# Design Thinking — A Structured Workshop Methodology

## What this is for

This is the protocol for running a structured discovery workshop when you are early on a product, a market, or a problem. You use it when the work has not yet started, the team is still arguing about scope, and the user is more imagined than understood. The output is not a design. The output is a shared, evidence-shaped picture of where the real opportunity lies, who is affected, what success looks like, and what the first move should be.

Use this when you are entering a new product domain, a new market, a new partnership, or a problem space that has resisted previous attempts. Use it when stakeholders are misaligned and you need a forcing function to surface the disagreement and resolve it. Use it before any UI work. Skip it when the problem is well-understood, the team is aligned, and the work is execution-only — running this protocol on an over-known problem wastes a day.

The workshop has five phases. Run them in order. Each phase produces a concrete artifact that feeds the next. The artifacts together produce a plan you can act on within the week.

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## When to run this

A few signals that this workshop is the right move.

You are about to start work on something where the user is unfamiliar to the team — a new segment, a new geography, a new use case. The team has assumptions but no shared picture, and shipping into that condition means shipping someone's guess.

The stakeholders are pulling in different directions. Sales wants feature A. Operations wants feature B. The original brief mentioned feature C. The engineer building it asks which is the real priority and nobody can answer with confidence.

You are in a discovery phase where the answer to "what should we build" is not yet "this specific thing." If you already know what to build and the question is how, skip this and go straight to design.

A previous attempt at this problem failed and you do not yet understand why. The workshop is a reset that surfaces what was missed.

There is a major decision pending — a partnership, an investment, a strategic pivot — and the team needs alignment before committing. The workshop produces alignment as a side effect of running the protocol.

You should not run this when the team is small enough and the problem narrow enough that a half-hour conversation would produce the same alignment. Process scales with complexity; do not impose ceremony where ceremony is not warranted.

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## Preparation

A workshop runs better or worse based on what you prepare before anyone walks in.

**People.** The room contains end users, key stakeholders, business leads, and the IT or engineering voice that will eventually build whatever this workshop produces. End users matter most; if the room has no end users in it, the workshop is talking about people who are not in the room, and the resulting plan will reflect the absent users' interests poorly.

Size the group to 6 to 12. Larger groups produce one or two loud voices and many silent passengers. Smaller groups miss the diversity of viewpoint that the protocol relies on. If the natural stakeholder list is larger than 12, you either run multiple workshops or you pick the 12 who are most essential and consult the others afterward.

Cast the room with care. An end user who has the problem on a daily basis. A stakeholder who controls the budget. A business lead who understands the commercial constraints. An engineer who can speak to feasibility. A designer who can speak to user experience. A skeptic — someone who is not already sold on the project, whose questions will keep the room honest. Avoid filling the room with people who already agree; agreement is a side effect of the protocol, not a starting condition.

**Place.** A creative space with wall surface for sticky notes and printed templates. Tables that can be re-arranged. Whiteboards. Good light. No screens dominating the room; the work is on the walls and the tables, not on slides.

If the workshop must be remote, build the equivalent in a collaborative whiteboard tool. The artifacts are the same; the medium is different. Remote workshops are harder because the side conversations and ambient awareness are lost — plan for more facilitation, shorter sessions, more breaks.

**Materials.** Sticky notes in several colors. Marker pens (the dark kind that read on a wall, not pencils). Dot stickers for voting. Printed templates for each phase, sized for wall mounting. Cameras or phones for capturing the wall at end-of-phase. A printed agenda that anchors the day.

**Templates.** Each phase has a template that focuses the conversation. The exploration template captures what users do today and where it hurts. The heat map template lays out candidate opportunities on impact and feasibility axes. The stakeholder map plots people by influence and interest. The future-state template prompts the team to write a specific story of success. The game plan template forces concrete commitments — who, what, when. Prepare and print these before the day; do not draw them live, that wastes the room's time.

**Pre-reads.** Send one document to participants 48 hours before the workshop. One page. The problem you are exploring, the question the workshop will answer, the agenda. Not 30 pages of context — people will not read it, and you do not want them arriving with locked-in opinions.

**Time.** A full workshop is a day. Five phases, each 60 to 90 minutes, with breaks. If you compress it into half a day, you sacrifice quality on the later phases. If you spread it across multiple days, the energy and continuity drop. Default to one day; only deviate with a reason.

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## The facilitator

One person runs the workshop. They are not a participant. They do not contribute to the substance of the work. They run the protocol.

The facilitator's job is to enforce the time-box, advance the phases, keep the conversation on the current phase, capture decisions, and ensure every voice in the room is heard.

A few specific facilitator moves.

**Hold the time-box.** Each phase has a duration. When the time is up, the phase ends. Participants will resist this — they will say "we just need ten more minutes." Sometimes the answer is yes, but usually the answer is no. The next phase needs its time too.

**Ask, do not assert.** The facilitator does not say "the answer is X." They ask the question that gets the room to X. "What do you think? What is the evidence? Who disagrees and why?" The room produces the content; the facilitator produces the structure.

**Surface silent voices.** Some participants will dominate; some will say nothing. The facilitator notices and intervenes. "We have not heard from this side of the room. What is your read?" The quiet voices often hold the missing piece.

**Force decisions.** When the room is circling, the facilitator names it. "We have been on this for 15 minutes. We need to decide. What is the decision?" If no decision can be made, the facilitator captures the open question and moves on; the open question becomes part of the output.

**Capture as you go.** The artifacts are populated during the workshop, not written up afterward. Photographs of the walls are the record. A written summary is sent within 24 hours, but the workshop's output is the populated templates, not a separate deliverable.

The facilitator is most effective when they are not also a stakeholder. If the facilitator has skin in the outcome, they will unconsciously bend the protocol toward their preferred answer. Use a facilitator from outside the team when the stakes are high; use the team lead when stakes are moderate; never use the most senior person, because the room will perform for them and the protocol will fail.

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## Phase 1 — Exploration Exercise

Duration: 60 to 90 minutes.

Purpose: collect what is known and unknown about the current situation. Surface assumptions. Identify barriers users currently face. Build the inventory of candidate opportunities that the rest of the workshop will work with.

The exploration phase is the room's collective memory dump, structured so that the dump is usable.

**Setup.** A wall is divided into four zones: "Who" (users and their context), "What" (the tasks they are trying to accomplish), "Where it hurts" (the friction, pain, workarounds), and "Why it matters" (the consequence — what happens when it goes wrong, what is at stake).

**The exercise.** Each participant, working individually for 15 minutes, writes one item per sticky note. Quantity over quality. The instruction is "what do you know, observe, or have heard about the current situation." Not what they think the solution is — what the current situation is.

After 15 minutes, the participants post their sticky notes to the appropriate zone. This takes another 10 minutes. The wall fills up rapidly.

**Affinity grouping.** With the full set of notes posted, the room — together, on its feet — groups related notes. Sticky notes about the same user cluster. Sticky notes about the same task cluster. Notes that span multiple zones get duplicated so the original stays in place. The clustering takes 20 minutes. The room talks while clustering — the conversation that emerges from "do these two notes belong together" is itself a major output of the phase.

**Naming the clusters.** Each cluster gets a name on a header note. The naming is consequential; the names become the vocabulary the rest of the workshop uses. A cluster called "users who are confused at signup" produces different downstream conversations than a cluster called "onboarding friction." Spend time on names; let the room argue them out.

**Inventory of opportunities.** From the populated wall, the room extracts a list of candidate opportunities — places where there is enough pain, enough frequency, and enough strategic relevance that doing something about it would be worth the effort. Each candidate opportunity becomes one item on a list that goes to Phase 2.

A working exploration phase produces 8 to 20 candidate opportunities. Fewer than 8 and the room has not explored enough; the facilitator pushes for more. More than 20 and the room is being indiscriminate; some candidates need to be merged or discarded before the next phase.

**Output artifact.** A photographed wall, a named list of opportunity candidates, a captured set of unresolved questions to revisit at the end of the day.

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## Phase 2 — Heat Map

Duration: 60 minutes.

Purpose: prioritize the candidate opportunities by impact, feasibility, and strategic fit. Produce a visual map that makes the priority order obvious to anyone walking up to the wall.

**Setup.** A two-by-two matrix on the wall. The horizontal axis is "impact" — how much value would solving this create for the user and the business if we got it right. The vertical axis is "feasibility" — how confident we are we can actually deliver a meaningful solution, given the team, the time, and the constraints. The four quadrants are labeled: high-impact high-feasibility (top right, the obvious wins), high-impact low-feasibility (top left, the ambitious bets), low-impact high-feasibility (bottom right, the quick wins), low-impact low-feasibility (bottom left, the avoid pile).

**The exercise.** Each opportunity from Phase 1 is placed on the map. The placement is done by the room, together, with discussion. For each opportunity, the room debates: how high is the impact? How feasible? Where does it land?

The facilitator manages the time. Spend no more than three minutes per opportunity on initial placement. There will be disagreement; some disagreements get resolved by the room, some get captured as "we don't agree on this, which means we need data to decide."

**Strategic fit overlay.** After all opportunities are placed, the room marks the ones that also align strongly with the current strategy. Use a colored dot. An opportunity that is high-impact, high-feasibility, and strategy-aligned is a top candidate. An opportunity that is high-impact and high-feasibility but does not fit the strategy needs a conversation: is the strategy wrong, or is this opportunity wrong for us?

**Voting.** Each participant gets a fixed number of dot stickers — typically 3 to 5. They use the dots to vote for the opportunities they believe most deserve action. The voting is not anonymous; participants stand at the wall and place their dots in view of the room. This is intentional; the public commitment makes participants own their picks.

**Resolution.** The opportunities with the most votes, in the top-right quadrant or near it, become the focal list for the rest of the workshop. Typically 3 to 5 opportunities are selected. The others go on a parking lot to be considered in future workshops.

**Output artifact.** A populated heat map, photographed and captured digitally. A short list of focal opportunities to carry into Phase 3.

**Pitfalls to watch.** Participants over-estimate impact when they invented the opportunity; the facilitator's job is to ask "what is the evidence for that impact estimate." Participants under-estimate feasibility when the work involves something they personally don't know how to do; the facilitator's job is to ask "what would it take to find out." The heat map is a directional tool, not a quantitative one — do not let the room treat the placement as if it were measured. It is a structured guess that the room agrees on, and that is enough for this phase.

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## Phase 3 — Stakeholder Mapping

Duration: 60 minutes.

Purpose: identify everyone affected by the focal opportunities. Map them by influence and interest. Decide who needs to be involved in the work, who needs to be consulted, who needs to be informed, and who can be ignored.

Stakeholder mapping is the phase that most teams skip. It is the phase that, when skipped, produces shipped work that gets blocked by a stakeholder nobody thought about.

**Setup.** A two-by-two matrix on the wall. Horizontal axis: "interest" — how much does this person care about the outcome. Vertical axis: "influence" — how much power does this person have to affect whether the work succeeds.

**The exercise.** The room brainstorms stakeholders for the focal opportunities. End users. Business leaders. IT and engineering teams. Compliance and regulatory. Partners. Customers' customers. Operations. Customer support. Finance. Legal. Anyone whose role intersects with the work.

Each stakeholder gets a sticky note. The note has the role, not necessarily the person — "head of compliance" rather than a specific name, unless the specific name matters.

**Plotting.** The room places each stakeholder on the influence-interest map. A stakeholder with high influence and high interest goes top-right (key players — must be in the room). High influence, low interest goes top-left (must be kept satisfied; if their interest spikes they can derail). Low influence, high interest goes bottom-right (must be kept informed; their support matters even when their power doesn't). Low influence, low interest goes bottom-left (monitor; do not over-invest in keeping them in the loop).

**Decision per quadrant.** The room decides, for each stakeholder, what engagement looks like. The key players: when and how do they engage. The high-influence-low-interest: what is the right cadence of light-touch updates. The low-influence-high-interest: how are they kept informed. The bottom-left: agreed minimal posture, perhaps a one-line email at major milestones.

**Identify gaps.** Are there stakeholders who should be in the room today but aren't? Mark them. They get a follow-up conversation within the week. Are there stakeholders whose position is unknown? Mark them. Someone is assigned to find out.

**Output artifact.** A populated stakeholder map with engagement decisions for each quadrant. A short list of follow-ups: stakeholders to interview, stakeholders to inform, stakeholders to recruit into future workshops.

**Pitfalls.** The most common pitfall is naming only the obvious stakeholders. The facilitator probes — "who else? who is upstream of this? who is downstream? who has a veto we have not named?" The second pitfall is treating the map as final; stakeholder configurations change as the work progresses, and the map is a living artifact that the team updates.

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## Phase 4 — Remember the Future

Duration: 60 to 90 minutes.

Purpose: produce a concrete, specific story of what success looks like. Working backward from "the future has arrived and the work was successful" forces clarity about what specifically would have changed in the world.

This phase is the team's first encounter with a vision artifact. It is not a roadmap. It is a vivid description of a future state, written as if it has already happened.

**Setup.** A wall divided into three sections: "What does the user experience" (the perspective of the end user in the future state), "What does the business achieve" (the commercial outcome), and "What does the team look like" (how the team has changed, what they ship, what they measure).

**Time horizon.** Pick a specific date. Not "in the future." A date — 18 months from today, 24 months, whatever feels right for the opportunity. The specificity matters; vague time horizons produce vague visions.

**Individual writing.** Each participant, working alone for 15 minutes, writes a short story. The story is one to three paragraphs. It is written in the present tense, as if the date has arrived and the participant is observing the world. Concrete details. Specific user actions. Specific business metrics. Specific team capabilities.

The instruction: "Describe what you see, hear, feel, and observe on this date. Not what you hope; what you see. Be specific. Use names if it helps. Use numbers if you have them."

**Reading aloud.** Each participant reads their story to the room. Three minutes each. The room listens; no debate during reading. The variation across stories is itself the data. Where do they agree? Where do they diverge? What is mentioned consistently? What is mentioned by only one person?

**Extraction.** With all stories read, the room extracts common elements. The user experiences that appeared in multiple stories. The business outcomes everyone wrote. The capabilities the team needs. These common elements become the consensus future-state.

**The divergence is also data.** Where stories disagree, the disagreement is an unresolved strategic question. The team captures it explicitly. Sometimes the disagreement reveals two viable futures and the team must pick one. Sometimes the disagreement reveals a stakeholder who is misaligned with the rest.

**Specifying the future.** The room rewrites the future-state as a single document — a one-page narrative of the future date. It is written in the room, on a flipchart, with the participants contributing line by line. The result is the team's shared picture of where the work is going.

**Output artifact.** A one-page future-state narrative, dated. A list of consensus elements. A list of divergences and the question each one raises.

**Pitfalls.** The pitfall is participants writing what they hope rather than what they believe will be true. The facilitator asks: "If we ship the work we are planning, on the timeline we are planning, with the team and resources we have, what will actually be true on this date?" That question shifts the writing from aspiration to projection, which is what the phase needs.

A second pitfall is participants writing about features ("by this date we will have shipped feature X"). The facilitator redirects: "What will users be doing? What will the business be experiencing? Features are means; describe the ends." The future-state is a description of outcomes, not outputs.

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## Phase 5 — Game Plan

Duration: 60 to 90 minutes.

Purpose: convert the day's findings into a concrete action plan. Specific work, owners, dates, and the first MVP.

This phase is where the workshop becomes operational. The first four phases produced shared understanding; this phase produces commitments.

**Setup.** A template with five columns: "Action" (the specific thing to do), "Owner" (the named person responsible), "Outcome" (what counts as done), "Date" (when it will be done by), and "Dependencies" (what must happen first).

**Identifying actions.** From the focal opportunities (Phase 2), the stakeholder map (Phase 3), and the future-state (Phase 4), the room generates a list of concrete actions that move toward the future state.

Each action is specific. "Explore the onboarding flow" is not specific. "Run five user interviews with new partners in their first 14 days to understand where they get stuck in the loyalty rules setup" is specific.

**MVP definition.** The room defines a first MVP — the smallest concrete artifact that will validate one of the workshop's central hypotheses. The MVP has a definition that the room agrees on. The definition is not a feature spec; it is a description of what the MVP will produce in terms of learning.

A good MVP definition has three parts. The hypothesis it tests ("we believe new partners struggle most at the rules-setup step"). The build ("a redesigned rules-setup flow shown to five users via clickable prototype"). The learning criterion ("we will know we are right if at least three of five users complete the setup without help; we will know we are wrong if zero or one complete it").

**Owners.** Every action has a single named owner. The owner is the person responsible for the action happening, not the person who does all the work. They can recruit help; they own the outcome.

Anonymous ownership ("the design team will do this") produces no accountability. Single-person ownership ("Sara will do this by the 15th") produces movement. If no one in the room is willing to own an action, the action is not really agreed on, and the room should reconsider whether it makes the cut.

**Dates.** Every action has a date. Real dates, not "soon" or "next quarter." The dates are the team's commitments; they will be referenced in the follow-up.

The room is realistic about dates. The facilitator probes: "What else is on your plate? What is realistic given that? When can you actually have this done?" A date that everyone knows is impossible is worse than a longer date that everyone can keep.

**Dependencies.** Some actions cannot start until other actions complete. The room maps the dependencies. The first MVP usually has dependencies — a stakeholder approval, a recruitment line, a budget release. Those dependencies become their own actions, with their own owners and dates.

**Output artifact.** The populated game plan template. The MVP definition. A schedule that links the dates and dependencies into a sequence.

The game plan is the single most important workshop output. It is what makes the difference between a workshop that produced understanding (which evaporates) and a workshop that produced action (which compounds).

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## After the workshop

The workshop ends; the work begins. A few practices that make the day's output durable.

**Same-day photographs.** Every wall is photographed at the end of every phase. The photographs are filed somewhere accessible to the team. They are the record.

**24-hour summary.** Within 24 hours, the facilitator sends a written summary. Not a long deck. A one-page recap: the opportunities chosen, the future-state, the stakeholder engagement plan, the game plan. The team confirms the summary captures the room's intent.

**Owner kickoffs.** Within a week, each action owner has had a kickoff conversation with whatever team or resource they need. The action is on its way. The owner is not waiting for permission; they have it.

**Two-week checkpoint.** Two weeks after the workshop, the facilitator runs a 30-minute checkpoint. Each owner reports. Actions that have advanced are celebrated. Actions that have not advanced are diagnosed — was the date wrong, was the owner wrong, was the action itself wrong? The checkpoint is short and focused on motion, not on debate.

**Six-week review.** At the six-week mark, the team revisits the workshop output. What has the MVP learned? Was the future-state correct? Have new opportunities emerged that should reshape the priorities? If the workshop was correct, the team is now actively moving toward the future-state and has the data to recalibrate. If the workshop was wrong, the six-week review surfaces that, and a fresh round of discovery is needed.

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## Common pitfalls

The workshop fails in a few recognizable ways. Watch for them.

**Blending phases.** The room is doing exploration but already debating which opportunity is best. The room is on the heat map but generating new opportunities. The phases blur and each one is shallow. The facilitator's job is to hold the boundaries — when a participant is doing the wrong phase, the contribution is captured and parked, and the room returns to the current phase.

**Talking instead of writing.** The room debates verbally for an hour and produces no artifact. The discussion was lively but nothing concrete came out. The facilitator's job is to insist on the writing — sticky notes, votes, marked-up templates. Talk feeds the artifact; the artifact is the output.

**No decision at the end.** The workshop produces a lot of understanding but no commitments. The team leaves with notes but not actions. This is a workshop that failed. The Phase 5 game plan exists specifically to prevent this; if the room cannot produce a game plan, the room should not adjourn until it does.

**"Interesting" without "actionable."** Insights that are fascinating but not connected to any decision. The room celebrates the insight and moves on. The facilitator probes: "What does this insight mean for what we will do?" If there is no answer, the insight goes on a parking lot for future exploration, not into the game plan.

**Missing the user.** The room is full of stakeholders but light on actual end users. The opportunities, the future-state, the game plan all reflect the stakeholders' theories about the user. The defense is to include real users in the room. When that is impossible, the room is honest about the limitation, and the first action on the game plan is "talk to users" before any feature work.

**The taste-keeper absent.** The workshop produces a plan that nobody with real decision authority has signed off on. The team leaves believing they have alignment; the next week, a senior leader looks at the output and rejects half of it. The facilitator's job is to ensure the right authority is in the room, or that the output is reviewed with that authority before the team begins acting on it.

**Treating the workshop as the work.** The workshop is a day. The work is months. The workshop produces a starting point, not an endpoint. Teams that treat the workshop output as definitive get rigid; the workshop output is the team's best understanding as of that day, and it updates as the work progresses.

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## Invoking this protocol with an assistant

The workshop can be run as a sequenced conversation with an AI assistant when the team cannot gather in person, or when a single product manager or founder wants to apply the protocol to a problem they are working on alone.

The assistant walks the user through the five phases in sequence, asking the right questions per phase, producing the artifacts at the end.

**Phase 1 with an assistant.** The assistant asks open-ended exploration questions: "Tell me about the users affected by this problem. What do they do today? Where does it hurt? What are the consequences when things go wrong?" The user dictates or types responses; the assistant captures and organizes them. The assistant proposes a clustering into opportunities at the end.

**Phase 2 with an assistant.** The assistant takes the opportunity list and asks the user, for each one, to estimate impact and feasibility. The assistant flags inconsistencies — "you marked opportunity A as low-impact but described severe pain; is that right?" The result is a heat map written as a structured table with the user's prioritization.

**Phase 3 with an assistant.** The assistant prompts the user to enumerate stakeholders. It probes for missing stakeholders ("you mentioned business and engineering; what about compliance, support, partners?"). It produces the influence-interest map and a recommended engagement plan.

**Phase 4 with an assistant.** The assistant asks the user to write the future-state. It pushes for specificity — "you said the business will be doing well; what does 'well' mean in numbers? What user behaviors does it correspond to?" It returns a tightened one-page narrative the user can hold up to stakeholders.

**Phase 5 with an assistant.** The assistant converts the day's outputs into a game plan template. It probes for unrealistic dates, for missing owners, for actions without clear outcomes. It defines the first MVP with the user, including the hypothesis-build-learning-criterion structure.

When run with an assistant, the protocol takes one to three hours rather than a full day, because there is no group dynamic to manage. It produces less of the alignment side effect that a group workshop produces — the user comes out with a plan, not with stakeholder buy-in — so a follow-up step is needed: the user shares the artifacts with stakeholders and runs the alignment conversation separately.

The assistant's job is to enforce the protocol. Not to bias the answer. Not to skip a phase because the user is tired of phase three. Not to combine two phases because the user wants to move faster. The discipline of the protocol is what produces the quality of the output; an assistant that lets the user shortcut the protocol is delivering a worse outcome than an assistant that holds the line.

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## Variations and adaptations

The five-phase protocol is the default. Some situations need a modified version. A few common adaptations.

**Compressed workshop, half day.** When the team cannot give a full day, the protocol can be compressed by tightening each phase. Exploration shrinks to 45 minutes with more advance prep. Heat map and stakeholder map run in parallel in 60 minutes. Future-state shrinks to a 30-minute structured exercise. Game plan stays full length, because the game plan is the operational output and shrinking it produces vague commitments. The compressed version loses depth but preserves structure; use it when the alternative is no workshop at all.

**Two-day deep dive.** When the problem is complex and the room can give two days, the additional time goes into deeper exploration and a longer game plan. Day one: phases 1 through 3. Day two: phases 4 and 5, plus a hands-on prototyping session where the team makes a rough first artifact based on the future-state. The two-day version produces stronger alignment because the day-two work makes the abstract concrete.

**Recurring quarterly workshop.** Some teams adopt this protocol as a quarterly ritual. Each quarter, the team re-runs the workshop with updated information. The first quarter's output becomes the input to the second quarter's exploration. Over a year, the team accumulates a body of evidence and a calibrated picture of the problem space.

**Customer-only workshop.** A variant where the participants are entirely customers, with the internal team facilitating. The team learns directly from the users running the protocol on themselves. This is harder to facilitate — internal participants are easier to wrangle — but the learning is denser. Use it for early discovery in a market the internal team does not yet understand.

**Stakeholder-only workshop.** A variant where the participants are entirely internal stakeholders, with no end users. Used when the goal is to align internal disagreements before engaging users. The risk is producing alignment on the wrong question; pair this with a later workshop or sequence of interviews that includes end users.

**Remote workshop.** When the room cannot gather, the protocol moves into collaborative whiteboard tools. The phases stay the same; the materials become digital. Breaks must be more frequent — remote attention fatigues faster than in-person. Time-boxes must be tighter — remote discussions sprawl. A second facilitator helps; one person drives the conversation, the other captures and manages the board. Expect a remote workshop to take 20 to 30 percent longer than the in-person equivalent, with somewhat less depth in the late phases.

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## The artifacts in detail

The protocol produces five primary artifacts, plus a sixth document that ties them together. Each artifact has a specific shape and a specific use after the workshop.

**The opportunity inventory.** A list, not a paragraph. Each opportunity is one to two sentences naming the user, the situation, and the gap. Example: "New partners in their first 14 days who try to configure loyalty rules without help and abandon the setup." The inventory has 8 to 20 items at the end of Phase 1.

**The heat map.** A visual two-by-two with opportunities placed by impact and feasibility. The placement is a structured judgment, not measured data. The heat map is preserved as a photograph and as a digital recreation; the digital version can be updated as new information arrives. Stakeholders who weren't in the room can review the heat map and react to it.

**The stakeholder map.** A two-by-two with stakeholders placed by influence and interest. Each stakeholder has an engagement decision attached — key player, kept satisfied, kept informed, monitored. The map drives a follow-up communication plan that the team executes in the days after the workshop.

**The future-state narrative.** A one-page story written in present tense at a specific future date. It describes the user experience, the business outcome, and the team capability at that date. The narrative is the team's shared picture of success; it is referenced in subsequent decisions to test whether the work is on track.

**The game plan.** A table of actions, with owner, outcome, date, and dependencies for each. Plus the MVP definition. The game plan is the operational output of the workshop; everything else informs it, and it is what gets executed in the weeks after.

**The summary document.** A one-page recap sent within 24 hours of the workshop. It includes the focal opportunities, the future-state, the stakeholder engagement plan, and the game plan. It is sent to all participants and to absent stakeholders who needed to be informed. Length: one page. Anyone reading more than a one-page summary will not retain the content; one page is what fits in working memory.

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## Roles in the room

The roles in a workshop are not the same as the roles in the day-to-day work. The workshop is a specific event with specific role needs.

**The facilitator.** Already covered. Owns the protocol.

**The decision-maker.** The person who, when the room is stuck, makes the call. Usually the senior product or business voice. Not the same as the facilitator. The decision-maker participates in the substantive conversation but is asked to make calls when consensus does not emerge naturally.

**The user voices.** End users in the room. They speak from their own experience. They are not asked to design solutions; they are asked to describe their situation. The facilitator protects their time and ensures their voice is heard above the internal voices that will dominate if unmanaged.

**The expert voices.** Internal team members with deep knowledge of the user, the technology, the business, or the constraints. They contribute throughout, with the facilitator ensuring no single expert monopolizes the conversation.

**The note-taker.** When the workshop is high-stakes and the artifacts must be captured cleanly, a dedicated note-taker handles the digital capture as the workshop progresses. The note-taker does not facilitate or contribute; they are the recording function. On smaller workshops, the facilitator can also take notes, but quality suffers.

**The skeptic.** A participant — sometimes the facilitator nominates them, sometimes they self-select — whose role is to challenge weak reasoning. "How do we know that? What is the evidence for that claim?" A workshop without a skeptic produces consensus that is broader than the evidence supports. The skeptic keeps the room honest.

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## Energy management

A day-long workshop is exhausting for participants. Energy management is part of the facilitator's job; without attention to it, the late phases produce poor output because the room is tired.

**Breaks every 90 minutes.** A 15-minute break between phases. Real breaks — participants stand up, leave the room, drink water, check messages. A break that is "five more minutes" is not a break.

**Light food matters.** Heavy lunch leads to afternoon collapse. Light, frequent snacks throughout the day beats one big meal in the middle. Water is constantly available.

**Vary the modality.** Long stretches of group discussion fatigue the introverts in the room. Mix individual writing, paired conversation, group discussion, and physical movement (walking to the wall, placing sticky notes). The variation refreshes the room.

**Move the room.** Standing exercises after lunch. Re-arranging the seating between phases. Walking to a different part of the room for a different phase. Physical movement helps cognitive movement.

**Sense and adjust.** The facilitator reads the room. If energy is dropping, take a longer break, switch modalities, end the day if needed. A workshop that produces strong outputs through phases 1 to 3 and tired outputs through phases 4 and 5 has produced less value than one that goes deeper on 1 to 3 and continues phases 4 and 5 the next morning.

**End on time.** The energy at hour 9 is not the energy at hour 4. A workshop that runs over schedule almost always loses quality in the overtime. End on time; if work remains, schedule a follow-up. The overrun makes the overrun feel productive in the moment, and the artifacts produced during the overrun are usually weak.

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## Following up

The workshop produces a starting point. The follow-up produces results. Specific practices for the weeks after.

**Action owner accountability.** Each game plan action has a single owner. The owner is followed up with at the agreed checkpoints — two weeks, six weeks. The follow-ups are short and focused on motion: what have you done, what is blocking you, what do you need.

**Artifact maintenance.** The opportunity inventory, the heat map, the stakeholder map, the future-state, and the game plan are not static. They are updated as the team learns. The opportunity inventory grows as new opportunities surface. The heat map shifts as feasibility estimates are revised by what the team actually attempts. The stakeholder map updates as new stakeholders emerge or as engagement decisions are revised. The future-state may be revised — usually toward more specificity — as the work proceeds. The game plan is replanned as actions complete and new actions become priorities.

**Sharing with absent stakeholders.** The day-one summary goes to absent stakeholders. The team then plans a small set of one-on-one conversations with the stakeholders who most need to be brought along. The conversations use the workshop artifacts as the discussion content; the artifacts ground the conversation in shared evidence rather than competing opinions.

**Linking to the build.** Once the work transitions into actual product development, the workshop artifacts continue to inform the team. The future-state is referenced in roadmap discussions. The opportunity inventory is referenced when prioritization debates arise. The stakeholder map is referenced when planning communications. The artifacts are alive in the work, not archived after the day.

**Refreshing the workshop.** The team may run the workshop again in three to six months. The refresh updates the artifacts with what has been learned. Sometimes the refresh produces minor updates; sometimes it surfaces major shifts that require replanning. Either way, the discipline of returning to the protocol keeps the team's strategic picture current.

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## Common pitfalls — continued

In addition to the pitfalls already named, a few more that experienced facilitators watch for.

**The "everything is high impact" trap.** When the room is too charitable in Phase 2, every opportunity ends up in the top-right quadrant. The heat map loses its discriminating power. The facilitator forces the room to make hard calls: "If we could only do three of these, which three?" The relative ranking is more important than the absolute placement.

**The "stakeholder list is too long" trap.** Phase 3 can produce a stakeholder list of 50 names if the room is too inclusive. A 50-stakeholder map is unmanageable. The facilitator pushes for consolidation — group stakeholders into categories (regulatory, financial, operational, etc.) and engage at the category level when possible.

**The "future-state is a feature list" trap.** Phase 4 produces a narrative; sometimes the narrative degenerates into a list of features. "By date X, we will have shipped features Y." The facilitator redirects: features are means; describe the ends. "By date X, partners will be configuring loyalty programs in 10 minutes instead of 2 hours" is the right altitude.

**The "game plan has no first move" trap.** Phase 5 sometimes produces a plan that starts with "do more research." More research is sometimes correct, but if every action is research, the workshop has not produced a commitment to act. Push for at least one action that is build-oriented or stakeholder-engagement-oriented, not just research.

**The "everyone is committed but nothing happens" trap.** The room signs up to actions, but the actions never get executed. The team's daily reality reasserts itself; the workshop output evaporates. The cure is the two-week checkpoint — making the actions visible early in the follow-up reduces the rate of silent abandonment.

**The "running the workshop instead of the work" trap.** Some organizations get attached to the workshop as the activity, and run it on every problem regardless of whether it is the right tool. The workshop is appropriate when discovery is needed and stakeholders are misaligned; it is overkill when the team already knows what to do. Use it where it fits; don't make it ceremonial.

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## The shortlist

If you remember nothing else from this file, remember these.

- Run this when the user is unfamiliar, stakeholders are misaligned, or discovery is needed before design.
- Five phases in order: explore, heat map, stakeholders, future-state, game plan.
- Prepare: people, place, materials, templates, pre-reads, time. The day runs on what you prepared.
- One facilitator. Not a participant. Holds the time-box, surfaces silent voices, forces decisions.
- End-user voices in the room. The workshop without users designs for absent people.
- Phase 1: structured dump and clustering produces an opportunity inventory.
- Phase 2: heat map prioritizes opportunities by impact, feasibility, and strategic fit.
- Phase 3: stakeholder map identifies who must be in, who must be consulted, who must be informed.
- Phase 4: future-state narrative, written in present tense at a specific date, surfaces alignment and disagreement.
- Phase 5: game plan with actions, owners, dates, dependencies, and a first MVP with hypothesis-build-learning structure.
- After the workshop: same-day photographs, 24-hour summary, owner kickoffs, two-week checkpoint, six-week review.
- The protocol can be run with an assistant in one to three hours, with a follow-up step for stakeholder alignment.
- The artifacts are alive after the workshop — they update as the team learns and stay referenced in subsequent decisions.
- Recognize when not to use the protocol. Force-fitting it to a known problem wastes a day.
