It all started within a slack call. We were seven people working on a very early stage product as a side-project. There was silence because we didn’t know where to go next with our limited time.

“So, we have a combined list of 40 ideas and feedback hypothesizes that we need to prioritize? How do we do that?”

The question felt like lightning. How do we facilitate a way to create our road-map for the following months? Accounting the desires of all seven people and sustaining an environment for collective thriving and creativity? This situation struck me, and I immediately felt in limbo. I’m part of a self-organized autonomous company and still had no idea how exactly we can structure our way of going forward in a mutually empowering and transparent way. Usually, my experience with software development road-mapping has been very straightforward. The vibe was around “here’s the visionary leadership role model we need to follow; let’s organize around that.” But now it was based on a more collaborative approach. Leadership was shared, visionary directions were pouring from every person, ownership was collective. I was frozen. How do we follow everyone’s desires and still have alignment? Is that even possible?

“We might list them all on a google spreadsheet and vote!” — someone exclaimed.

Immediately a google spreadsheet was born, and we all jumped in it to express different ideas. But voting can quickly become a podium for persuasions. How do we make road-mapping an enjoyable event? An experience where attendees can hear how others are thinking about a specific idea while lobbying for it? All that while still maintaining the psychologically safe space to explore on their own how much they like the topic discussed at the moment?

“We might have two dimensions — priority and lovability and vote based on that!” — another ecstatic voice was heard over slack audio.

By now, I realized that there’s no need for one centralized facilitator in a meeting. If there’s enough creative atmosphere, people can pick energy from thin air and canalize it towards something purposeful.

“Yes! We can sync over the details of the scope of the idea, and everybody can asynchronously put his priority and lovability score in the spreadsheet.”

And so we began. Taking one or two minutes to synchronize over the scope of the hypothesis, then one or two minutes more for scoring it based on individually perceived priority and lovability. Some were fast and voted in advance; others wanted to connect more deeply with the topic at hand.

We ended up with 40 scored items. “But now what?” I was still pondering.

“Is it a good idea to summarize the priority and lovability scores of each member and create a score based on that?” — I heard a lovely suggestion.

“Oh my… of course it does! We might even sort the score.” — and the recommendation was immediately executed.

After a while, I understood that we now have not only harmonized together around every feedback we ever received, but we also were able to factor every person’s feelings into the equation.

We ended with useful guidelines for going forward, and it was very thrilling to co-create them. The output wasn’t perfect, but we enjoyed the ride.

If you want to do the same, here’s a spreadsheet template to kickstart it https://bit.ly/2Vk5ppr.