, we made one specifically for our growth work at Whimsical to give us a single, connected view of ideas and work in progress. At the time we were regularly using this, we were practicing Basecamp's 

, which is very anti-roadmap. This  Solution Tree helped us plan work in the absence of a roadmap, since we could reference it when gathering ideas for pitches that were relevant to Whimsical's goals for each cycle. 

People on the Growth team and across the company would regularly share ideas for experiments we could run, some of which depended on other work, or made more sense segmented into discrete, smaller experiments. However, we often found it difficult to keep track of all of our ideas and tie them specifically to our team's focus areas, so the Solution Tree really helped us make sure that we had clarity on those points.

The original version of this mind map contained dozens of embedded links to pitch docs in Whimsical, which I've italicized here. So it ended up being a combination of text nodes and link nodes, depending on how developed an idea was. This gave us a way to quickly document loose ideas and also scan for in-progress or completed work.

We used this daily, for both sync and async discussions. Myself and the PM (Steven) would regularly open up the file when thinking about experiments or projects to run next, referring to past ideas or documenting new ones. We'd often leave async comments on ideas for whenever we'd refine them further. Steven and I also curated ideas for the tree, adding, organizing, and pruning as needed, to avoid it becoming too unwieldy and disorganized. So while people across the org would 

 ideas, Steven and I were the ones actually managing them in the tree. But the file was free for anyone to view and comment on, and the team found it very helpful for organizing well-documented product pitches and rough ideas, all in a single view.

The most challenging part of making the tree was just maintaining it over time, ensuring that it reflected our latest ideas and priorities.

Brandon Dorn

The Growth team at Whimsical found this Solution Tree to be extremely helpful for organizing both well-documented product pitches and rough ideas in a single view.

Growth Opportunity Solution Tree at Whimsical

Growth Opportunity Solution Tree

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