How might we questions template

Mural’s How Might We questions template gives your team a structured starting point for one of the most versatile problem framing techniques in design thinking. Instead of debating what’s wrong, HMW questions reframe problems as opportunities, opening the door to creative solutions your team might not have considered. The result: sharper ideation sessions, stronger alignment, and ideas that actually move forward.

How Might We (also called HMW statements or HMW questions) is a method rooted in the LUMA System’s Statement Starters, a human-centered design approach to reframing challenges as invitations for exploration. Whether your team is running a dedicated brainstorm, kicking off product discovery, or synthesizing research findings, HMW questions keep the conversation focused on what’s possible rather than what’s broken. For more ways to structure creative sessions, see our guide to brainstorming techniques.

What is a How Might We questions template?

A How Might We questions template is a shared workspace designed to help teams turn a defined challenge into a set of open-ended questions that spark new thinking. It combines the HMW method, which has been a staple of design thinking and innovation practice since the 1970s, with a structured canvas where teams can write, rephrase, and refine their questions together.

The template walks your team through the full arc: define a problem, reframe it as a series of HMW questions, explore variations, and then prioritize the strongest questions to fuel your next brainstorming or ideation session. It’s most useful when a challenge feels too big or too vague to tackle head-on, because the HMW format breaks it into pieces your team can actually work with.

Key features of the How Might We questions template

The template is built around a natural progression: start with the problem, generate questions, then decide which ones are worth pursuing.

At the top of the canvas, there’s a dedicated space to write and refine your problem statement. This matters because the quality of your HMW questions depends entirely on how well the problem is framed. From there, the template opens into areas for generating multiple HMW questions, with prompts that encourage participants to think beyond safe or obvious phrasing. The prompts push toward bold, provocative, and emotionally grounded questions, the kind that produce ideas nobody walks in expecting.

The canvas also includes space to explore variations of each question, testing different angles, extremes, and framings before settling on the versions that resonate most. If your team wants to speed up the generation phase, Mural AI’s Generate feature can produce additional HMW questions from a natural language prompt, giving you a broader starting set to react to and build on.

Collaboration is woven throughout. Teams can contribute in real time or use private mode to write independently before sharing, which prevents anchoring and gives every participant’s thinking equal weight. When it’s time to converge, anonymous voting helps the group surface the questions with the most energy behind them, so you leave the session with a clear, prioritized shortlist.

The How Might We questions template helps you:

• Reframe problems into opportunities your team can explore creatively

• Generate a wide range of open-ended questions that push past obvious solutions

• Encourage divergent thinking across disciplines and experience levels

• Align cross-functional teams around a shared understanding of the challenge

• Improve the quality of brainstorming sessions by starting with better prompts

• Keep the focus on user needs and real outcomes rather than internal assumptions

• Turn the strongest questions into actionable ideation sessions with clear direction

How to use the How Might We questions template

You don’t need a design thinking background to run a strong HMW session. Here’s a practical, five-step approach you can follow in Mural.

Step 1: Define the problem

Start by writing a clear problem statement that anchors the session. The best problem statements are specific enough to be useful but broad enough to invite multiple solutions. Focus on the user or customer need behind the problem, not the internal process frustration. “Our users abandon the signup flow” is better than “Our conversion rate is low” because it points to a human experience your team can explore.

Step 2: Turn the problem into HMW questions

Reframe your problem statement by starting with “How might we...” and completing the sentence in as many ways as you can. Each question should be open-ended and avoid embedding a specific solution. The goal is volume first, quality later.

Here’s what this looks like in practice:

Problem: Users abandon the signup flow.

How might we make signup feel faster?

How might we eliminate signup altogether?

How might we make the signup experience something users actually want to complete?

Notice how each version opens a different door. The first question leads toward speed improvements, the second toward a fundamentally different architecture, and the third toward an emotional redesign. That range is exactly what you’re after.

Step 3: Expand and explore variations

Take your strongest questions and push them further. Try different angles: what if you made the problem worse on purpose? What if you solved it for a completely different user? What if the constraint everyone assumes is fixed actually isn’t? These provocations help your team break out of habitual thinking and find the questions that genuinely surprise them.

This is also a good moment to use Mural AI’s Generate feature. Feed it a problem statement and let it produce a batch of HMW variations your team can react to, edit, or use as inspiration for their own.

Step 4: Select the best questions

Once your canvas is full of HMW questions, review them as a group. Remove duplicates, merge similar questions, and refine the phrasing of the ones that resonate. Then use voting to identify the top three to five questions the team feels most energized by. These are the questions that will drive your next session.

Step 5: Use your questions to brainstorm ideas

Your top HMW questions become the prompts for focused ideation. Each question can anchor its own brainstorming round, with participants generating solutions on sticky notes. This is where the HMW format pays off: because the questions are open-ended and opportunity-framed, the ideas they produce tend to be more creative and varied than what you’d get from a generic “solve this problem” prompt.

When to use How Might We questions (with examples)

HMW questions fit anywhere your team needs to shift from analyzing a problem to exploring what’s possible. Here are the scenarios where they’re most effective.

Design thinking workshops

HMW questions are a cornerstone of the design thinking process, typically falling between the “define” and “ideate” phases. They translate research insights into creative prompts that keep ideation grounded in real user needs.

Brainstorming sessions

A brainstorm is only as good as its prompt. Starting with well-crafted HMW questions gives your team a sharper focus than “let’s come up with ideas for X,” and the open-ended format encourages a wider range of responses. Explore more brainstorming and ideation approaches to see how this fits into a broader creative workflow.

Product discovery

Early-stage product work often surfaces more problems than solutions. HMW questions help product teams translate customer pain points, market gaps, and stakeholder input into structured exploration that feeds directly into roadmap decisions.

UX research synthesis

After a round of user interviews or usability tests, your team has findings but not yet direction. Turning those findings into HMW questions bridges the gap between “here’s what we learned” and “here’s what we might do about it.”

Strategy and innovation sessions

When leadership teams need to move from strategic priorities to concrete initiatives, HMW questions give the conversation a productive structure. They prevent sessions from stalling in abstract debate and push toward specific, explorable opportunities.

Retrospectives

Retros often surface recurring frustrations without making progress on them. Reframing persistent challenges as HMW questions shifts the energy from complaint to creative problem-solving, and gives your team something concrete to ideate against in the next session.

Customer experience improvements

Support data, NPS feedback, and journey mapping insights all produce a list of “what’s not working.” HMW questions convert that list into prompts your CX team can brainstorm around, focusing effort on the moments that matter most to your customers.

Tips for running a How Might We workshop

The difference between a productive HMW session and a forgettable one usually comes down to facilitation. Here’s what helps.

1. Spend real time on the problem statement before you start generating questions. If the problem is vague or too broad, the questions will be too. A well-framed problem statement is the single biggest predictor of a useful session.

2. Encourage quantity over quality in the generation phase. Set a timer for five to ten minutes and have everyone write as many HMW questions as they can, independently, using private mode. You’re looking for volume, because the most interesting questions are rarely the first ones people think of.

3. Keep questions open-ended. If a question implies a specific solution (“How might we build a chatbot for onboarding?”), it’s too narrow. Reframe it: “How might we help new users feel confident in their first ten minutes?”

4. Use timeboxing to maintain energy. HMW sessions work best in focused bursts, not marathon meetings. Twenty minutes of intense question generation is more productive than an hour of gradual drift.

5. Build on each other’s questions. When someone writes a question that sparks a new angle for you, write your variation and put it next to theirs. The best HMW sessions feel like a conversation on the canvas, not a collection of isolated contributions.

6. Use voting with specific criteria, not just general preference. “Vote for the question most likely to produce a solution we haven’t tried” will surface different priorities than “vote for your favorite.”

Once you’ve selected your top questions, use them as direct prompts for focused brainstorming. Each HMW question can anchor its own ideation round, giving your team a clear, energizing starting point for generating actionable ideas.