From research to decision: how to use the campfire principle to engage your team

Building a shared understanding is a challenge

Making even small decisions as a product team can be challenging when everyone has their own individual understanding of a problem. Because of that, a big part of my work as a designer is to help build shared understanding by facilitating, rather than just executing design. In a perfect world, I’d invite the whole team to observe all interviews or usability sessions for every round of research we do. But this kind of UX Watch Party quickly takes up the time of up to ten people. It’s hard to synchronize something as time-consuming as that with all the other activities that happen during a sprint.

The workshop this article dives into is one I designed and executed in my team with great success. It allowed us to share learnings, build shared understanding quickly, and decide on the next problem to focus on.

Time to gather around the campfire

Everyone has a voice and a story to tell

Enriching research findings with (user) stories helps to bring research participants and their needs to life. It allows us to champion their experiences and bring their voice into the design process. But even a perfect research report isn’t enough to keep the team engaged, as it’s only one-way communication.

This is where a campfire is different. It acts as an informal gathering where everyone participates. As Dave Gray writes, “Campfire leverages our natural storytelling tendencies by giving players a format and space in which to share stories.” Instead of a designer talking, the whole group brings their authentic perspective, and with it their diversity and sense of ownership.

Share understanding to share stories

Using simple card models and drawings while telling stories helps to deconstruct stories and confirm everyone understand them the same way. Having visuals can inspire and encourage your team members to build even further on top of your model. You can then reorganize bits and pieces together. The result? A shared understanding that includes everyone’s contribution. Next is the visual voting and ranking of issues. This helps the team to identify and focus on the next problem to work on.

The documents we created helped us recall details and decisions that emerge during effective collaboration. Jeff Patton compares the simplified visual model you create as a result to vacation photos.

How we play

Start by including more storytellers

Don’t do your user interviews all by yourself! Make sure that your other team members have their own stories to tell during the workshop. I always invite the Product Manager and at least one developer along to my interviews so they can hear customers’ stories first-hand. Instruct them how they should take notes, and share insights afterwards.

I’ll use the example of the learnings I shared with my team during the upgrade experience project for Trustpilot’s customers.

Time to play the game

Assign. The goal is to hear (user) stories from different people, not only from the designer leading the research. If you have more people in the room than stories to share, split them into groups based on the interviews they’ve observed. For my project, I conducted five interviews and then had a workshop with ten people in the room which resulted in five working groups.

Think (10 mins). Each group has a story (or an interview) they need to present to the whole group. Give everyone some time to go through their notes to refresh their memory. I also hand out transcripts with the main insights from specific interviews as a cheat sheet.

Write (10mins). Ask groups to write down a sequence of the story on sticky notes. These golden nuggets of information help others understand, remember and built on top of your story later. Multiple-color sticky notes help to label and recognize interviews. For my project, colors helped us to identify companies on different subscription plans: Lite, Pro or Enterprise.

Say and place (5 min each). It’s showtime! Every group tells an authentic story as they place sticky notes on the whiteboard. You can draw a line on the whiteboard to indicate a timeline that has a beginning and an end. For my project, the beginning was “Signing up” and the end was “Buying a subscription”. After 5 presentations we had 5 parallel lines on the board.

Organize (15min). After everyone has presented their stories, it’s time to start working on unifying the story/journey as a team. Try to arrange (approx.) your sticky notes across the timeline so that things happening at the same time are stacked one below the other. Name the big steps. For my project, we ended up with these: 1) Signs up for Trustpilot; 2) Reaches the limits of a Free plan; 3) Searches for information on paid plans; 4) Contacts Sales; 5) Buys a subscription.

Focus (15min). With this model in front of you, you can now identify the pain points and positives of this journey. The next important step is defining what you learned and where you go next. My team assumed that adding the ability for users to upgrade their plans themselves would eliminate the need to contact Sales, and thus improve their whole buying process. But after mapping the user journey we realized the biggest problem was that none of the customers could actually choose a plan themselves. The content lacked specific answers, suggestions, and transparency around pricing, so people still needed to contact Sales. A shared artifact sparked a discussion around where we should focus as a team, and we switched from optimizing the checkout flow to improving content in the sprints that followed.

Steer the product in the right direction

Life is too short to designing things that don’t change anything. The campfire method works because it brings your research to life, it helps your team build a shared understanding quickly, and it enables you to decide on the next thing to focus on in order to steer the product in the right direction.

“It was fun, and I learned so much in so little time.” A developer from my team.

“We knew we had problems with content, but it was hard to grasp how big it was and prioritize it. This workshop helped us update our plans for the next sprints.” Product Manager.