Product in Practice: Getting Engineers Involved in Brainstorming

Brainstorming in groups often underperforms because of social loafing, conformity, production blocking, and downward norm setting, yet teams still benefit from the diverse perspectives each member brings. This essay follows Ellen Juhlin, a product leader at Orion Labs, who found her engineers jumping straight to feasibility concerns during solution brainstorming for a requested direct messaging feature. After asking the Continuous Discovery Habits community for help, she adjusted her approach with gentle framing, analogous product inspiration, and redirecting technical concerns to the right phase. The changes made participants feel safer sharing ideas and surfaced a strategic misalignment with stakeholders. The piece matters because it shows how separating idea generation from evaluation can be taught gradually.

01Key takeaways

• Separate idea generation from evaluation explicitly, and tell the group when technical concerns will be considered.
• Show participants their ideas are recorded and valued to reduce the influence of the loudest voice.
• Use familiar analogous products as inspiration when a team is new to creative exercises.
• Welcome new ideas at any stage and add them to the solution pool rather than rejecting them.
• Redirect feasibility comments to the assumptions or later phases instead of dismissing them.
• Brainstorming sessions can reveal misalignment with stakeholders, which is worth addressing as strategic context.

02Key sections

Why group brainstorming struggles

Traditional group brainstorming suffers from social loafing, conformity, production blocking, and downward norm setting. Still, groups gain value from varied experience, so the goal is capturing as many perspectives as possible.

Ellen's challenge with engineers

Engineers at Orion Labs repeatedly raised feasibility concerns during idea sharing, even though the team needed a new direct messaging UI. Ellen felt she was shutting down contributions when she asked them to set concerns aside.

Community suggestions

The community proposed rules like generating impossible ideas, drawing on analogous products, warm-up exercises, and the Lightning Decision Jam. Ellen hesitated to add more brainstorming activities that might seem irrelevant to a self-conscious group.

Ellen's adjustments

She introduced analogous products in later rounds, framed quantity over quality with a specific later editing time, and welcomed new ideas at every stage. She also redirected technical concerns to the right phase, such as noting assumptions on sticky notes.

Results and a surprising discovery

Participants grew more comfortable sharing as their input was visibly considered, and the team revealed it did not share stakeholders' priority. Ellen used this to clarify that the goal was matching table-stakes features of competitors.

03From the post

“Getting a group together to generate ideas—an activity often referred to as “brainstorming”—doesn’t always go smoothly. In the past, Teresa has written about the major reasons why traditional brainstorming doesn’t work: social loafing (people tend not to work as hard in a group setting), conformity (people”

04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.