Brightidea Whiteboard

Time Period

2021-2022

Disciplines

Product Management, Product Strategy, UX, User Research, Market Research, Interaction Design

Brightidea Whiteboard fills a gap in our enterprise idea management platform with native whiteboards for real-time team brainstorming & ideation. This missing puzzle piece makes Brightidea a unique all-in-one solution for end-to-end idea management.

Role: I served as Product Lead for v1 of Whiteboard, leading a team of backend Rust engineers, frontend developers, and designers to deliver this brand-new product on a cutting-edge WebAssembly technology stack. Primary responsibilities included managing the roadmap & backlog, running the development cadence, and interfacing with the marketing team for product releases.

Read about the initial launch on the Brightidea blog, A Better Way To Brainstorm, and check out the official launch video:

Product

Problem: our idea & innovation management platform was enterprise-ready and excelled at longer duration, asynchronous idea collection, but we were losing out on realtime brainstorming and ideation to whiteboarding tools like Mural & Miro. This was accelerated by the global pandemic driving knowledge workers online. Anything that previously happened face-to-face in a conference room was now digital. Our idea management admins were frequently requesting connectors to these 3rd party tools, so their employees could actually do something to manage whiteboard ideas after a session. We saw this as an opportunity to become the end-to-end solution ourselves.

Solution: Our initial aim was to build a tool with the basic building blocks for realtime ideation. Second to that, was to establish a deep and native integration with our existing idea management platform. The demo vidoes below offer an overview of the product capabilities. From the initial release through two quarterly updates we built a v1 whiteboarding product with:

  • Infinite canvas - no constraints on ideation and collaboration
  • Multiplayer - collaboration at the core: share, follow, huddle
  • Lines, shapes, text, images, and pen - all the building blocks you need for visualizing ideas
  • Sticky notes - capture thoughts and represent ideas like you would in person
  • Emojis & stickers - bringing personality, fun, and humanity to whiteboards
  • Templates - jump in right away without spending hours on prep–from workshops to retros
  • Brightidea integration - transfer ideas bi-directionally with our innovation platform
  • Product-led growth - simple sharing, intuitive user access controls, free trials
The multiplayer experience is fundamental to Whiteboard collaboration, supporting distributed knowledge work
The multiplayer experience is fundamental to Whiteboard collaboration, supporting distributed knowledge work
Whiteboard enables visual collaboration with built-in primitives including sticky notes, shapes, text, stickers, and drawing tools
Whiteboard enables visual collaboration with built-in primitives including sticky notes, shapes, text, stickers, and drawing tools
Start or extend your Whiteboard from a built-in template for common workshops & team activities
Start or extend your Whiteboard from a built-in template for common workshops & team activities
Evaluate and rank ideas on the fly using a customizable
Evaluate and rank ideas on the fly using a customizable "Smart Matrix," with direct integration to the Brightidea idea management platfom

For more of my work at Brightidea, read about how we built Brightidea Programs or how I contributed to the design of core products and platform.