Design Knowledge Base

Strategy Design Workshop

The strategy workshop purpose is to have the team together to start the conversation on how the team could fulfill the opportunity by tackling the most critical problem with the most promising hypotheses. The exercise is about prioritization and focus rather than solutioning.

When to Use

  1. To generate hypotheses to solve defined problems
  2. Solution space has very little constraint in the moment.
  3. To determine which aspect of a problem space is the largest opportunity.
  4. strong opinions, many sub-problems leading to a broader bigger problem, many solution paths to evaluate,

Workshop Details

Attendees Ideal Size Suggested Time
1 representative per squad discipline, 1 representative from Support, Marketing, Sales, and BI. 5 to 8 people 1.5 to 2 hours

Prep Work

Before the session, create empathy map and focus on a particular goal. Required to ground the workshop around the user’s perspective and their goal. Send the artifacts beforehand but also include time in the workshop to review.

Create a journey map with

Agenda

Review Goal (5 minutes)

Let everyone know the purpose of the workshop, which is to collectively explore high level directions of how to solve a problem.

Review UX Artifacts and the User’s Goal (15 minutes)

Review who the user is, what’s important to them, and what’s their current journey (abbreviated journey map, only show the steps).

Problem Ideation (5 minutes)

Have everyone write down as many problems as possible. Guide everyone to consider for each step of the journey and the user’s goal. “What gets in their way?” No problem is too small at this step.

(While participants complete this task, you facilitate the organization of the problems. You do not participate in this exercise since you’ve already done it for the journey map.).

Discuss Problems (10 minutes)

Discuss and continue to cluster Post-Its into similar themes.

  1. Read all the Post-Its, unless captured well by a theme.
  2. Connect to problems to what you’ve already documented in the journey.
  3. Reiterate the biggest problems.

Hypothesis Generation (10 minutes)

Next, have everyone explore how they’d solve the problems discussed. Have them try to focus on the biggest problems but allow them to tackle any size problem. Instruct them that the hypothesis can tackle only one problem or many problems.

Use the format below.

We believe that _____[feature/solution]_______ will ______[outcome]______.

Focus on how you’d solve it.

Silent Voting (10 minutes)

Give everybody 3 dots to vote on the ones they think will make the biggest impact.

While people cluster, instruct them to cluster similar hypotheses.

Wrap Up

Thank everyone for their participation and tell them what the expected next steps are.

  1. Continue exploration of problem space, leveraging what came out of today’s workshop as guidance.
  2. Validation of explorations.
  3. Lastly, remind everyone that not everything will be immediately acted on but all these ideas will be saved in the backlog for later.

References

Templates (if applicable)

Created by: Joe Steinkamp | Last updated by: Joe Steinkamp