15 Team-Building Warmup Activities for Product Management and Design Teams
This is a collection of non-dumb ice breaker or warm up activities I've sourced from brilliant others or created on my own that can be conducted with product teams in 20 minutes or less
I firmly believe in the continuous improvement of both myself and the teams I manage. This philosophy is so deeply ingrained in my approach that I’ve implemented several programs at Synapse Studios to ensure ongoing upskilling and growth. These systems are as much about keeping myself accountable as they are about empowering my team.
What does this look like in practice?
Weekly 90-Minute Practice-Based Product Book Club: Since 2019, we’ve read over 15 books, with 2024 selections including Radical Focus, Testing Business Ideas, and Articulating Design Decisions.
Weekly 20-Minute Skill-Based Warm-Up Activity: A quick, focused exercise to sharpen skills and kickstart team meetings.
Annual Team Training Course: We collaborate to choose an area for improvement, with recent courses covering topics like GA4 Masterclass, SQL training, and complex UI design.
Certified Scrum Master Training: New hires receive this training, and we maintain certifications annually.
Elective Role-Related Learning: Team members are encouraged to pursue webinars, classes, continuing education, conferences, or other skill-based activities relevant to their roles as identified throughout the year.
As Director, I’ve ensured that my product management and product design teams receive a minimum of 75 minutes of dedicated upskilling every week for the past five years. This commitment to learning is often cited by team members as a key reason for our exceptional product department tenure—80% higher than the industry average, with our team members staying for an average of 4.5 years compared to the 2.5-year industry norm. I’m also proud to have recently transitioned Associate Product Managers into full-fledged, top-notch Product Managers within just two years, paving the way for future growth.
While I wish I could dedicate even more time, this program ensures we remain committed to learning and growth as individuals, managers, leaders, and colleagues. By systematizing this approach, I hold myself accountable and maintain consistent learning levels because the ROI is undeniable. Retaining top talent is one of the most critical aspects of maturing technology organizations. With replacement costs now estimated at 100%-200% of an employee’s annual salary—and top technical talent commanding the highest salaries in an organization—this investment in upskilling is essential.
By my calculations, I can invest up to six hours per week in training, upskilling, and retention programs to keep my top team members happy, challenged, and growing—and still see a positive return on this investment. But enough about the math—let’s get to the practical side.
Below is my list of favorite Product Warm-Up Activities, designed to save you time and help your teams connect, learn, and grow together during ceremonies, meetings, or celebrations.
For transparency, we love and make heavy use of Coda and Miro to help execute these activities in the time horizon specified.
11-Star Review: Identify a recent successful or unsuccessful experience and map out what the experience could have been from a 1-star to an 11-star level (completely unfeasible). (Source: Brian Chesky).
“Addition by Subtraction”: List out the tools you use most often. Then, in small groups, spend 10 minutes improving them by removing features. (Warning: this is harder than it seems!) (Source: Do Less Podcast)
“Drawing on Data”: Write down something you learned this week (personal or professional), then spend 5-10 minutes creating a chart in Excalidraw to visualize your learning, share your chart with the group. (My personal favorite was a team member’s chart about how, as viewing minutes increase on Netflix, it takes longer to find something new to watch.)
“Product Gauntlet”: Format a roadmap item as a problem statement (Because of [issue happening, [who is affected] leading to [consequences]. Solving this would [benefits, and result in [desired outcome]), break into small groups, and brainstorm small experiments to run based on the problem statement. Return to the group to share solutions. (We often use this to generate dozens of ideas for teams stuck on a problem.)
“Play Along”: If I’m conducting a survey or implementing a program, I make it part of the warm-up to complete the task. This ensures clarity and provides an opportunity for feedback in a small group environment where team members feel safer sharing their thoughts. For example, we recently sought idea submissions for an experimentation working group, and all PM team members were asked to share and submit a product idea for consideration. This helped me ensure they understood the instructions, the form fields made sense, and the ask was minimal and could be done in less than a few minutes before I rolled it out org-wide.
“Product Checkup”: Use warm-up time for a single question survey on a leadership topic to get the team thinking, engaging, and providing valuable feedback such as what makes us unique, successful, or loved by our customers or even what is our biggest problem, area of concern, or bottleneck.
“Product Scavenger Hunts”: Use platforms like Mobbin, Dribbble, or Product Hunt with specific goals, and have the team share their findings. Some examples are to find the most complicated workflow, longest workflow, or best workflow in a specific category.
“Product Jeopardy”: Test your team’s skills with a pre-made Product Management Jeopardy game.
“Product Breakdowns”: Challenge your team to review a concept, competitor, or new product idea and create a quick OST (Outcome, Opportunity, Solution) that may have led to the product decision. This can help team members to think of how other teams may work or break down problems to assist with their own problem decomposition skill development.
“Feature Demos”: For new tools or features, split the team into groups by use case and prepare a demo. An OST can guide them in preparing a successful presentation. We recently conducted feature demos for Miro AI and Slack Lists.
“Team Storytelling”: Start with a prompt like “if only we could…” and have the team add a sentence at a time to create a cohesive story. This helps teach the “yes and…” concept from improv.
“Improve-a-Product”: List products you love and come up with 1-3 ideas for improving them and share with the team.
“Business Walrus”: Play rounds of this game where individuals or teams receive product prompts, requirements, and constraints, and have to pitch their product idea to the group. (Source: Business Walrus)
“Team Visioning”: Solicit feedback from your product management team on company direction and strategy by asking questions such as, “in 5 years from now, how do we want our customers to remember us?” or “In 5 years, how will the world be a better place because we exist?”
“Time Audit” - Look back on your previous week/day and list out the types of activities you spent your time on. Rate each one on a scale of 1-10 in terms of how happy it made you feel. Include professional and personal items. Reflect on what you learned and what patterns you see for yourself and among team members. What brought you the most and least joy?
“Draw Toast” - This is one of my favorites because of its simplicity and effectiveness. Have everyone grab a pencil and paper and sketch the steps to make toast. After the timer is up, have everyone share their drawings and reflect on the variety, skill, and even the surprise steps the team uncovers for even the simplest of tasks. This also helps remove the sketching barrier, showing you don’t have to be an artist to communicate effectively with visuals. (Source: DrawToast.com)
This approach to continuous improvement has not only strengthened my team but has also created a culture of learning and growth that benefits us all. I hope these activities inspire you to foster the same within your own teams.
And, of course, saves you from another lame icebreaker.