A workshop is not a long meeting. It is an intensive, facilitated session where a cross-functional group comes together to solve a specific problem, develop a plan, or create something new. While meetings are for sharing information, workshops are for making progress. They are the engines of a customer-centric organization, and knowing which type of workshop to use—and when—is a critical skill for any CX leader.
Every successful CX initiative begins with a shared understanding of the landscape. The Discovery Workshop is designed to achieve this alignment at the outset of a project. Its purpose is to gather existing knowledge, understand business requirements, and create consensus on the project’s goals and priorities. This is where you bring together key stakeholders to ensure everyone is starting from the same place and heading in the same direction.
A well-structured stakeholder engagement plan is crucial for the success of these workshops. Research shows that a systematic approach to identifying and involving stakeholders from the beginning leads to more successful outcomes (1). In a Discovery Workshop, you might use activities like stakeholder mapping, assumption surfacing, and reviewing existing customer data to build a collective picture of the current state. The goal is to leave the workshop with a clear problem statement and a high-level plan that everyone has agreed upon.
It is impossible to design a great customer experience without a deep understanding of the customer. The Empathy Workshop is designed to build this understanding across the organization. It is a session focused on helping a broad team—from engineers to marketers to executives—connect with customer needs, motivations, and pain points on an emotional level.
This is where tools like customer personas and journey maps come to life. However, the effectiveness of a customer journey map depends on its realism and the collaborative process used to create it (2). An Empathy Workshop is the ideal setting to collaboratively build or review a journey map, using real customer quotes, video clips, and data to ground the exercise in reality. Activities might include creating empathy maps for key customer segments or collaboratively mapping a current-state customer journey. The goal is to shift the organization's perspective from an inside-out, feature-focused view to an outside-in, customer-focused one.
Once the team is aligned on the problem and has built empathy for the customer, it’s time to explore solutions. The Design Workshop, often called a design studio, is a high-energy, creative session focused on rapidly generating a wide range of ideas. The power of this workshop comes from bringing together a diverse group of participants from different disciplines to sketch, brainstorm, and build on each other's ideas.
The key to a successful Design Workshop is to create a psychologically safe environment where all ideas are welcome, regardless of how wild they may seem. The focus is on quantity over quality in the initial stages, with the goal of exploring the full spectrum of possibilities before converging on the most promising concepts. This collaborative ideation process not only leads to more innovative solutions but also creates a sense of shared ownership over the final design direction.
No organization has unlimited resources. Once you have a wealth of good ideas, you need a structured way to decide which ones to pursue. The Prioritization Workshop is designed to build consensus on which features or initiatives will deliver the most value to both the customer and the business.
There are many prioritization frameworks you can use, from simple dot-voting to more complex models like value vs. effort matrices. The specific framework is less important than the process itself. A well-facilitated Prioritization Workshop ensures that decisions are made based on clear criteria and data, rather than on the opinion of the most senior person in the room. This process of collaborative decision-making is essential for ensuring that the team is aligned and committed to the chosen path forward (3).
Before investing significant resources in building a new solution, it’s essential to ensure that it truly meets the needs of your customers. The Retrospective Workshop (or “Retro”) is a structured feedback session where designers present their work-in-progress to a cross-functional team to gather feedback and identify areas for improvement.
Unlike a typical design review, a Retrospective Workshop is not about getting approval. It is a collaborative problem-solving session focused on making the design better. The facilitator plays a crucial role in ensuring that feedback is constructive, specific, and focused on the user’s goals. By creating a culture of open and honest critique, you can significantly improve the quality of your solutions before they ever reach the customer.
These five workshop formats are not rigid templates; they are flexible frameworks that can be adapted and combined to meet the specific needs of your organization. The common thread that runs through all of them is the power of structured collaboration. Research on team effectiveness has shown that real-time facilitation and structured collaboration significantly improve learning and performance
(4).
By moving away from passive meetings and embracing active, goal-oriented workshops, CX leaders can accelerate decision-making, build cross-functional alignment, and create a culture of shared ownership for the customer experience.
It’s time to stop meeting and start workshopping.
(1) Hollmann, S., Riedel, N., Brase, J., Fuchs, A., Herwig, A., Baum, M., ... & Strech, D. (2022). Ten simple rules on how to develop a stakeholder engagement plan. PLoS computational biology, 18(10), e1010520.
(2) Rosenbaum, M. S., Otalora, M. L., & Ramírez, G. C. (2017). How to create a realistic customer journey map. Business horizons, 60(1), 143-150.
(3) Xiang, Y., Vélez, N., & Gershman, S. J. (2023). Collaborative decision making is grounded in representations of other people's competence and effort. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152(6), 1565-1579.
(4) Sjølie, E., Strømme, T. A., & Løhre, A. (2021). Team-skills training and real-time facilitation as a means to improve student learning of collaboration. Teaching and Teacher Education, 103, 103348.
