I’ve spent the last few days recording customer data, and getting ready for the Team Building Affinity exercise that I have planned for Nov 3rd. The steps for this exercise are the following:

1. Define the topic to be brainstormed. I will provide an overview to the team on the problem for which ideas will be generated. Here I will discuss our goals, and the scope of our discussion.

2. Next I will give 15 minutes for the team to familiarize themselves with the 200+ Post-it® notes that I will have tacked up to a wall. These will actually be faux notes, because they will be generated from an excel spreadsheet that I typed up.

3. Next I will task the team with finding the relationships between ideas and categorize the ideas together. This will take probably 15+ minutes. The actual notes are called “Atomic Tasks”. This is data that was collected from multiple customers in a Verb + Noun format. The notes will then be grouped into “Tasks”. These are Atomic tasks that are extremely similar from different users, those tasks will be chunked together into “Towers”, and towers can be grouped together into “Mental Spaces”. This is supposed to convey our Customer Needs to Development, and Architecture, and Product Marketing. This will help us prioritize our product features based on customer needs.

These Atomic Tasks, Tasks, Towers, and Mental Spaces are the pieces that comprise up a Mental Model. Once they are all organized, the group will discuss themes and ideas that come out of this Mental Model to make sure that everyone has a general understanding.

I have also put the pieces of the Marketing Requirements into an excel spreadsheet. I will then distribute those to the group, and see if we have correlating requirements for each of the items in the mental model. This can help us see if we have any gaps in our software product design.