In my opinion, they should. Often, you don’t need workshops at all. When you do, you should expect them to impact your business significantly and produce exceptional results.
Why should you demand impact from workshops? How to approach them? How to increase the chance that when someone offers you workshops, you get maximum value?
Read along to find out. (I’ll also share examples of exceptional workshops.)
If you prefer a video version, we've also discussed this on our podcast.
Should you agree to a workshop at the start of the project?
In many cases, the story goes like this.
You are building a new product or plan to use technology to improve your business. You have a great vision and know the market. The problem-solution fit is clear. However, you may lack expertise – tech-wise or business-wise. You need a partner. The one you found suggests kicking things off with a workshop.
Should you agree to a workshop right at the beginning? Very often, no. Sometimes, yes. If you find this answer vague, let me show you the most common misuses of workshops.
Common misuses of workshops
Knowledge transfer
One of the most common misuses of workshops is knowledge transfer between companies. There are much more efficient ways to do this than having a meeting with multiple people, which costs a lot of time and money.
If you’re an experienced entrepreneur, let alone a serial entrepreneur with extensive technical and business knowledge, you most likely created some artifacts of your knowledge and some kind of plan. Maybe it’s not a complex business plan, but it highlights the essence of what you plan to build.
From an experienced business partner, you can expect the ability to understand the materials you have and, using their experience, procure questions. It allows them to understand the deeper needs of your project based on what you already have. Most likely, they also know a little bit about your industry, competition, and overall business.
Of course, at some point, you need to talk in order to:
✅ confirm you use the same vocabulary,
✅ make sure you understand each other,
✅ go deeper, exchange experiences.
A good tech partner will ask relevant, impactful questions. However, a simple knowledge transfer doesn’t need to be done via a workshop.
One person you introduce can later introduce others by creating synthesized materials. It’s drastically more efficient than talking in large groups.
Companies often agree to a knowledge transfer for simpler projects for free as part of their sales operations.
Premature workshops
Let’s picture another scenario. You have a well-defined challenge. Maybe your production app needs adjustments and optimizations. Perhaps you want to focus on performance, scalability, or security.
You might have identified that a new technical partner who can take over the project is a great solution to your challenge.
In such cases, you most likely don’t need workshops. Instead, use consulting sessions, a targeted audit (some can take as little as 1 hour of your time and 10 hours of investigations), or a larger analysis. You can also stick to knowledge transfer.
Then, start cracking the problem.
Use workshops as training
You may lack the experience to define the details of your project well enough. You haven't heard about:
✔️ Business Canvas, Value Canvas
✔️ Thesis, analogs, antilogs
✔️ Competitor analysis,
✔️ Customer Journey Mapping
✔️Market analysis,
✔️Quantitative and qualitative analysis
✔️ Assumptions mapping
✔️ Flow charts
✔️ A3
✔️ Design Sprint
✔️ …and hundreds of others.
Workshops are not the ideal approach to learning.
Use consulting instead. Ask for 1:1 sessions. An experienced analyst can help you prepare the right tools to define your project. Or, tell a consultant about the project and ask them to do the defining in your stead.
In cases when workshops are useful (and there are many), use the output of such consulting to prepare follow-up workshops.
Workshops as a template
Okay, let’s say you have the right case for workshops. You got a proposal from a company that regularly does them. They have great graphic materials and offer workshops as a product. They have experienced salespeople who present you with the approach.
Most often, it’s a suboptimal approach. You CAN tune workshops to your needs and situation and pre-plan them so that they (ideally):
✅ meet your goals,
✅ will be followed up by an actual implementation
✅are designed to impact your business.
However, I’ve participated in multiple template-based workshops that didn’t follow through. What are the reasons?
❌ Workshop modules were generic and didn’t touch on the essence of the product or the problem. The end deliverables weren’t that useful.
❌ The suggestions were reasonable but not tuned to the business. As a result, the findings of the workshops weren’t followed through.
The main risk, though, is that such workshops are often average. You’ll get nice materials summarizing your thoughts, but don’t settle for this — it’s not enough. You should aim for a meaningful impact.
Workshops done by juniors
This will do the job if you just want to organize your knowledge using workshops as a template. However, there are better ways of achieving similar result: consultations or an experienced business analyst.
Juniors won’t give you exceptional impact. They won’t help you with meaningful insights. Sure, there are MANY templates for juniors to run workshops. They will generate some useful deliverables. Using an experienced team of exceptional specialists is orders of magnitude more impactful, though.
So, do you need workshops?
Ok, the first part of this article may seem like a rant. Perhaps I’ve just seen too many inefficient workshops and had many more offered to me. There are, however, cases in which workshops are a good way to go. In most cases, it’s when you need a dialog between voices.
The voices that matter are:
✅ The voice of the market – what your clients want. This one is fairly obvious. There are many ways to gather it, which is critical for success. I’ll assume you know how it works. If not, let me know, and maybe I’ll write about it ;)
✅ The voice of the business – you need to build something that fits your business. Something you can implement with your current capabilities. Also, something you WANT to build.
✅ The voice of technology — what is possible within the boundaries of the current technology or a given domain expertise.
The voice of technology is often the least obvious. You don’t want just to get a mutual understanding and an estimate. A good tech voice will tell you:
✔️ Which non-obvious technical solutions, sometimes very recent, can give you a significant competitive advantage?
✔️ How long will this advantage last? What will most likely happen in the tech field in 1 or 2 years? How you can best leverage your investment in technology?
✔️ How can you reduce costs and risks?
✔️ What NOT to build? (You want a Lean approach - to build exactly what is needed, and omit non-critical features that don’t add value for your clients.)
Some ideas and solutions appear only when those three voices talk. As long as you involve good people, workshops can produce amazing results.
So, what are the results of a great workshop?
Let me give you some examples.
Vetsak
Our research and six hours of meetings with all stakeholders resulted in ideas that:
✅ Increased conversion rate of furniture sales by 100% within 3 months, thanks to a 3D configurator implementation/
✅ Lowered costs of photoshoots by tens of thousands of USD monthly, thanks to the use of CGI, within 6 months since workshops.
✅ Streamlined processes within 6 months, thanks to the change of the shopping platform.
Zremb
Twenty hours of workshops and some additional hours of formal work resulted in:
✅ a plan that finally secured public funding of 3MLN PLN for the client
✅ lowered costs of the project from 3MLN PLN to 500k PLN
✅ changed the implementation time from 2 years to 6 months
✅ provided backlog for the creation of an advanced project built in a consortium of 4 companies.
Center for Educational Technology
Our 15 hours of 1:1 talks and preparations, and a single 4-hour meeting, resulted in:
✅ Aligning the vision of multiple stakeholders from multiple departments.
✅ The vision that couldn’t be agreed on for many months was worked out within a few weeks.
✅ Certain impactful action points were generated.
In all those cases, we used a custom approach.
How to plan a great workshop? Lessons learned
All the good workshops — those we organized and those we participated in — had a few things in common.
I’ll assume you know methodologies and how to structure workshops. I find obvious remarks, like good moderation, materials, etc., not worth in-depth assessment at this point.
Instead, let’s focus on less obvious aspects.
Modular and tuned to the need
We did our pre-work. We identified the needs and confirmed them with an almost scientific approach. Not only that, but we proposed the best workshop plan and then discussed and refined the approach with a partner. In all cases, we built a custom approach.
Senior people
We engaged people with significant business and tech experience – when needed, C-level. Most business-changing remarks came from senior experts.
Trust
We built mutual trust between each other. We were open to talking about all aspects of the business without barriers.
Deep work
We planned deep work sessions for workshop participants. By deep work, I mean individual work with no scheduled meetings. This allowed the focus time for research, synthesis, summary of action points, and arriving at impactful conclusions.
What gives remarkable results is in-depth research, using the knowledge of the whole company and our network, not just of workshop participants.
Whenever possible, we also worked with single people to provide outputs that can be used as inputs for meetings in a larger group.
Networking
Sometimes, we knew our expertise in a specific field wasn’t great enough. In these cases, we engaged the help of exceptional companies.
Thankfully, we have an extensive network thanks to participation in a few IT organizations, some of which we help build.
I always recommend participating in such groups. 🙂 It's a great investment whenever you can bring an experienced partner to participate.
Focus on business impact, not deliverables
We focused on generating an implementable business impact instead of just delivering deliverables. We defined measurable goals and paths for their implementation. Also, we focused on a good output for the later process of planning the implementation in a lean way.
It's a win whenever you get an action item that can be done without an implementation. Code is a means to achieving a goal, not the goal itself.
Code is a waste.
Workshops organized by a partner
By now, you know what you can aim for in workshops. The common situation, though, is when workshops are being organized for you, not by you. How can you check if they’ll be organized professionally?
I'd recommend the following...
Double-check whether you need a workshop at all
Perhaps knowledge transfer (1:1 session) is enough for now? Maybe an audit or another structured form?
Talk with people who will do the workshops
Salespeople often sell the idea of organizing a workshop well. It’s their job. You want to talk with all the people involved — at least with representatives of all voices (business, market, technology).
Very often, senior people sell, and junior people conduct workshops based on a template prepared by a senior. You don’t want this. The best result you can get with juniors is an average result.
Talking with senior people before the workshops should already yield a few insightful and useful remarks. It’s a good indication of what workshops may bring.
Ask for a modular approach
Discuss the plan provided by the partner. Provide your remarks. Ask how your goals will be met and what will happen if they aren’t.
Don’t be afraid to ask for deep work or for a partner to prepare before the workshop. Check whether they even plan it.
Don’t be afraid to exchange knowledge asynchronously before workshops. If you’re unsure how to transfer knowledge this way, ask your partner for examples, ideas, and templates. (Alternatively, consulting.)
Always aim for exceptional results
You can’t always get miraculous outcomes, but don’t cut your chances of getting them. Every new partner has (or at least should have) deep knowledge in areas you don’t have. It’s good to expect exceptional impact from them. Ask who and how will deliver it.
Thanks to such questions, I influenced the partner to change the workshop plan multiple times. Sometimes, the results were amazing. (That’s, for example, a story about our last rebranding.)
Ask what the follow-up of workshops will be.
Maybe you need just a new UI/UX or a backlog for your project. Don’t settle for it, though.
Continuous discovery
Let’s say you had the workshops organized. They delivered implementable action points that changed your business. That’s great. Although oftentimes, there’s one more thing worth taking care of.
Workshops can provide very valuable expertise. You gain insights into areas you can’t cover yourself, and input that allows you to correct the course and plan your actions efficiently. I agree – workshops are one way to get this done quickly.
However, it’s also possible, advisable, and in some cases required to continue acquiring expertise while developing the product. In my experience, larger projects, or those with a high level of innovation and R&D, are when it’s most important.
You can plan development in a way that doesn’t require the repetition of costly workshops every few months. Apart from ensuring a standard Lean approach to the development of your product, you can bake into your software development process certain procedures that make sure you:
✅ get the deep domain expertise of your partner regularly,
✅ get the expertise from experts on your partner’s team who have worked on a certain problem already, not just from a team assigned to your project,
✅ use the network of your partner to get the niche know-how when needed,
✅ get impactful feedback from the team developing your product.
We mostly deliver this thanks to a set of mechanisms and procedures and the roles of Customer Success Manager and Shadow Product Manager. It’s a complex and extensive topic, though… maybe worth a separate article.
Conclusion
Thanks for staying with me until the end of this article. Let’s sum up the most important stuff:
✅ Workshops CAN be done fundamentally better. Aim for a custom approach when it's useful.
✅ If you aim for a simple knowledge transfer, you don’t need to do it via workshops. Many companies will willingly share it as a part of their sales operations. 1:1 sessions and consulting can also be useful.
✅ Workshops tend to produce the best outcomes when senior experts are involved. Deep work sessions are also helpful.
✅ Focus on business impact, not deliverables.
PS: This is just an afterthought. Sometimes, you’ll hear from a partner that after workshops, you can take deliverables and go to any other tech partner to use them to build a project. It’s not the full truth. Workshop deliverables may quicken knowledge transfer, but they won’t eliminate it completely. Almost everyone will want to talk with you to confirm the mutual understanding of your business. You should especially avoid those who won't ask for this.
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