Once you agree the idea is viable, there are multiple questions you need to find the answers to, and, once again, there are desired answers to these questions. Getting such answers would mean we’re ready for the last stage – planning the product development and launch.

• What would this solution look like when turned into a digital product? → We need to be able to prototype such a product rapidly and create a facade of the product that looks convincing to stakeholders.
• How appealing is such a digital product? Does it resonate with our target customers? → When interacting with the prototype, the target audience should report that the product is intuitive and that it addresses some pain points they had recently.
• What are operational and tech limitations we need to take into account? → We need to be able to identify limitations and have a clear plan of overcoming or mitigating them. Otherwise, the product isn’t feasible.

Ask the experts

You might cover expert insights before the workshop with the client. Still, there’s a huge value in letting client workshop participants ask questions to an expert in the domain and creating a joint set of insights.

The first thing is to identify experts who can provide you with insights on the client’s company and the domain. Some usual suspects:

• CEO or CPO
• Marketing managers
• Customer support managers and reps
• Sales managers and reps
• Industry thought leaders and SMEs – this is easier said than done. You can leverage your own business network, look for SMEs withing Infinum or ask your colleagues if they know someone who’s an expert in that domain

Depending on the relationship you have with that expert, you might need to give them the incentive to join the call. These can be small ticker items like a voucher or a small gift.

You should plan 30-45 minutes per expert in your agenda. Usually, up to four experts are okay. Anything more than that, and you’ll start hearing similar things.

There’s no one-size-fits-all for questions you should ask the expert. But there are some guidelines when you’re preparing those questions:

• Break it down into smaller sub-topics or themes: Prepare questions that address different aspects of the subject matter. May not be applicable to all clients and domains.
• Practicality vs Vision: Practical questions focus on the current challenges, best practices, and actionable insights. Visionary questions encourage experts to think ahead and explore innovative ideas and future trends related to the topic.
• Experiences and examples: Ask for specific examples or case studies from their professional experiences. This helps bring abstract concepts to life and understand how were solutions applied successfully in real-world scenarios.
• Challenge assumptions: Go for counterfactuals and ask experts to challenge their or their industry’s assumptions. You’re looking for alternative viewpoints or potential risks and drawbacks.
• Future opportunities and trends: Inquire about emerging trends, technologies, or market shifts that may impact the topic at hand. Encourage experts to share their insights on potential opportunities or disruptions in the future landscape and how they foresee the industry evolving.
• Ideation and problem-solving: Ask them to brainstorm potential solutions, share their strategies for overcoming challenges, and discuss any lessons learned from previous experiences. Ask the participants to keep their notes in the rose-thorn-bud fashion. Roses are positive things like trends that are beneficial for us; thorns are bad things such as pain points, and buds are things that could be opportunities in the future.

After each expert have a quick round of sharing insights and ask participants to stick their top 5 insights to the joint board. You want to avoid information overload, so you want them to filter out things that may not be that important.

Pre-mortem

Pre-mortem may seem like an intimidating name for an exercise but it is close to how it sounds. “Pre-” implies before and ‘mortem” means to die. A premortem assesses risks that could kill or destroy a product or idea.

It is important to gather this context from participants prior to a workshop to gauge their confidence in the product or idea, as well as to gather unforeseen information that may otherwise be concealed from you or your team such as some internal blocker, market news, or other inhibiting factors that could make the product fall of course or fail.

Two steps in creating a good pre-mortem document.

• Get workshop participants' input before the session → There’s a template Typeform survey. Duplicate it and send it to both internal and external workshop participants. Be sure to brief the manager on the client side and request that it be complete prior to the workshop. If anyone forgets or doesn’t have time (this happens quite often) provide a 10 minute time slot during the workshop to allow participants to focus and complete this survey.
• Use the session to comment on different risks and ideate potential solutions to address those risks

Our ultimate workshop template covers the goals and the flow of this workshop exercise. You should use it when preparing your agenda and workshop board (be it online or remote).

Lightning demo

Lightning demos are a great way to get the entire group to find apps and products that could be inspirations for ours. No, this doesn't mean just "copy your competitors".

Look for products from other domains that solve a similar problem for users as the app you're working on. For instance, both food delivery and fashion e-commerce apps solve a similar problem for users: find a thing that works best for them.

A lightning demo works by quickly covering the product, emphasizing the core features and functionality. It is best to start with a primary use case flow or two and walk others through it, describing each relevant feature along the way in brief detail.

Our ultimate workshop template covers the goals and the flow of this workshop exercise. → FigJam

Evil and crazy 8s

The standard Design sprint exercises aimed at ideation. Don’t skip those – you’ll end up with a more diverse pool of ideas, and participants will be more engaged.

Evil and Crazy 8s quick overview:

• Ask participants to fold an A4 paper three times, giving them 8 frames on that paper
• Tell them they’ll have 1 minute per frame to draw an idea
• It doesn’t need to be perfect, this is for their eyes only
• Evil 8: the idea should break the product, make it worse for the users // Crazy 8: the idea should solve a problem for users
• Once one minute is up, participants move on the next frame
• Each new frame can either be a completely new idea, or an expansion of a previous idea
• Once eight minutes are up, the exercise is done

Our ultimate workshop template covers the goals and the flow of this workshop exercise. → FigJam

Sketch, vote, decide

The “put your idea to the paper” part of the process. These three linked exercises will help participants turn their ideas into actual sketches and allow you to set a course for the product prototype.

When you’re committing to a direction, make sure that the Decision-maker is there and that they’re okay with that decision. When in doubt, go for a riskier direction – you want to test it out by prototyping.

Our ultimate workshop template covers the goals and the flow of these workshop exercises. → FigJam

Storyboard and prototype

Once you have the winning idea and product direction, you need to create a testing scenario. You’ll do it by creating a storyboard.

How to make a storyboard? Go back to your user journey and tag the most important touchpoints that you need to visualize to test out the idea. These steps need to create a coherent story of usage. Something relevant and real-life that the target audience would do when using your product.

Use sketches of the winning concept and add a placeholder post-it for the screen that you’re missing. Write down what the user is trying to do and what screen opens after they click on a specific part of the screen.

Once the storyboard is ready, write down the research questions you want answered on each screen. Comment on those questions with the workshop participants and define what’s the final set of questions. You’ll use those for user testing.

Prototyping is the next step. Align with the Designer on the user tasks the prototype needs to support. Go for up to four tasks to test out the concept. Make sure those tasks are relevant for real-life usage.

Concept test

Recruit five people that match your target persona. You want actionable feedback to your idea to people who are potential users. Don’t settle for stakeholder or internal feedback. This is the key moment of this stage – real users need to see and use your product so that you can validate the demand for such a product.

The user testing interviews are somewhat focused on usability (check: moderated usability testing chapter). Still, your main focus is to test the concept – i.e., does it resonate with the target users?

Your user testing session should have the following three segments:

• Warm-up and checking if they fit the target audience: Start by asking people about similar problems/situations that you’re trying to address with your product. Make sure they feel comfortable talking to you and check if they actually match your target audience. It might be that they’re not a match, or they just might be a different segment. Make sure to note all of that.
• Using the prototype: Send them the prototype and ask them to open it on a native device, be it mobile or desktop. Ensure they share their screen with you and that they think out loud as they’re solving tasks. You and other workshop participants should keep notes in a rose-thorn-bud fashion.
• Follow-up questions: get their impressions while they’re fresh. Ask them if such a product would be useful to them in the past two or three weeks. If yes, then dig deeper, and understand if that situation fits your vision of the target audience. Also, ask them to compare your product to other products and services they’re using to solve a similar problem.

After five to six interviews, you’ll clearly understand whether or not people find your product appealing. The potential decision is to persist, pivot or perish. Don’t sugarcoat it to clients, be open and honest. They don’t want to invest money in something that won’t work and bring them back profits or savings.

Tech review

Involve a solution architect or a tech lead from the get-go. It’s not just strategists or designers who should be coming up with ideas. Our tech colleagues also have a creative spark, and they produce great ideas if you follow the steps outlined above.

The additional benefit of having a tech person involved from the beginning is that they can do a tech review of the idea. They can prevent the workshop team from chasing rainbows, and if the prototype is validated by the users, they can create an outline of the tech architecture.

This document is foundational for the last stage of the innovation process – planning the solution.