I lead product design on a remote team, and I’m invested in using tooling like FigJam to create shared spaces for my team to collaborate on a wide variety of initiatives outside of product development.
Recently, I started using FigJam to help us structure our initiatives and conversations about equity and inclusion. We conducted an audit to sort our objectives into broad categories (hiring, communication, accountability, etc.) that now map to different sections of a FigJam board. Each section I split into two subsections. One is called “articulating” and one is called “visioning.” A few times a month, I host articulation and visioning sessions to involve the team in conversation/ideation around one of the broader categories. For these, we use a separate section of the board called “the staging area.” During a session, the team meets in the staging area to talk about a topic like “what does communication look like at [our company]?” Folks have quiet time to write things down on stickies and react to their coworkers. Afterwards, a subset of folks synthesizes the results to split out actionable findings (“we need to consolidate our slack channels”) from more abstract topics for further discussion (“how do we suppress individual power during decision making?”). We’ll then execute on the actionable findings and host new sessions to dig into the bigger topics.
All that said, here’s what I would love to see in FigJam to expand on use cases like this!
— The ability to toggle anonymity. I like that folks can turn their names on/off on the sticky notes. It would be great if they can toggle their names on their cursors as well so that people can generate ideas with a feeling of more safety
— I can have a way to explore/verify who’s spent time in the file. That way, as we move to running these processes async, I can keep tabs on my expectations that leadership participates and follow-up with tailored reminders/better understand engagement
— Setting parameters on the part of the board people can use during a session would be cool
This tool has been amazing in engaging my medium/small team in these kinds of conversations and I’m super excited about what the future of FigJam looks like!