable.

Set up a discovery call with us today!

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