Our March meetup topic was ideation & collaboration – but the real focus was having small groups of attendees get hands on experience by using a specific method – Crazy 8s!

It was a super rainy night in Melbourne! Thank you everyone for attending – including a few folks who were absolutely drenched when they showed up!

The Talk

When we’re looking to innovate or problem solve, it’s easy to get stuck into our existing scenarios. How can we break out of this? How can we, and how can we help our teams, think in new ways?

One exercise that can be used to quickly come up with new ideas is Crazy 8s.

Crazy Eights is a brainstorming technique designed to rapidly generate a wide array of ideas within a constrained timeframe.

Lucy explained it’s a mix of convergent & divergent thinking plus has an element of prioritisation that helps you narrow scope. It’s a very time efficient method and that timeboxing helps you to not overthink ideas and focuses us to think outside the box.

Since Crazy 8s challenges individuals to sketch eight distinct ideas in eight minutes. This fast-paced exercise promotes quick thinking and minimises the tendency to dismiss unconventional ideas, fostering a creative and uninhibited environment. It’s especially useful for teams aiming to push the boundaries of conventional thinking and explore a broad spectrum of possibilities.

When to Use Crazy Eights

Lucy likes to use Crazy 8s when

• We know what we are doing but wondering how do we design the right thing in the right way
• When you have a lot of subject matter experts / stakeholders and want to include them
• When you are creatively blocked or not sure how to solve the problem

Benefits of Crazy Eights

Implementing Crazy Eights in brainstorming sessions offers several advantages:

• Encourages Creativity: The rapid pace and emphasis on quantity help bypass mental blocks, allowing creative ideas to emerge.
• Inclusive Participation: By providing a structured yet open framework, all team members can contribute, ensuring a diverse range of perspectives. The individual brainstorming assists with the ‘loudest voice in the room’ problem.
• Efficient Ideation: The time-boxed nature ensures that sessions are productive and focused, yielding a substantial number of ideas in a short period.

How to Conduct a Crazy Eights Session

1. Divide into small groups of 3-4
2. State your challenge: Make sure everyone knows what the problem or challenge you’re working on
3. Prepare the Template: Surprise! There is no fancy ‘template’. Just take some paper and fold in so you have 8 boxes!
4. Start the Timer: Allocate 1 minute for participants to sketch their idea. Do this 8 times so everyone has 8 sketches, ensuring a brisk and focused session. Even though people are divided up in groups, this is an individual task. AND sketching is the idea! Not words!
5. Have each group share & discuss their sketches: Each person in the group explains their 8 sketches
6. Each group should vote on the group’s ideas. What 1 idea would you like to move forward with?
7. Time Management: Assign a timekeeper to provide regular updates, helping participants allocate their time effectively across all eight sketches.
8. Iterate as Needed: Repeat the process to delve deeper into promising ideas or explore new directions.You can take the top 3 and continue to build on them. You can get all the groups to vote. Keep collaborating & iterating.

But wait! Before you start…

Steve and Lucy added a new twist to Crazy 8s as a warm up – first we needed to get out all the BAD ideas for the topics. Since this was a warm up – we did 4 minutes with a bad idea per minute. We needed to exorcise all those bad ideas!

You put down all the crazy stuff in there (we had lots of groups talk about burning things… hilariously). Interestingly, it’s good to put down ideas that have already been done – because that is a bad idea to pursue. People in each group shared their bad ideas with each other.This was good practice for the real session.

With a brand new A4 page (folded thrice) – we had 8 squares. Personally, I found the 6th box the hardest to fill – but that’s where real growth comes. And that includes the art of possible.

The best part is the voting mechanism – because that depends on what each group selects – which changes the outcomes as well. Another important aspect to remember when using this technique!

Resources:

Steve has posted on LI about his experience of using Gamma to create the presentation.

Slides are below

Our Speakers:

Lucy Serret is a Senior Product Designer at 1Breadcrumb. She believes in the power of collaboration, creativity and insights to solve user problems & has a passion for human centred design, inclusive design and technology.

Steve Bauer is the Chief Product Officer at 1Breadcrumb, master of festivities at Product Camp Melbourne and owns many articles of clothing emblazoned with flamingos.

Our wonderful hosts and sponsor:

Zendesk started the customer experience revolution in 2007 by enabling any business around the world to take their customer service online. Today, Zendesk is the champion of great service everywhere for everyone, and powers billions of conversations, connecting more than 100,000 brands with hundreds of millions of customers over telephony, chat, email, messaging, social channels, communities, review sites and help centers. Zendesk products are built with love to be loved. The company was conceived in Copenhagen, Denmark, built and grown in California, now expanded all over the world.

Our first speaker from within our community for the May event is Felicity Bodger on discussing her playbook on “How to become a Killer Product Manager in 3 Easy Steps.” This talk is for product managers who want to level up to become killer pms, creating a personal professional playbook will enable you to transform your team of mercenaries into missionaries while also fending off the monster chewing on your leg, unlike your run of the mill corporate values that only have the half-life of a power point presentation.

Our second speaker from within our community for the May event is Marc Vandamme – Creating alignment with your teams and leaders. Marc is Senior Product Manager @Performio. Loves climbing and is looking for indoor & outdoor lead climbing buddies!

Our third speaker from within our community for the May event is Nick Kardamitsis, discussing how to go “Beyond the numbers: Harnessing data for smarter product decisions.” Nickolas is an outcomes-focused, customer-centric problem solver, passionate about hitting organisational goals. With over 10 years in digital product experience, Nickolas navigates the end-to-end product lifecycle and leads both technical and non-technical teams, effortlessly switching between strategy and execution. He loves everything about product—especially the words, “Yes, but…”

One of ProdAnon’s goals is to help our community members learn and grow – and what better way to achieve that than give our members the chance to do short talks to share what they learned and get some public speaking experience. Several people who have spoken at ProdAnon have gone on to present at larger conferences which is awesome!

For our May session, we did a call out for folks interested in doing 15 min talks. And we had 4 wonderful speakers share their knowledge:

Felicity Bodger – How to become a Killer Product Manager in 3 Easy Steps.

Marc Vandamme – Creating alignment with your teams and leaders.

Nick Kardamitsis – Beyond the numbers: Harnessing data for smarter product decisions.

Jerllin Cheng – Responsible Use of Ai

If you’re interested in doing a talk, reach out to Jen & Liz(slack, email, at an event). Typically, ProdAnon sessions are workshops, panels or individual speakers plus we sometimes do the short talk sessions.

Thank you for hosting Culture Amp!
Culture Amp is the world’s leading employee experience platform, revolutionising how 25 million employees across more than 6,500 companies create a better world of work. Culture Amp empowers companies of all sizes and industries to transform employee engagement, drive performance management, and develop high-performing teams. Powered by people science and the most comprehensive employee dataset in the world, the most innovative companies including Canva, On, Asana, Dolby, McDonalds and Nasdaq depend on Culture Amp every day. Culture Amp is backed by leading capital venture funds and has offices in the US, UK, Germany and Australia. Culture Amp has been recognised as one of the world’s top private cloud companies by Forbes and most innovative companies by Fast Company.

In the fast-paced world of product management, we frequently discuss the strategies behind making decisions and the art of influencing stakeholders. However, a crucial aspect of the role that often goes under explored is the ability to change one’s mind and remain open to being influenced.

In this session, Lucy talked about the nuanced art of changing your mind—an essential skill for growth and effective leadership.

You’ll have belief 1 and then something happens… you receive new information or have an emotional response or there’s a rational assessment which translates into belief 2. The journey between those 2 points is not always that simple and our own biology can throw a spanner into our thinking.

So when we’re making decisions constantly and those decisions are influenced by a lot of things including our own biological & emotional reactions, how can we grow? Well Lucy brought data & analysis to this question.

First, the let’s talk about the octopus. Lucy gave us some ‘facts’ covering octopus mating to see where we sat on the believe vs not believe scale (which also illustrated that science has changed their mind over time as information and research evolved). She then challenged us with a statement that we product people make thousands of decisions but only 1 or 2 are any good. Yikes! That hurt! Do we believe it?

Bring in the SCARF model (status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness) to help us understand how our brain reacts because this journey can feel threatening, can be neutral or even rewarding! Saying we only make 1-2 good decisions in our entire career was tough. It was threatening to our status! Maybe we didn’t think it was fair or made us feel unsafe.

But if you recognise these things are happening and re-frame how you think about making decisions, growth can happen.

Lucy reflected that when she was new in her career, she was comfortable with being wrong. She was learning. It was expected because she was new and status & certainty was low. As her career progressed, she felt new pressures and expectations that she should know what she was doing. When she received contradictory information it was a threat to her status, autonomy and she felt more defensive. This led to her being less comfortable when she was wrong that translated into a slowness of being open to new ideas thus taking longer to adapt to a new idea.

One way Lucy re-framed changed the way she wrote documents. As a product person at Amazon, Lucy worked in the ‘working backwards’ style of press releases, 6 page reviews and starting meetings with silent reading before discussion of the document. While she worked with her trio to develop the document, she realised it was when it was circulated at higher levels that she was getting more clarity and good questions. She decided to be provocative in her statements early in the game so her trio and other peers would give better feedback. She re-framed that the document is about getting feedback, not about being right.

How do you know you’re making better decisions today than x years ago? How do you measure the effectiveness of making decisions? Bring in a 2×2 matrix! Lucy plotted process and decision.

Through this plotting, Lucy took on another belief – as a PM, when we make the decision we need to firmly believe it is correct but then switch quickly into how can we disprove it? How can we look at this with a different lens? What should I have done differently?

For greater success, we can seek out how to make better decisions & change our minds when needed.

Lucy’s slides are available.

During the talk she referenced

• SCARF model
• Bounce
• Evan LaPointe‘s interview with Lenny
• Thinking Fast and Slow
• Naked Statistics
• Wes Kao on managing up
• Escalating Product Decisions – an article Lucy wrote several years ago

About the speaker: As an industry veteran with over 25 years of experience, Lucy Spence has made more mistakes than most and loves sharing her experiences in the hopes others can learn what she’s learned in less painful ways. In that time, she’s gone from individual contributor to product leader a few times at a range of companies from start-ups to Amazon. As a Senior Product Manager at Octopus Deploy, you can expect to see many Octopus-based metaphors and analogies.

Catapult was our fabulous host. Thank you Catapult!

Catapult exists to unleash the potential of every athlete and team on earth. Operating at the intersection of sports science and analytics, Catapult products are designed to optimise performance, avoid injury, and improve return to play. Catapult has over 400 staff based across 24 locations worldwide, working with more than 3,800 Pro teams in over 40 sports across more than 100 countries globally. To learn more about Catapult and to inquire about accessing performance analytics for a team or athlete, visit us at catapult.com. Follow us at @CatapultSports on social media for daily updates.