DEV Community: Contenda

How our product team uses Brainstory for meetings

Lilly — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

If you found your way here from our previous blog, welcome! This blog will go into a more detailed step-by-step guide with examples, specifically for product teams. We’re talking about meetings that are:

Regularly occurring, often at least once a week
Cross-functional stakeholders (engineers, PMs, designers, etc)
Goal is to align and plan work

We like to use Brainstory for these meetings because it saves time and makes decisions happen faster than synchronous meetings.

How to start meeting prep

Think about the topics that you typically cover at your meeting. For our internal team, it’s usually something like this:

Product roadmap
Engineering blockers
Marketing efforts
Team logistics
Miscellaneous news

Brainstory will help you with thought organization , so you don’t need to be super clear on what your topics will be in advance. Because you’ve had this kind of meeting before, you’ll very naturally elaborate and give context where you have in the past. Start talking and Brainstory will do the rest!

Sharing your Brainstory

Once you’ve finished your Brainstory, share it with your coworkers. For a recurring meeting, you typically only need to give people a few hours of advance notice to review it. For our internal team, our usual cadence is sending out the weekly Brainstory on Sunday evenings for a Monday mid-day meeting.

We love Brainstory’s guided navigation, especially through extensive proposal documents because it alleviates that initial sense of being overwhelmed.

Feedback aggregation

Encourage people to respond to your meeting prep within Brainstory. This will aggregate everyone’s feedback onto a singular document for a source of truth. Giving feedback on Brainstory is a powerful experience that levels the meeting playing field.

Meeting time!

Brainstory will flag the topics that need any extra discussion and clarification. Otherwise, it’s simply a matter of deciding what to do next! The hardest part of a meeting— getting everyone on the same page about facts and context— is done in advance.

For us internally, we can often make a decision async based on the feedback aggregation, so we don’t need to meet at all. As you use Brainstory, you’ll get to this stage faster and faster!

The 3 Stages of Team Meetings

Lilly — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The three stages of meetings

Updates
This is the most common type of meeting, perhaps also the one you hate the most. Everyone goes in a circle and gives a status update on what they’re working on. Managers seem to default to this recurring meeting type.
Presentation
This is when a single person presents an idea and solicits feedback from everyone in the meeting. Typically, only a few people will speak up, regardless of how they feel about the idea. Introverted, junior, and historically excluded people may not feel comfortable saying anything. Others may over-contribute and fall victim to confirmation bias.
Decision-making
This is when a meeting is held only to make a decision. It is the most efficient and important part of all meetings. Significant work was done to provide context prior to the decision. Trust is high, so everyone is ready to commit to the outcome decided.

What types of meetings are you in?

If you’re like me, in my career as an individual engineer, most of my meetings were updates. Sometimes we had feedback meetings, specifically for the manager’s benefit or maybe an architect. I was never empowered to feel like a leader on my team in a decision making meeting.

That’s what Brainstory solves. Brainstory helps teams make better decisions. Built into the product is the fundamental process of moving teams from Stage 1: Updates to Stage 3: Decision-making.

When teams use Brainstory, their involvement leads to commitment.

Why Brainstory for Teams?

Lilly — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The idea of Brainstory

I’ve worked at a few very different tech companies. Everywhere I’ve worked, people complain about how ineffective meetings are. Let me illustrate:

1: Facebook.

At Facebook, our engineering meetings often went like this:

Manager: “What is the status of this ticket?”

Engineer: gives status update

Manager: “Do you need any help or resources?”

Engineer: “Let’s circle back offline to save everyone time.”

This would repeat for all the engineers. In the end, we’d spend an hour providing context on our work, but then having to “circle back offline” to fill in the details. This meeting often occurred in the middle of the morning, which for me was a peak focus time.

2: Midgame.

Midgame was a small 3-person startup, so this is the opposite end from Facebook. We were all highly passionate and invested in our work. There was no “circle back offline”, but rather a constant urgency to make decisions.

The problem?

We were a remote company with very different work schedules. Our CTO had just had a baby, so “jumping on a call” was not the easiest timing for him. He lived in a 1-bedroom apartment in NYC, so even speaking out loud could wake the sleeping baby.

Our CEO loved to walk and talk. He thought best when he could move his body (he was a former D1 athlete). The problem was we’d spend an hour talking, when we only needed to spend a few minutes making a decision.

As an IC engineer, I was caught in a Goldilocks situation— spending too much time in meetings with the CEO, not getting enough context from the CTO.

3: Rapid7.

Rapid7 is a public cybersecurity company in Boston. Size and culture-wise, it sits right in the middle between Facebook and Midgame. Meetings were still awful.

As an IC devops engineer, I was invited to numerous meetings from different product teams. About 95% of those meetings did not apply to me, but the 5% that did was very important. I needed to be at every meeting because only I could tell when and why that 5% was important.

And this was true for every devops engineer on my team: We all spent a disproportionate amount of time in meetings. I often took my laptop home because it was the only place I could code in peace.

What’s the pattern?

ICs dislike their current meeting schedules. Meeting schedules are made for managers. As a manager, a meeting is an effective way to have a “pulse” on the team and managers typically don’t need blocks of focus hours, so meetings aren’t disruptive to them. At every company I worked at, the managers were not complaining about the number of meetings— only ICs complained.
There have been some attempts at creating a social solution. Have you seen the calendar extension that calculates the cost of a meeting? As the saying goes, time is money.
Companies don’t have a methodology for context sharing and decision making. At every company I’ve worked at, a subject we never cover is: How do we share context and make decisions? This approach seems to vary from team to team.

My 3-person team at Midgame spent a lot of time in all day brainstorming sessions with boxes of pizza and half-empty soda cans.

My team at Facebook had a very independent decision making process. Most people did not share information with each other, except with the manager. We were allowed to move fast and break things.

My team at Rapid7 spent an enormous amount of time sharing context, but was very slow to make decisions. It seemed like we were always in the “information gathering” stage.

So why Brainstory?

Help companies make better decisions. Brainstory starts at the individual level. It assists each person in articulating all the necessary context around a problem. Then, it shares this context with other team members who go through the same process of articulation. The collective result of this process is a dramatic reduction in the amount of time spent communicating context. Now we have a shared foundation of facts and we can directly proceed to a decision making stage with everyone’s input.

Learning Clubs through Brainstory

Lilly — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As part of our rundown to 2024, we’ll be blogging about all the ways you can use Brainstory to accomplish those New Year’s Resolutions. One of the most popular NYE resolutions? Learning something new!

What is a learning club?

You might call this a book club, a professional meet-up, journal club, or even a study session. It’s a group of people who agree to learn a subject matter together, usually with the help of formal texts (papers and books).

Over a hundred people want to be a part of Laura’s game theory journal club!

What is the challenge of a learning club?

Organizing a group together takes a lot of work, usually on the host. The host needs to:

Meeting prep
Ensure everyone has a good time
Keep notes of the meeting

Oftentimes, groups can fall apart if no one does this work. Think about a group project from school or social plans that fall through because no one followed up.

The problem is that learning clubs depend on a regular commitment to this work. If you let the occasional month go by without meeting, then you’ll be sabotaging your learning in the long run.

How to structure your learning club for maximum learning!

Be picky about who is in your learning club.

Everyone should commit to the same amount of time, effort, and energy. If someone misses a chapter or meeting, what are the expectations?

Do your meeting prep!

Everyone needs to do meeting prep. If you don’t do meeting prep, it is very easy for a group to waste an hour. Use Brainstory to talk through what you want to cover at the meeting. Those topics could include:

Something you found really interesting about the reading
Something that confused
Something you would like the group to discuss further
Something you’d like to share because the reading reminded you of it

As the host, you can decide what the format of the meeting is. If you are unsure what the format should be, spitball into Brainstory and see how it chunks out the sections. Then share your Brainstory with everyone in your learning club.

Aggregate meeting prep notes

Once everyone has submitted their meeting prep, everyone will be able to view everyone’s feedback on your original Brainstory.

In mid-January, we’ll release a feature that makes it even easier to view all of their feedback without additional navigation. Here’s a sneak peak of that UI!

You’ll be able to see where people generally had questions, agreed, disagreed, and had follow up thoughts. If you want to see more, you can click their comment and it’ll take you to their feedback Brainstory (what you currently see in the UI).

Have a productive, engaging meeting

Now that everyone’s aware of the context and holes, your learning club meeting is going to be very efficient. You’ll be able to dig right into the meat without having to “get everyone up to speed”.

People will walk away from this meeting with a ton of energy and knowledge, making them more excited for the next meeting.

Are you reading this blog before January 1st, 2024?

Join our giveaway and win awesome cash prizes! See you in the Discord!

Journaling through Brainstory

Lilly — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As part of our rundown to 2024, we’ll be blogging about all the ways you can use Brainstory to accomplish those New Year’s Resolutions. One of the most popular NYE resolutions? Journaling regularly.

What is the challenge of journaling regularly?

A lot of people struggling to journal regularly because they believe:

They have nothing interesting to say
Need to carry a physical journal

Why is journaling regularly rewarding?

If you’ve been on social media, it feels like people who regularly journal just… have their life together more. A little bit of that is social media haze, but journaling is also a proven therapeutic technique. Medical professionals say that journaling can:

Reduce stress
Keep your memory sharp
Boost mood
Strengthen emotional functions

All the more reason to start journaling in 2024!

How do I overcome the challenge of journaling regularly?

Journaling doesn’t have to be written with a pen and paper. You can use Brainstory to journal on the go and tackle the biggest hurdles to journaling.

Brainstory prompts are open-ended and designed to be encouraging to your thoughts. Unlike staring at an empty page, Brainstory will gently ask questions that make you realize you have a lot to say. Plus, Brainstory will save all of your journal entries in your dashboard so you can keep a record of everything.

Are you reading this blog before January 1st, 2024?

Join our giveaway and win awesome cash prizes! See you in the Discord!

Getting Organized through Brainstory

Lilly — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As part of our rundown to 2024, we’ll be blogging about all the ways you can use Brainstory to accomplish those New Year’s Resolutions. One of the most popular NYE resolutions? Getting organized.

What is the challenge of getting organized?

Getting organized is difficult for many people because it feels endless. Every time you clean, it gets dirty again. Do you ever have those dreams of trying to run faster, but it just feels like you’re getting impossibly slow? That’s how getting organized feels when you’re in a messy state.

How do you tackle the challenge?

But it’s a new year, which means it’s a new challenge. If you’re trying to get organized, it is not about willpower. This is a misconception. If you try to “motivate” yourself into getting organized, you might succeed temporarily, but you’ll ultimately end up in a messy state again.

Instead, you need to create a system of organization.

What is a system of organization?

Here’s an example of a system any one of us can find ourselves in:

Your dishes have a habit of piling up in the sink. You always dread having to face this mess at the end of the week. Worse, it prevents you from cooking towards the end of the week so you end up ordering takeout. You feel guilty for eating less healthy, so you swear you’ll get organized over the weekend. You do a big clean over the weekend, which is great, but also exhausting. You’re too tired to do meal prep, so you go into the week without groceries.

Sound familiar? Notice how one problem (the dishes) ends up creating other problems (our diet). We often get trapped by our emotions and compensate to feel better.

Here’s that same story, but with a system of organization:

Your dishes have a habit of piling up in the sink because you worry about rinsing things off properly before loading the dishwasher. As part of your organization system, you run the dishwasher twice— once in the morning and once when you get back from work. This cleans the dishes even if you don’t rinse them off. Plus, dishwashers are highly efficient, so you take comfort in knowing that you’re still using less water than washing by hand. Towards the end of the week, you’re still cooking meals, but you also decide to order takeout as a treat. You feel satisfied and delighted by your environment and the food you ordered. Over the weekend, you do a bit of cleaning and grocery shopping for the week.

This second story has a really small physical change (loading the dishwasher), but a really big mental change (less anxiety).

That’s great but…

“…how do I achieve this system in my life?”

You’re already on the right path! You’re asking the right question.

Now that you’re asking the right question, head over to Brainstory and start talking it out. Go over things like:

Is there anything in your life where you have a good system of organization?
In your current problem, what emotions are you feeling that prevents you from getting organized?

Here’s a video of one of our affiliate creators, Brian Canavan, getting organized through Brainstory!

Are you reading this blog before January 1st, 2024?

Join our giveaway and win awesome cash prizes! See you in the Discord!

Talk to Brainstory in your own language

Lilly — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

While Brainstory only speaks English, we are happy to announce that you can talk to Brainstory in your own language! (With some asterisks, of course.)

Talk in the language you’re most comfortable

This feature is available right now! You don’t need to anything: just talk! Anything you say will be automatically translated to English in the same conversation flow we all love. As mentioned, this won’t affect the language of the questions asked, or the summary— but hopefully this allows you to be even more at ease.

How we use the multilingual capability

Johnson grew up in a bilingual household and learns languages as a hobby. For him, sometimes he forgets a word in one language but can recall it in another. Other times, some words are more natural in one language than another, like titles for relatives.

Here is Johnson’s example as he tries to figure out what presents to buy his grandparents:

Mandarin Translations:
奶奶 = Grandma
爷爷 = Grandpa

Johnson: 奶奶 really likes to talk on the phone. 爷爷 usually spends his time watching YouTube videos. They both take walks in the evening. That’s about it. They don’t really do much else which is why getting them a gift is hard.

Brainstory: It’s great that they are active and enjoy simple pleasures. Considering their daily activities, what kind of gift do you think could enhance their experiences?

And other times, Johnson is trying to tell a story about a past conversation (in another language!):

Japanese Translations:
韓国語のメニュー大丈夫ですか = Is the Korean menu alright?
え？英語のメニューありますか = Eh? Is there an English menu?
え？ = Eh?
はい...あります = Yeah... We have one.

Johnson: One of the funniest things that happened while I was there was getting mistaken for Korean. I went to an Okonomiyaki place and the people in front of me were Korean and the people behind me were Korean so I guess it was a pretty popular place for Korean tourists. So when the waiter sat me down, they were like 韓国語のメニュー大丈夫ですか and I was just like え？英語のメニューありますか and they looked at me with a blank face and was like え？ and I just slowly nodded my head with a panicked smile since I could barely read any Korean and then finally they were like はい…あります and left with a really confused face to grab me an English menu.

Brainstory: Sounds like your experiences in Japan were quite interesting and also humorous at times! How do you think these experiences and your desire to improve your Japanese might influence your plans or goals for the next year?

The asterisks

We have 2 of them to call out.

We are relying on OpenAI’s Whisper service for the translation: it’s possible that there might be an error recognizing the language you spoke, or that the translation might be incorrect. On these occasions, just ask for the previous thought to be corrected or ignored!
Whisper currently supports (as of 2023 December):

Afrikaans, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Maori, Nepali, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, and Welsh

This list is updated independently of us, so if you want to make sure your language is supported you can always check their documentation here and verify.

Try it out yourself!

Head to Brainstory and try speaking in whatever language is most comfortable for you! We’ll be keeping Brainstory in English for now so we can ensure the quality of the conversation experience, but we’re open to the idea of fully supporting other languages in the future. Join our community Discord and let us know how you use this multilingual feature or if supporting other languages is important to you.

How Brainstory follows management principles

Lilly — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post is inspired by the following tweet from Will Robbins, GP at Contrary Capital.

Thinking is fundamentally done alone

When you start a new Brainstory, you’re fundamentally starting a solitary thought. Brainstory provides a reflective surface so that you can do this thinking deeper and faster than if you were truly alone. Unlike thinking with others, Brainstory never tries to give you advice or suggestions, so you can have your best thoughts.

Communication is fundamentally done 1:1

When you share your Brainstory with someone else, they are fundamentally responding to your thought in a dedicated 1:1 manner. They are opted-in, by default, to addressing all of your points. Both parties are given the opportunity to understand the set of facts, then add their opinion.

Inspiration is fundamentally done in groups

When you share your Brainstory in a group, feedback is aggregated and holes are discovered. This is where inspiration is born!

Are you reading this in December 2023?

Join our giveaway and win awesome cash prizes! See you in the Discord!

The 'Serendipity Effect' of Brainstory

Lilly — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A first time Brainstory user shared this story in our community Discord.

I originally was going in the direction of trying to give myself criteria to make my movie ratings more objective, but it turned into me [talking] about what makes a movie important to me and helped me visualize that for my ratings instead. First time using Brainstory, I like how it pulled me from my first line of thinking (making an objective scale) to a different train of thought (Making me defend and elaborate on my categories of subjective ranking) very seamlessly, very cool!

Let’s talk about what this experience is and why!

What does Brainstory do?

Brainstory asks you questions. It does not give advice or suggestions. While you’re talking, it may seem like Brainstory is “pulling” you into a different train of thought, but that’s actually you pulling yourself into a different direction. All Brainstory does is ask you questions about your thinking.

Why did we make Brainstory ask questions?

Asking questions is good, but there’s a lot of reasons humans don’t want to ask other humans questions. Maybe you feel like you’re wasting someone’s time, or you think the question is too sensitive. Research has shown that the benefits of asking questions outweighs the perceived consequences, but tell that to your emotions!

That’s why we made Brainstory— to be a safe place where you can always have your best thoughts.

Are you reading this in December of 2023?

Join our giveaway and win awesome cash prizes! See you in the Discord!

Announcing the Brainstory Holiday Giveaway Contest: Unleash Your Creativity and Win Big! 🧠🎁

Cassidy Williams — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As the festive season unfolds, we’re unwrapping something special just for you: introducing the Brainstory Holiday Giveaway Contest! It’s the perfect opportunity to infuse the holiday spirit into your brainstorming, connect with fellow thinkers, and win some gift cash!

What is Brainstory?

For those who are new Brainstory, welcome aboard! Brainstory is our innovative app designed to supercharge your thinking, and make it easy to get fast, thorough, async feedback from your peers. And now, we’re adding a sprinkle of holiday magic with an exciting contest!

What’s the contest?

Create Your Brainstory:
- Dive into the Brainstory app, let your imagination dance, and craft a Brainstory that captures your most brilliant ideas.
Share on Discord:
- Join the festive gathering atbrainstory.ai/discord and share your Brainstory with our creative community. It’s time to celebrate the season of giving and sharing your creative brilliance!
Give and Receive Festive Feedback:
- Engage with your fellow Brainstory creators! Provide warm, festive feedback on their Brainstories, spreading the holiday cheer and building a community of creative collaboration.

Learn more here if you have further questions.

The Holiday Prize Pool - $1000 Up for Grabs!

We know you’ve been good this year, so here’s what Santa Brainstory has in store:

Best Brainstory: $500
- The creator of the most enchanting Brainstory will receive a magical $500 to turn their holiday dreams into reality.
Best Festive Feedback (Chosen by the Idea Maker): $500
- The person who spreads the most holiday joy through their feedback (as chosen by the Brainstory creator) will also receive a festive $500 cash prize.

Key Dates to Mark on Your Advent Calendar:

Contest Start Date: December 15, 2023
Contest End Date: January 1, 2024
Winner Announcement: January 8, 2024

Winning

Winning is as sweet as a cup of cocoa by the fireplace. Santa (that’s us) will evaluate Brainstories to determine who has been naughty and nice. So, adorn your Brainstory with tinsel, share the joy, and let the holiday magic unfold!

Spread the Festive News!

Don’t be a Grinch—share the festive cheer! We’re hoping to get 1000 participants in the event.

Tell your friends, family, and colleagues! Collaborate on feedback and try to win together! You can enter multiple times.

Get ready to unwrap the gift of creativity, connect with like-minded thinkers, and compete for the title of Brainstory Holiday Champion!

Asynchronous book clubs with Brainstory

Cassidy Williams — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Okay, anyone who’s been in a book club knows that it’s hard to get everyone to read the book. It’s even harder to get everyone to read the book and meet up to discuss it. And it’s even harder to get everyone to read the book, meet up to discuss it, and have a productive (and fun!) conversation about it. So, how do you get everyone on the same page?

(…pun intended)

Getting started with Brainstory

You’ve all got a book to read. Start talking to Brainstory with that book in mind. What did you like? What did you not like? What did you learn? What did you not understand? You’ll naturally expand on certain ideas, concerns, and action items. In less time than it takes to read a chapter, you’ll have a finished outline of your book club discussion!

Sharing and discussing your books with Brainstory

Send your Brainstory to all of your fellow readers, either via email or by dropping the link in the group chat! They can respond whenever they finish the book, and you can all see each other’s thoughts in one place.

The way Brainstory aggregates feedback is a fun and powerful experience that helps you really understand what everyone else liked and disliked, what they thought of certain parts of the book, and where they might disagree with how you interpreted it.

Does this replace the in-person book club?

It doesn’t have to! Brainstory is a great way to get the conversation started, but it doesn’t have to be a replacement for the book club itself. You can get everyone on the same page before you meet up, and make sure everyone’s voice is heard, even if they can’t make it to the book club meeting.

This is just one of the many ways you can use Brainstory to make your life easier, and we’re excited to see what you do with it!

Brainstory and Budgets

Lilly — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

So you love Brainstory and you’d like to try it for work but… budgets are capped. This is not a problem! You actually have unlimited sharing and feedback requests for guests with any Brainstory.

How does sharing work with guests?

You have two ways of sharing a Brainstory! You can either:

Share directly by inputting guest emails
Copy the share link that’s accessible by anyone who clicks it

In both of those situations, the guest user does not need a Brainstory subscription! In fact, any feedback requests they give won’t count towards their 10 free original Brainstories.

So who needs a Brainstory subscription?

Let’s say someone on your team would like to try starting the Brainstory. They can still do so without purchasing a subscription. Starting an original Brainstory will count towards one of their 10 free uses, but they will also receive unlimited shares.

If your team finds Brainstory valuable (and we hope you do!), the people who regularly start the Brainstory are the people who would need a subscription. For some teams, this is effectively just $10/month for the whole team to get value.