Product Design Workshops

The traditional way of organizing communications during the development of a new product is vertical. The client communicates their wishes to the company’s management. Top management forms its vision of the project, team leaders set technical tasks, and direct performers receive specific tasks within their competence. Effective? Not always. To get rid of the disadvantages of this approach, many companies introduce innovative methods, such as design workshops. We tell you more about them.

What Are Design Workshops?

Design workshops are an original form of teamwork designed to develop a realistic vision of goals and collect unbiased opinions on how to achieve them. Their differences from traditional meetings are:

• Participation of three parties — customer (stakeholder), management, and executors. The vertical way of organizing communications is replaced by a horizontal one. Each party can express its opinion and get an idea of the progress of the project.
• Narrow focus — as a rule, one goal at a time is discussed at design workshops. This approach helps to focus on specific tasks achievable in the foreseeable future and not to waste unnecessary time.
• A clear structure of active communication. Design Workshops are built on the basis of simple logic. They gather, discuss, screen, prioritize, and analyze different opinions. These events have a rigid schedule that typically spans between 4 and 12 hours.

5 Reasons Why Design Workshops Are the Future of Corporate Communications

1. Increased efficiency

The traditional vertical approach means a tremendous waste of time. Each stage of communication is a separate meeting that takes up a significant portion of the workday. There’s a reason why the “It could have been an email!” meme has become popular in IT.

A design workshop allows you to use your working time more efficiently. All issues are solved in one meeting with a clear schedule. Each topic is given due attention at all levels — from the client to the direct executor.

The workshop also saves time in turning conceptual plans into technical tasks and breaking down general goals into specific tasks. It involves both team leaders and staff members who see the big picture. As a result, they can navigate the project faster and get to their work as soon as possible.

2. Finding compromises

One of the biggest challenges in the technology industry is the mismatch between business goals and user needs. A product often turns out to be convenient for its developers but not for the target audience. This is especially important to consider in the experience design industry, where up to 35% of losses are due to the lack of compromises.

During the design workshop, different opinions are discussed:

• Developers talk about technological limitations and optimization methods;
• Management forms a working business model;
• Customer defends the interests of the end user.

Structured communications allow for analyzing each idea within one meeting. By discussing all possible options, participants manage to “stop somewhere in the middle,” creating a viable product concept.

3. Generating new ideas

When setting a task, customer representatives and top management may not be aware of certain technologies and functions. By communicating with the direct executors, they get the missing information. This allows them to change the idea behind the project.

When we consider software development, we are usually talking about additional application modules that add value to the product for the end user. The earlier they are incorporated into the project, the less time, effort, and money will be spent on their creation. That is why it is very important to hold business workshops at the very beginning of the project.

In addition, during such a meeting, the customer may propose a number of ideas that will be evaluated by the executors. The task of management in such a case will be to collect honest unbiased feedback that will allow for evaluating the rationality of adding such features to the final product.

4. Minimizing risks

Many successful ideas never turn into successful business models due to underestimation of risks. That is why the topic of many workshops is not the advantages but the disadvantages of projects:

• Missing features that are really needed;
• Difficulties in realizing the main ideas;
• Possible delays at each stage;
• Probable changes in the market situation at the time of product release;
• Rapid development of competitors, and so on.

A successful business workshop allows for a thorough review of each source of risk. Based on the results of the meeting, decisions can be made to change development timelines, add or remove certain features, use alternative methods, or enter other markets.

5. Establishing internal communications

An important benefit that is often overlooked. During workshops, specialists working on different areas get to know each other. They exchange ideas, assess the professional level of their colleagues, and assign responsibilities.

All this allows for well-structured internal communications. Instead of addressing a message to management, an employee can directly address a specific specialist, saving time and company resources. It may seem like a small thing, but it’s the little things that make up the productivity gains.

Conclusion

Design workshops can rightly be called the future of corporate communications. They are traditional meetings — clearly structured, productive, and cost-effective. They result in specific decisions that affect the future of the product. These workshops help to find compromises and avoid mistakes. With their help, it is possible to establish internal communications and minimize risks for the company.

I’ve seen my fair share of economic woes in the tech world, and I think it’s fair to say that the tech industry is going through a year from hell. Several of the biggest tech titans have engaged in sweeping layoffs. Nerdwallet reports that there were more tech layoffs in 2022 than in the previous two years combined.

The fragile banking system hasn’t done entrepreneurs any favours, either. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank early in 2023 has made both existing and future investments shaky at best.

For some, this has translated into the need to let tech talent go. Even for companies that haven’t scaled back their staff, the economy is scaring many previously optimistic tech startups into preserving cash and extending runways.

These short-term adjustments may be necessary at the moment, but if I’ve learned anything from my experiences, savvy leaders have to resist living in a “damage control” mindset. You can’t sacrifice the long game in favour of short-term survival. You need to balance safety with calculated risk by looking for the silver lining here — because it’s significant.

Here are a few ways I’ve learned to take advantage of tech layoffs and turn short-term fears into long-term strengths for your brand.

Use Layoffs to Clean Up Organizational Management

It’s easy (and tempting) to blame the economy for layoffs. If entrepreneurs truly want to use tech layoffs as a learning experience, though, they should take a good, long look inward.

Consider where your organization is lacking. What internal factors contributed to your need to let go of the same talent that, just a year or two ago, you were trying to retain at all costs?

For instance, according to McChrystal Group, the tech industry is notoriously bad at notice and lead time from organizational leadership. Compared to other industries, tech employees “are 27% less likely to indicate that they always or very often receive appropriate notice and lead time from managers to accomplish important projects.”

The advisory services firm adds that tech workers have a low opinion of their leaders’ ability to make wise decisions. They are 30% less likely than other industries to agree that their leadership teams can make clearly defined, responsible decisions — get this — within established boundaries.

The tech world has had a reputation as the Wild West of economic startups for decades. It’s brimming with potential, loaded with deep-pocketed investors, and often free from the well-established structure or consequences of other economic sectors.

This free-for-all approach is a two-edged sword, as we’re seeing with the current layoffs. If entrepreneurs want to learn from the loss of so many talented employees, they need to set the stage for future tech hires by improving the corporate infrastructure within which they expect them to work.

Use Layoffs to Reset Your Recruitment Process

Cleaning up your internal operations is a great way to give your organization a spring cleaning in the wake of layoffs. Once that’s done, you need to resist the urge to simply rinse and repeat.

Instead, as entrepreneurs look forward, they need to improve how they onboard new talent. The tech industry is riddled with poor hiring practices.

Cash-infused startups make reckless hires right and left, often recruiting friends and family members — or at the least making personal preference hires. Companies also tend to onboard way too many people, in general — often without a second thought.

These bloated staffs and overpriced salaries are a large part of why so many layoffs are taking place. Mark Zuckerberg even acknowledged (and took partial responsibility for) the role that false predictions and overzealous investments played in setting up the current employment crisis at his own company.

Moving forward, entrepreneurs need to use the experience of past tech layoffs to improve their future hiring processes through things like:

• Matching every hire with a clear, defined need.
• Having more than one leader approve every hiring decision.
• Consider alternative options, as well (agencies, contractors, AI)

Hiring isn’t cheap. The latest data indicates that both the hard and soft costs associated with each hire could be as high as three to four times a position’s salary — which, in tech, is a lot of money.

A clean, clear hiring process is critical to the ongoing health and profitability of a company. It ensures that, when a downturn does come, everyone has clear value and can contribute to keeping a company’s books in the black.

Use Layoffs to Capitalize on Available Talent

A clean organization and clear hiring practices are appropriate lessons that entrepreneurs can glean from the current crisis. But these leaders also need to remember not to let short-term fears blind future decision-making. They must remember to balance these introspective adjustments with calculated risks.

Entrepreneurs must dig deep during tough economic times and lean on the same ability to take advantage of opportunities that led to their business-building journey in the first place. With so much talent flooding the marketplace, it is a prime time for smaller startups and tech companies to snap up incredible tech workers at affordable prices.

Many have already caught onto this fact. Revelio Labs reported that tech startups posted 15% more openings than big tech companies in late 2022 and early 2023. Revelio Labs’s CEO, Ben Zweig, made the important connection that this contradicts the current fears that startup funding will disappear and smaller firms will fail. “In retrospect, it’s looking more and more like a momentary blip,” the executive concluded.

Zip Recruiter had similar findings. In late 2022, the site reported that 37% of tech workers found a new job within a month, and 79% were re-employed within three.

These impressively low employment rate numbers are a testament to how the economy is reacting to the shedding of talented tech workers by larger companies. If entrepreneurs want to take advantage of the ongoing carnage as Big Tech lets go of so many workers, they need to clean up their organizations, revamp their hiring practices, and then look for top talent …now.

Plotting the Future for Tech

Tech is the future. The current challenges are very real obstacles that tech startups must overcome. But they shouldn’t do so by keeping their head in the sand.

If tech entrepreneurs want a seat at the table moving forward, they must use the occasion to strike. They must clean up internal activity, clarify needs, and then make smart hires, all with an eye toward a future that their industry will continue to define — regardless of if they’re part of it or not.