What is the Lean Coffee template?
Try something different with your team and involve everyone in an agenda-less discussion using the Lean Coffee template. Give the power to your team members by letting them set their own flow of the session and making everyone’s time effective. Drive your peers’ productivity in a leaderless setting but in line with the principles of lean thinking.
Vote on topics you want to discuss most and let your teammates share their opinions and feedback. Drag and drop ideas into appropriate columns but keep the discussion going in a designated time frame. Plan out your next steps on how to incorporate great ideas into actual tasks.
What are the benefits of the Lean Coffee template?
Thanks to the Lean Coffee template, you can:
- Give the attendees the power to set their own agenda of the meeting and thus create a more active and engaged atmosphere.
- Treat the gathering as a productive use of everyone’s time, not “yet another meeting that could have been an email”.
- Enable your teammates to ask all of their burning questions in an open and respectful setting.
- Let everyone voice their ideas and allow attendees to host effective brainstorming sessions or retrospectives.
- Educate newcomers in your team about Agile or Scrum methodologies starting with an easy and simple template, and explain any concerns they may have.
How to use the Lean Coffee template in a few steps?
- Invite all team members to your whiteboard with a ready-to-use Lean Coffee template and gather topics for discussion on sticky notes.
- Set a specific number of votes per attendee and start voting on the topics you want to discuss with your team.
- Move the propositions through the “To Discuss”, “Discussing”, and “Discussed” columns and set up a timer to control how much time you want to spend on one topic.
- After a successful exchange of opinions, plan out the action plan and the next steps you will take.