Glossary

Your go-to resource for acronyms, jargons, terminology, and useful words for product and customer experience teams.

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Affinity Grouping

What is Affinity Grouping?

Affinity grouping is a collaborative brainstorming and prioritization technique with many different possible applications. It works by having your group of participants generate ideas and opportunities on Post-It Notes. 

This article will provide a broad overview of affinity grouping as well as some tips for product managers who want to use this powerful technique to prioritize their product roadmap. Affinity grouping can be an incredibly helpful tool for product managers who are looking to get their team’s buy-in on their product roadmap. By facilitating a group brainstorming session with Post-It Notes, product managers can quickly and efficiently gather data points that can be used to generate a prioritized product roadmap.

Brainstorming with a group to come up with new ideas is always a great way to get the creative juices flowing, but it can often be difficult to sift through all of the ideas afterward and figure out which ones are the best. This is where affinity diagramming comes in – it’s a method of brainstorming that helps you to organize your ideas into themes or categories, making it much easier to evaluate and prioritize them afterward. To do this, participants simply get together and brainstorm several ideas and opportunities, then sort them into clusters based on similarity. Once you have several “affinity groups” of initiatives, you can vote and rank each group, and at the end of the activity, you’ll have a clear list of your best new ideas to work on.

How Do You Facilitate an Affinity Grouping Activity?

Affinity grouping is a simple and easy way to get a variety of ideas from different people within an organization. All you need is a group of participants, some Post-It notes, and a whiteboard, and you’re ready to go!

First, have everyone in the group write down as many ideas as possible. Once you have all of the ideas, start sorting them into affinity groups. These groups will help keep the ideas organized by theme.

For example, if you’re sorting ideas for a new product, you might have one group for product features, another group for packaging, and another for marketing. This way, you can easily see which ideas are similar and which ones are unique.

Once you have your affinity groups set up, you can start discussing each idea in detail. This is where you’ll start to flesh out your concept and figure out what’s feasible.

As a group, vote on different themes. You can treat this like a buy-a-feature prioritization session, or simply have everyone work together to rank the themes by importance. By doing this, you’ll be able to identify which themes are most important to your team and focus on those accordingly.

When Should You Use Affinity Grouping?

Brainstorming new projects and features as a team is essential for any product-based company to succeed. One way to do this is through something called affinity grouping, which allows members from different departments to come together and collaborate. This is beneficial because it allows for other teams who might not be as involved in the product development process (such as marketing or sales) to have a say in what direction the product should go next. Not to mention, it’s a great opportunity for team building!