Mastering User Requirements: Three Proven Workshops

I recommend only the following three workshops:

1. User Story Mapping Workshop
2. Design Sprints Workshop (5-day sprint)
3. Use Case Ideation Workshop

I've led numerous projects across multiple product teams using these workshops.

They work.

Many design/product exercises pretend to create precise user requirements, but in my experience, nothing matches the effectiveness of the three workshops I will share in this post.

User Story Mapping Workshop

This workshop format has existed since the late 1990s and is the gold standard in requirement generation. The author has also written a book, which I highly recommend, and offers courses on executing user story mapping.

I first utilized this workshop in late 2019 as a senior product designer at Lowe's. I had to design a B2B shopping list for Lowe's procurement customers, and in this case study, you see me use it with excellent results.

I have taught designers how to use user story mapping in their process with fantastic results. I run one workshop with the designer and their entire product team and walk them through the process. Then, during the next mapping workshop, they lead it while I observe. They follow the steps I've laid out and wrap up with a quarterly backlog of user stories they can execute.

At Salsify, I was able to help one product team deliver their milestone four weeks ahead of schedule because I introduced them to user story mapping, and they killed their app marketplace launch. (See link 🔒)

Template: How To Run a User Story Mapping Workshop (8 steps)

Best suited for: User stories

Design Sprint Workshop

This book popularized the design sprint concept, and the authors' format was copied throughout the tech industry. However, caution: The design sprint format is meant for small projects and capabilities. I modified it to incorporate it into a more extensive discovery process with a larger team of designers.

I led a strategic transformation project at Lowe's in 2022, creating a two to five-year product roadmap for the Lowe's Store Technology organization. The project aimed to develop a target state for the end-to-end flooring installation customer experience that processed over 1MM annual flooring quotes.

In this case study, I used a modified design sprint format with great success with a small team of six designers to solve for and generate a modernized Lowe's services customer experience for a 250MM LOB.

Template: Both Mural and Miro provide design sprint templates for product teams. Search for design sprints in the template section.

Best suited for: User stories

Use Case Ideation Workshop

I was first introduced to the use case ideation workshop format at Oracle headquarters in Redwood City, California, in early 2019. The Brand and Creative team partnered with the product design team to overhaul Oracle.com and create a target state for the new digital experience of Oracle customers browsing the Oracle website.

From my perspective, it's the most challenging workshop to teach and the most difficult to run. This is because you build an actual future state of a journey, and that is incredibly taxing on people who don't spend a lot of time imagining different concepts of a journey in their heads.

On top of that, you take your future journey and write them up into use cases. Most product teams have forgotten how to write use cases and prefer user stories. From my experience, writing and managing use cases is more complex but better from a business perspective. This is because a use case communicates the value of the proposed investments better than a group of user stories would. (That is my experience based on running a lot of projects)

Here is a case study of how I used this workshop with two other lead product designers to explore a Pinterest-type inspiration concept at Lowe's. This small, straightforward workshop allowed us to move quickly, but you can see the process in the case study in much greater detail.

Best suited for: Use Cases

Conclusion

Remember, getting people into one of these three workshops generates clarity on what you want to build and, from there, generates superior user requirements to help you reach your goal.

Most other meetings are a giant waste of money and time. The only thing that matters is generating user requirements that move the needle at your company.

Get in touch

Thank you for reading my post. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you need help with a project.

Written by Leo Vroegindewey, Principal Product Designer.

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