OKR Brainstorming for Initiatives/Experiments Template

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Have a lot of ideas within your team but are unsure of where to start? This board is specifically for idea generation and populating a backlog—featuring your fav Pokémon from the 90s. 💡

We're a Growth/Product team working on driving user acquisition, activation, and retention for 50+ million users—and we get together at the end of every quarter to this board to prepare for the incoming one.

This board will help you to:

☑️ Gather data around an O its KRs.

☑️ Generate ideas to support your goals.

☑️ Formulate ideas to start populating your product backlog with tangible and impactful experiments to AB test.

Instructions are included in the left-side panel, but essentially—there are three parts to the brainstorming: the preparation, an async run-through, and the actual in-person/video call.

The preparation:

The facilitator should fill out sections 1, 2, and 3.
1 is the new O and KR(s) for the upcoming quarter.
2 should cover all relevant data for your team to uncover insights about your platform, users, and growth areas.
3 contains HMWs (how-might-wes) that will help you break down and reach your OKRs.
HMWs can be an exercise in itself (but we sometimes reuse them from previous quarters as we've done so many).

The async session:

Get everyone on the team to visit your board and review the OKR, relevant data, and HMWs.
Get them to add as many inspirations as possible (from the Internet, previous experiences, etc.) relevant to potential initiatives that can contribute to your OKRs.

The actual brainstorming meeting:

Inspirations board: Group the inspirations by topic (e.g., acquisition, onboarding, retention, churn reduction, resurrections, etc.)
Quickly go to the ones that stand out.
Crazy 8s: This is a popular exercise to buzz your brain quickly and develop new ideas in less than 20 minutes.
Get everyone to get a pen and piece of paper. Fold the paper in half 3 times.
Open it back up, and you should have a sheet of 8 rectangular sections.
Set a timer to 1 min, and get everyone to doodle an idea (what they envision it to look like in the product; it can also be an email, push notification, anything!). Repeat 8 times.
Voting: Everyone gets 3 votes. Move your top 3–4 ideas to the next section.
Experiment planning: Move the top 4 ideas to section 6.
Go through the different criteria: This exercise helps new team members to familiarize themselves with your experiment planning process—something that we go through at the beginning of every initiative: From forming a hypothesis to calculating the duration of an AB test.