Facilitation fun
When I talk about the powers of design thinking in product management, I always mention not only the benefit of this way of work for our customers and product, but also for our teams. The collaborative, interactive, and engaging nature of design work is so beneficial for bringing teams together and broadening our perspectives. Because of this, I enjoy facilitating all kinds of activities for my team from product ideation sessions to new team rituals. Below is a snapshot of sessions I’ve run virtually while working at Microsoft.
Activities
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“How We Roll” comes from consultancy SYPartners and began as an in-person ritual though was quickly adopted to virtual during the pandemic. The purpose of the activity is to foster “greater understanding and respect for one another as colleagues and teammates”. In the activity, participants denote individual preferences on a spectrum for a variety of work questions such as Working in silence <—> Working with music, and I expanded to include more personal questions such as Early Bird <—> Night Owl or Coffee <—> Tea. After reviewing individual preferences, the group co-creates ways of work that best fit the needs of the team.
I found this activity in Rituals for Virtual Meetings: Creative Ways to Engage People and Strengthen Relationships.
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Inspired by IDEO’s Speed Dating creativity challenge, I mashed together Speed Meeting: a no-cost morale or get-to-know-you event that is fun and fast-paced. Using a list of pre-written, open-ended questions derived from The New York Times’ “36 Questions That Lead to Love”, randomly paired participants spend 6 minutes learning more about each other before quickly getting shuffled into a new group.
A few sample questions:
What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?
Describe an inspiring space you’ve worked in.
What’s one trend you will never follow? One that you follow(ed) religiously?
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I’ve been deeply inspired by Dr. Susie Wise’s Design for Belonging book and framework, so much so that I brought Susie to Microsoft as a speaker and workshop facilitator to share her work. Additionally, I’ve used two tools from the Design for Belonging toolkit, Belonging mind-map and Belonging journey map, to facilitate discussions around diversity, inclusion, and belonging within my product organization and PM 1 & 2 Community.
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Leveraging tools from AI meets Design ideation card deck, I hosted an ideation session aimed at exploring how we could bring artificial intelligence to our experiences. The session was broken into three parts: 1) What are we hearing from our customers?, 2) What can AI help with?, and 3) What if…
In Part 2, we pondered which customer pain-points AI might help solve or fulfill in a new or better way considering today’s AI key capabilities in detection, prediction, and generation.
In Part 3, we explored prompts such as “What if… the user can interact through conversational language?, “What if… you can adapt elements of the interface to every user?”, and “What if… you can predict what your user will need or want to do next?.
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I hosted an “Intro to design methods & mindsets” remote workshop for my team at Microsoft, closely following d.school’s Starter Kit with slight modifications due to time and remote-work constraints. I invited engineers and PMs to a 2-hour session full of high-energy, interactivity, and collaborative learning. During the 2 hours, my teammates worked with a partner going through the entire design thinking process (empathy, define, ideate, test, iterate) designing a solution for a low-point in each other’s yesterdays. See more on the dedicated portfolio page.
FigJam workspace for How We Roll activity.
Susie Wise talk at Microsoft on Design for Belonging.
Small group workshop on Design for Belonging with Susie Wise at Microsoft.
FigJam workspace for AI ideation session.
Opening slide for Introduction to design methods and mindsets workshop, adapted from d.school's Starter Kit.