Before you dive into brainstorming, set the stage by identifying the goals of your brainstorming session. What is the problem you’re trying to solve? Talk to your project lead and ask advice from stakeholders who understand where your team is stuck and how a brainstorming session can help. Once you decide on a theme, schedule your session and make sure every participant understands how it’ll run in advance.

Ask the team to come up with any and every solution to the problem you’re looking to solve. Anything goes! The goal is to break past old assumptions and get your creative juices flowing. Put each idea on a sticky note and take advantage of whiteboards to think and collaborate.

Once you’ve come up with a pile of ideas, use disrupt cards to cut down the total and structure your thinking for the rest of the session. Disrupt cards shake up your brainstorming session by adding new variables to your theme. Introduce a new disrupt card every 10 minutes and try to remove ideas during each round. By the end, you’ll have a focused set of winners.

After you finish your brainstorming session, organize your ideas into themes your team can work on in the coming months. Follow up with your team and agree on an owner for each theme. Document your ideas in the template and add each theme as a Jira issue on your team’s backlog so you can track results and measure success.