I built this when our team and company were scaling quickly, and a lot was changing. I was taking the lead for our growth design team, we had just hired a new designer, and we had more pods and more projects than ever. While everyone was super talented, not every designer had the same level of competency, practice, and confidence to run an effective workshop. Running workshops is hard! I’ve been running various design workshops for over a decade, so I built this as a way to scale some of my expertise, while also creating space for a living, growing document that the whole design team could keep developing together.

As a designer, sharing work that’s unfinished or still evolving is a superpower for so many reasons. But doing that can be hard too! I’ve built callouses for this over the years, so as often as possible, I try to model that behavior and show rough drafts or other very WIP work. 

I also knew much of the other information in this doc could help my team immediately, so I didn’t want to create unnecessary blockers for getting this rolling. It was meant to be something my team would co-create, so this placeholder was a clear opportunity to get input on the next version.

After writing this out, I was able to have better conversations with my designers around what they were trying to achieve with their workshops because we had some common language for the first time. 

Sometimes I’d see workshops that seemed like they were just for alignment, but the designers had some fundamental questions and were kind of asking for feedback - ultimately achieving none of the desired outcomes. 

Other times, we’d run brainstorming workshops but then learn that the designer didn’t actually need people to be generative; they needed targeted feedback and to make some decisions. 

Once we were able to talk specifically about the workshops' outcomes, designers could think more critically about the format and run more effective workshops (and get the results they wanted!)

These 6 workshop types come from a mashup of 3 design philosophies and some conversations with our Head of Design, Erin Mongan. The Nielsen Norman Group is considered the preeminent UX think tank, so I borrowed a lot from there. A lot comes from my time at the Exploratorium, where I led community design workshops that had to be really inclusive and experiential. And then there’s a little bit from a group called the Design Department, which has a really specific philosophy around the concept of critique. I mashed those three things up to create workshop types that I was hoping would be mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive.

I tried to make this one more broadly applicable for alignment or decision-making with any stakeholder. A lot of times, designers want to present their work in order to inform others, not necessarily get generative feedback. Sometimes they need to review the work specifically to get a decision. Examples would be all-hands meetings on one end or presentations to exec/leadership on the other. 

The risk here is not setting the right context up front, then the designer will end up getting a ton of feedback they didn’t want or need, or they won’t get to the decision point clearly. 

This was also a reaction to our business unit lead, Fareed Mosavat, introducing something he called a Product Workshop (that he brought from Slack). Helping designers understand the differences between the types of outcomes a review might have was key to this format.

I never got to the part of fleshing out the individual format tips and resources. The org restructured and priorities changed, so I hope to come back to this someday! 

In an ideal world, this would be an exercise we would co-create as a design team to really align on the purpose of the different formats and lock in some of our shared language.

There’s a lot of repetitive, tedious work that goes into setting up a workshop. You have to set up the space, figure out who to invite, send out messages, coordinate schedules…it’s just a lot of admin work. I wanted to create some shortcuts to make this part of the process easier for our team.

This is an understatement. There’s an art to running a critique, setting the right context, diplomatically nudging people back on topic, knowing when to parking lot things. This is probably the juiciest section of the playbook, and one that I planned to spend the most time with my designers talking through, co-developing, and practicing.

For both a product org and a company at large, if you follow up a design workshop and summarize what you took away, it does two really powerful things. First, it makes people feel heard. They understand that there's been action and closes a communication loop. Second, it opens up the opportunity for additional clarification/input if I got something wrong. So it's just as much for design’s benefit as it is for the organization's benefit to create general constant alignment. 

Sometimes the biggest blocker to sending out a follow-up was not knowing how to write the message. So this section ended up being one of the most helpful things. Designers ended up copying and pasting these, which freed up their brain space to work on actual synthesis.

This is the area I really want to spend time fleshing out in the v2 of this playbook. Best practices are great, but there are so many different types of workshops you can run, the best way to illustrate them is to show examples and templates. Unfortunately, this is also the area that would be the most time and labor-intensive to build out, so I just haven’t had time yet.

When I socialized this to the other designers, the ask was, “Hey, if you've run a really successful workshop and you left that workshop, and were like, damn, we did it, take a moment to just share a link to that Figma or Figjam.” That's where we would start to evolve this playbook together, and start to build more templates and more best practices.

Adam Green

I built this playbook to scale my design team's impact—as well as my own expertise—in the midst of hypergrowth and rapid change.

This playbook is designed to be a living resource for our team to use workshops to inform and drive our decisions effectively.

Workshops are meant to unblock, inform and inspire our team 

to make the best design decisions possible.

thoughtful and objective when making decisions

Workshops are not just opportunities to get feedback on designs. They’re opportunities to utilize stakeholders to make better decisions.

🤔 The Big Why: Why Should I Run a Workshop?

we should be able to confidently speak to any of our design decisions 

throughout any phase of work. To be able to do this, we must properly interrogate and build objective confidence in those decisions at all stages of our design process.

Workshops are a key way we produce the evidence and artifacts for us to base our decisions.

We don’t have to be right! We just have to know why we made the decision (if only to be proven wrong later).

If we can’t confidently speak to an objective reason behind the decision, it likely indicates that we need further information.

🔮 Before Your Workshop: Planning and Prepping

💡 Different stages of our process require different feedback.

At any given milestone, we should be able to confidently and objectively speak to our rationale behind the various design decisions. To do this, we should be constantly asking ourselves:

What feedback would I need in order to confidently move forward with my work?

Start with the goal: Articulate your desired outcome/result of the workshop. (Examples below)

Choose your workshop: What type of workshop or exercise will achieve your desired outcome?

Plan your workshop (this can change depending on your workshop type! For help on how to plan specific workshops - check out the 

Pick your participants: Who can help inform or answer those questions?

Create your workspace: Use a template or start from scratch in your desired format

Write your agenda: What’s the rough format you’d like to follow? (Examples below)

Schedule the workshop: Create or modify an invite to get folks ready

Announce details to participants (Examples below)

The key first step for our workshop process is clarifying the outcome desired. This is the goal that will help shape the appropriate format and participants.

Ask yourself - at the end of the workshop, 

Depending on where you are in your design process, you are likely grappling with some decisions or big questions. Lean on those to identify what you would need to move forward. These will in turn help inform the type of workshop and participants.

Picking the right participants is a key aspect of running a successful workshop. Most of your workshops will likely lean on your immediate project partners. Depending on the workshop outcome, however, you may find yourself needing to pull in other stakeholders.

A good rule of thumb is to consider who is impacted by the decisions you’re evaluating or developing (often identified in the PRD or 1-pager) to help narrow the potential list of participants for your workshop.

Remember to include stakeholders early in your design process to help them raise potential issues or opportunities!

A helpful reference for understanding people that may be useful is the Gusto Org Chart. If you’re still not sure, it can be helpful to connect with a Functional Lead of the group to have them weigh in on who to include.

 participants possible to achieve your outcome. Larger workshops can become challenging to facilitate.

Understand business requirements at the beginning of an initiative

Gather existing knowledge from client or stakeholder teams

Gather existing knowledge in order to determine additional research plans over the course of the project

Clarify and document stakeholder expectations

Document broader context or constraints that may affect the project (stakeholders, business constraints)

Generating alternative solutions from diverse perspectives

Create shared ownership of product solutions

Ideate off of current existing product functionality

Evaluate designs of competing products or other experiences to document possible solutions

Gaining clarity on user needs or motivations.

Understand who the relevant customers or users are

Gain clarity and consensus on user pains, needs, motivations, and behaviors

Clarify the jobs to be done for your users

Documenting trade-offs and scope modifications

Prioritizing features for roadmap adjustments

Make a decision on a key aspect of a project

Document or rank the value of project features

Build consensus on which goals, ideas, or user groups to prioritize

Understanding how well design is achieving its goal

Evaluating design decisions and challenge assumptions

Aligning team to the rationale of proposed solutions.

Highlight usability issues using design heuristics or project principles established by the team

Evaluate user flows through the lens of a specific user group or persona

Document issues with proposed solutions or directions from cross-functional project stakeholders

Design Workshop Playbook at Reforge

Design Workshop Playbook

👋 Start Here!

🤔 The Big Why: Why Should I Run a Workshop?

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