Braintorming & Affinity Mapping

When I first joined Quicken Loans, the agile process was in its early stages of being adopted.  During one of my initial projects, I organized a story writing session with development, design, UX peers, product managers, and other stakeholders.  After introducing the process and what we would be doing, we proceeded into brainstorming.  Here, everyone wrote a story headline for the project based upon their experience and knowledge.  Next we went around 1 by 1 reviewing what each person had written, identify any duplicates.  In this particular case, I took all of the unique items, digitized them, printed them out and put the onto large sticky note.  I then got the group back together and we affinitized then into various categories.  Although some team members were initially skeptical, by the end, everyone recognized its value, leading to the continuation of this practice for future projects.  Below are some images from this inaugural session: