Design Thinking Workshop
YEAR: 2019
COMPANY: VELUX A/S
One day workshop to uncover and address users needs in a creative and collaborative way
My role
I worked together with a Product Manager to scope out the challenge, set the workshop´s objective, plan the agenda and gather the materials.
I then facilitated the workshop.
Opportunity
As part of our collaboration with Sales companies in VELUX, we wanted to explore deeply users needs in order to work towards solutions that would address those specific needs.
We decided to use the Design Thinking methodology to achieve that. This was the first Design Thinking Workshop organized in VELUX.
Process
The workshop included 10 participants with different professional backgrounds: Project Managers, Content Managers, UX Designer, Sales Managers, and CRO Specialist. Most of the participants were people working at VELUX, at the headquarter and in three different sales companies (England, Germany, Denmark). We wanted to get different perspectives around the table.
The participants were grouped in 3 teams and together they went through the Understand and Explore stages. The participants started by empathizing with real users (one for each team), then defined the challenge to address, and generate ideas to solve the problem. Finally, they sketched the best ideas and quickly tested them with the participants from the other teams.
Workshop day
The first part of the workshop was dedicated to warm-up exercises, such as 30 circles, to put all the participants in an open, creative and collaborative state of mind.
Then I introduced Design Thinking methodology and how impactful it can be when applied to a specific challenge.
Specific activities were planned to help the participants moving throughout the process from an initial broad challenge to a well- defined concept aimed to address the specific needs identified.
At the end of the workshop, participants wrote a letter to their future selves, where they set some goals to reach. The letter was sent them 30 days after, so they could reflect on whether they reached what they had set their mind up to.
Photo by Anton
Current situation
Some of the participants went back to their departments and continued actively to work on the concepts generated during the workshop. Moreover, they embraced the methodology and started to apply some of the activities within their teams, on a daily basis.
We are continuously exploring new possibilities to bring this methodology in various departments and teams across the organization, as a different way to approach new challenges and projects.
Currently, I am facilitating several ideation sessions where I try to bring design thinking and lateral thinking approaches to the table to encourage the creation of innovative and out-of-the-box solutions.