Sticky note exercise
The sticky note exercise is a team workshop for surfacing what the team collectively knows about a specific user activity. The team picks an activity (receiving a job offer, submitting an invoice, booking a flight) and brainstorms everything about it onto sticky notes, one idea per note, with no filtering during generation. Then the team sorts the notes into three piles: what has to be true for the activity to count as complete, what usually happens but isn't strictly required, and what's adjacent without being central.
Definition
A team-elicitation procedure that surfaces the anatomy of a scoped transition by having domain-knowledgeable team members brainstorm what's in play, then sorting the brainstorm into Essential, Expected, and Related tiers.
When the team holds the knowledge
The exercise is the right move when the people most able to articulate a transition's structure are inside the team rather than outside it. It complements interview-based methods like the situation explorer: the situation explorer extracts from users, the sticky note exercise extracts from a team. It's especially appropriate when the practitioner sits at lower domain expertise than the team and the team is carrying tacit knowledge that has never been externalized.
The practitioner's posture is deferential. The exercise works because its structure surfaces what the team already knows, not because the practitioner knows the domain better. The right stance is "I don't know how this works most of the time; you do, and the structure of this exercise is going to help you put it on the wall."
The generation half
Pick a single high-level activity to focus on — for instance, "receiving an offer." Set a five-minute timer. Team members brainstorm onto sticky notes, one idea per note, peeling each note off the pad and putting it aside as they write so they aren't scanning their own list and constraining themselves to linear continuations. No quality judgment during generation; every idea goes on a note regardless of whether it seems important.
The brainstorm holds several consideration-categories in mind to surface different facets of the transition:
- Initiating events: what happened that led someone to be in this situation.
- Who else is involved.
- Relevant skills.
- Assets and objects in play.
- Obstacles and enhancements.
- Social pressures and performance dimensions: how the user can help others look good, or how the user looks good to others.
- Emotions.
- Completion criteria: what makes this transition count as complete.
Run the procedure once per high-level activity. A major transition typically warrants 8–10 activities.
The sorting half
Once the team has generated sticky notes for an activity, sort them into the three tiers of condition tiering: Essential (definitional — if absent, the instance isn't an instance of the transition), Expected (typical — present in most instances), and Related (correlated — plausible but not structurally required). Each team member sorts independently first, then the team compares and reaches consensus. Solo-first preserves individual contributions from group-think; the comparison surfaces alignment and reveals gaps.
Two signals are worth reading during the sort. Forehead-slap moments — when a team member surfaces an Essential detail others missed — are the exercise working as intended; the structure has externalized tacit knowledge that no one would have generated alone. Tier disagreement is diagnostic: when team members place the same item in different tiers, the disagreement reveals different mental models of what the transition fundamentally is, and resolving it surfaces something the team hadn't previously articulated.
Where the output goes
The exercise produces a tiered decomposition of the transition's anatomy in folk vocabulary — the team's natural language, not formal specification. That output is input to the aspect toggle: Essential-tier notes become candidates for completion criteria once translated to state-vocabulary, and the scoped transition itself gets pressure-tested for scope fidelity. Sort disagreements often mark places where the toggle needs to do more work to reach a definitive specification.
This is the flat-anatomy method. The sticky note exercise produces what's in play at a single altitude; Break It, Break It Down produces sub-transitions nested across multiple altitudes. Either may be the right starting move depending on what's needed downstream.
Example
Running the generation half on "receiving a job offer" produces sticky notes like: checking inbox repeatedly while waiting; reading the offer letter for every detail; wondering about the start date; deciding whether to push back; excitedly telling family; talking it through with a partner; researching market rates; nervously preparing a counteroffer; comparing multiple offers; asking someone experienced to review; worrying about a bad decision; doing a fist pump; crafting a reply; reviewing finances; popping champagne.
The sorting half tiers them: crafting and sending a reply are Essential — the transition isn't complete without them. Reading the offer for detail, deciding whether to push back, telling family, and worrying about getting it right are Expected — probably present, not definitional. Fist pumps, market-rate research, counteroffers, and comparing multiple offers are Related — they color the transition without being structurally required. Distribution typically runs small Essential pile, slightly larger Expected pile, larger Related pile.