A practical guide to running a brainstorming session that actually produces ideas — how to prep, facilitate, use an online whiteboard with a remote team, and turn the output into work.
Frame it
Start from one clear, specific question.
Diverge
Generate quietly first, then build together.
Converge
Cluster, vote, and pick what to pursue.
Act on it
Turn winning ideas into owned tasks.
What you can do with Wyatt
Frame it
Start from one clear, specific question.
Diverge
Generate quietly first, then build together.
Converge
Cluster, vote, and pick what to pursue.
Act on it
Turn winning ideas into owned tasks.
Most brainstorms fail before they start because the prompt is vague. “Ideas for the product” produces noise; “How might we cut new-user setup time in half?” produces options. Write the question at the top of the whiteboard, add the constraint or goal behind it, and share both before the session so people arrive already thinking.
Open with several minutes of silent, parallel idea capture — everyone writing their own sticky notes before anyone talks. Silent generation avoids anchoring on the first loud idea, gives quieter teammates equal weight, and reliably produces more distinct options than free-form discussion. Quantity is the goal at this stage; judging comes later.
A shared canvas — physical or online — keeps every idea visible at once, which is what lets people build on each other instead of repeating each other. On an online whiteboard, remote teammates add stickies in real time, group related notes as themes emerge, and nothing is lost to whoever happened to hold the marker.
Once ideas slow down, switch modes explicitly: cluster similar notes, name the clusters, then dot-vote to surface what the group finds most promising. Deliberate convergence keeps the session from ending as an unranked wall of stickies — you leave with a shortlist, the reasoning behind it, and clarity about what was set aside.
A brainstorm only matters if something happens next. For each shortlisted idea, capture the next concrete step, an owner, and when you’ll check in. Doing this in the last ten minutes of the session — while context is fresh — is the single highest-leverage habit in this whole guide.
Wyatt gives the whole loop one home: run the session on a collaborative whiteboard, let the AI assistant suggest angles you haven’t considered or summarize the clusters, and turn the winning stickies into real tasks in the same workspace — so ideas land next to the documents and projects they belong to.
Set the canvas
Create a whiteboard, write the framing question at the top, and share it with the team before the session.
Diverge, then converge
Capture ideas silently in parallel, cluster and name the themes together, then dot-vote a shortlist.
Ship the follow-ups
Turn shortlisted ideas into tasks with owners, linked to the project, before the session ends.
Use cases
Ways teams put this to work
Explore solutions to a user problem before committing a roadmap slot to any of them.
Run structured sessions across time zones where everyone contributes on the same canvas.
Generate and prioritize improvements after a launch, incident, or sprint.
Usually 30–60 minutes: a few minutes of framing, 10–15 of silent generation, then clustering, voting, and follow-ups. Energy drops fast beyond an hour.
A specific question, silent parallel idea generation before discussion, a shared visible canvas, and deliberate convergence into a shortlist with next steps.
Use an online whiteboard as the shared canvas: everyone adds sticky notes in real time, you cluster and dot-vote together, and the board remains as the record afterward.
Four to eight works best. Fewer limits the range of ideas; more makes convergence slow — split larger groups into parallel boards and merge.
Yes. In Wyatt, the assistant can suggest angles you haven’t considered, summarize idea clusters, and turn the shortlist into tasks — grounded in your workspace context.