Product Strategy Workshop & Toolkit

User-centred design and Design Thinking: hard to explain, easy to experience

I can explain at length what user-centred design does for you, but it only really convinces once you experience its benefits. If you’ve never worked in a user-centred way, ‘design thinking’ and user-centred design can sound rather abstract. You may have heard the term. You may even have heard from others how these sessions tend to go, and that LEGO is occasionally involved. But the real value doesn’t show up in an explanation. It shows up in the doing – in the moment a team realises for the first time how much decisions and products change once it consistently thinks from the perspective of the people it designs for.

That’s exactly where the Product Strategy Workshop comes in. In one compact day, it makes user-centred design tangible – easy to get into, no prior knowledge required, working directly on your own product. Not a dry theory session, but a format that shows its value quickly and, ideally, leaves you wanting more.

What is the Product Strategy Workshop?

The Product Strategy Workshop is a facilitated one-day workshop and a deliberately easy way into user-centred thinking and design. We work with tried-and-tested design thinking methods and – because there’s usually no research data at this stage – deliberately with input and assumptions from your team.

At its heart are three simple questions that we answer together:

• WHY: What purpose and which values does the product or service serve?
• FOR WHOM: Who are we actually designing this product or service for, and what are their pain points and needs?
• WHAT: What are good solutions for these people? What helps them most? What might already exist?

These three questions are the core of our guiding principle, ‘Principles before Pixels’: first clarify why and for whom we’re designing, before we tackle the what. We work directly on the product with your team’s input – concepting, designing, getting hands-on. That way you can feel how this way of working changes the outcome for the better, even without solid evidence such as research data.

Who is the workshop for?

The workshop is for any organisation, company or team with little or no experience of user-centred thinking and design. Even if there’s no research data yet, your team gets to know the methods in a single day, experiences what working in a user-centred design process feels like and sees first-hand how this approach shapes the outcome.

Once learnt, these methods can be used by your team again and again – for instance when new requirements come up or when real research data becomes available. So the workshop isn’t just an introduction; it’s a working tool that takes your UX maturity a first, concrete step further.

What you get: answers to three questions and methods your team can use again and again

Your team leaves the workshop with two things:

• Answers to three questions (why, for whom and what) about your product: even if they’re based on assumptions, they’re a solid starting point you can build on.
• Hands-on training in user-centred thinking and design – and with it, first-hand experience of the benefits, so you can decide whether this way of working is right for your team.

The workshop results can feed straight into your current product design and make the value of a user-centred design process visible in practice right away. But these first results are only the beginning, and their impact reaches beyond the workshop and the design itself: the methods you’ve learnt can be applied again and again – with real data, too – and become valuable input for your team’s or organisation’s knowledge and research base. That, in turn, provides useful context for generative AI, for instance in the form of skills and context documents.

Scope and Investment

Product Strategy Workshop & Toolkit

Duration: one full-day workshop or two half-day workshops

Investment: €2,430 excl.VAT (remote, or in the Rhine-Neckar region with no additional travel costs)

Participants from different disciplines (e.g. design, board or management, product ownership, development) work as an interdisciplinary team towards a result that can be taken straight into the next stage of the product design process. Along the way, they experience and learn three common, reusable methods – a first, concrete step towards greater UX maturity.

What's included

• Facilitated workshop using 3 design thinking methods for up to 6 participants
• Workshop documentation: as a digital whiteboard for remote workshops, as photos for on-site workshops
• Methods toolkit: the 3 design thinking methods you learnt in the workshop, as a guide with tips – so you can use them again without me. Because the workshop is only the beginning.

Why the Product Strategy Workshop from Truly XD?

Truly XD is a Maturity-Minded Experience Design studio for value-driven organisations. Our workshop makes user-centred thinking and design processes tangible: on your own product, with your own team, with a result you can take away. We start where your team is today, not with an idealised version of it: matched to your maturity, without assuming prior knowledge. An ideal starting point if you've set out to raise your UX maturity. User-centred, responsible and accessible product design is the stance we work from, right from the start.

The Product Strategy Workshop is part of Truly XD’s UX capability-building series. Every offer in this series is designed to introduce user-centred design processes to organisations and teams — for the first time, where needed — and to embed them for the long term. They're deliberately compact, easy to access and closely aligned with one another, all to build UX capability. You'll find all the other offers in this series here.