Creating on a Blank Canvas

My team at SwiftKick Mobile recently stepped up to the plate in response to COVID-19 and attempted to do the impossible; come up with four viable businesses in two days to help people with their changing lifestyles in the aftermath of the virus. How we managed to start with a blank page on a Miro board and end with four businesses is a magic trick, and it wouldn’t be possible without total commitment to how we think about creativity and product development at SwiftKick. With the problems our society is facing seemingly mounting by the day, I wanted to share our framework for that process, in the hopes that it helps you and your team contribute to the side of history that finds solutions to our problems in a rapidly changing world.

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Step 1: Creative Briefs

When constructing an agenda for hackathons, I like to view the creative process as a funnel that seeks to direct thought towards opportunities that become ideas and then converge on solutions. For this hackathon, the team at SwiftKick wanted to cast a wide net at the top of the funnel. COVID-19 had disrupted so many parts of our society, we could find opportunities to help people with mobile technology just about anywhere. We also didn’t know for certain heading into the hackathon where our team’s interest level or expertise would be. So instead of focusing on one problem, we created six briefs to focus on problems we saw in six different verticals; School & University, Entertainment, Mental & Physical Health.

The goal of the briefs was to begin to narrow the funnel of infinite ideas down, beginning with six specific focus areas. We sent these briefs out before the first day of the hackathon to give individuals time to start their internal creative process, spark conversations with others, and indicate to us, the organizers, where their existing interests and expertise lied before the formation of teams. Doing this enabled teams to be self-organized around existing interests and initial ideas from the team.

Step 2. Discovery (Divergent Thinking)

Entering the morning of the first day of our hackathon, the SwiftKick hackers have already begun individually collecting their thoughts and forming teams around shared interests, but they haven’t yet begun the process of sharing their ideas and further narrowing each of their individual ideas, interests, and assumptions down to one product that they will be spending the weekend hacking on. Before a group can narrow ideas, they need to get every individual idea out of the table through a process commonly called “divergent thinking” in a group ideation session to officially begin the hackathon weekend.

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In my experience, this step is the most important and the most challenging. On many teams not used to regularly creating on an empty canvas, group ideations can be bogged down in deliberation. If this sounds like your typical ideation process, you are likely pitching ideas to your team members more than you are collaborating and ideating with your team members. In ideations that feel more like pitch meetings, existing office dynamics can unfairly influence this process. Team leaders like CEOs, tech leads, and product managers are accustomed to having top-down influence in daily operations. Other team contributors also contribute to that dynamic because used to deferring to that influence. In hackathons, this is unproductive, because if a team spends too much time on one person’s perspective, and that perspective turns out to be misguided, teams will have no chance to pivot to another idea in the short amount of time the hackathon is designed for.

Step 3. Product Development (Convergent Thinking)

Now that each team has a variety of ideas sketched out, it’s time to pull them together and make a product that solves the “how might we”. The common term for this process “convergent thinking” as we are looking to converge on one product after first getting as many ideas out as possible from divergent thinking.

Up until this point, our teams have been looking to be unconditional and supportive of other people’s ideas to get as much out on the table. But it is important in this step to have a good sense of what ideas would be a valuable solution to the “How Might We?” question and be extremely discerning with what should go in the Must Have square especially. This will mean that some members’ ideas will be rejected. But that isn’t a bad thing. In one of SwiftKick’s favorite books on creativity “How To Fly a Horse”, Kevin Ashton writes “Rejection is not persecution. Drain it of its poison and what remains may be useful”. This is the ultimate purpose of a MoSCoW, reject anything that doesn’t fully solve the problems posed by a “How Might We?” question so that only the most valuable ideas remain.

And with the pitch competition, the magic trick is over. Our hackers arrived at the end of our 48-hour marathon with four amazing product ideas. The secret is that the work does not end there. In a lot of ways, hackathons are just the beginning. At SwiftKick, we are currently exploring all of the ideas we generated that weekend, either by finding the best ways we can bring them to market ourselves, or connecting them with people outside our offices who may be better equipped to do so. After all, “Ideas are cheap, execution is everything”.

In a lot of ways, I view the lifecycle of developing a product is a continuing cycle of convergent and divergent thinking as market conditions shift and new opportunities emerge. Once the first version of a product is shipped, new problems will present themselves, and the team will once again diverge together to find the patterns between each team member’s sea of infinite ideas, then converge to find a solution. With enough divergent and convergent cycles, you and your team may just have a valuable product and a solution to one of the many problems in our changing social and economic landscape.

It’s time to build!