How to run a design thinking workshop

Design thinking workshops are crucial for product design, enabling designers to expedite their work, address the right problems, and align with stakeholders effectively. These workshops are condensed versions of the design thinking process, which consists of five steps: empathizing with users, defining problems, ideating solutions, prototyping, and testing. Workshops aim to swiftly cover these aspects, often in an Agile manner, to foster an iterative design approach. Running an effective workshop involves gathering insights, defining a clear problem statement, ideating solutions, selecting the most promising ones, and potentially prototyping. The effectiveness of a workshop depends on factors such as participant diversity, problem complexity, and the desired level of precision. Typically, workshops last from an hour to a week, depending on objectives. While they can't replace the full design thinking process, they are valuable for initiating design projects and aligning teams, especially when strategic objectives and insights are already in place.