How user research helped run a successful exec workshop
By: Gabe Fender
Tags: User Research, Surveys, Workshop, User Experience, Facilitation

How user research helped run a successful exec workshop

We recently facilitated an exec-level workshop for a client and found that a bit of user research with participants beforehand delivered a better outcome for them.

We’d been working with this client for a few years and built a good relationship with them. For this workshop, they wanted to better understand the benefits of product teams. We had a few discussions with a senior manager about what they wanted to get out of the workshop and who would be attending. This helped us define goals for what they wanted to get out of it and informed an outline of the agenda. But this was only one person’s view and we didn’t want to make any assumptions about what the rest of the audience wanted to get from it.

So we looked to user research to help us. We didn’t want to jump to a solution based on the brief we’d been given, we wanted to explore the problem further directly with the “users”, which in this case, were the people participating in the workshop. We put together a quick survey to ask “what do you hope to get out of the session?” and included some content ideas to test what people were most interested in.

The questions were:

What do you hope to get out of the session? (free text) What 3 topics are you most interested in learning? (multiple select) What are your biggest questions about product teams for your organisation? (free text) Any other comments? (free text)

The survey was sent using Microsoft Forms which automatically captured their email address. This was important as it gave us insight into the goals and questions of individuals stakeholders. If you’re running a survey with people outside your organisation, one tip I’ve found is that “asking for personal information at the start may filter out people who are not serious about completing the survey.”

These were very busy people so it was important that the survey only took a few minutes to complete. Getting a good response though took a bit more work and we found that Slack was a good way to remind people. We were persistent with reminders because we knew that taking 5 minutes to complete the survey would result in a better outcome for them.

In the end, we got an 80% response from 12 people which helped us understand expectations ahead of the session and tailor the content to cover the most important topics and questions. We could also set expectations for things we wouldn’t be covering. This resulted in a clear agenda from the start and people were aligned with what we were going to cover in this session and already some ideas for follow-ups.

Overall, running a survey with participants ahead of the workshop helped us:

Align the group on the agenda — by understanding people’s expectations of the session, we could play it back at the start of the workshop and create alignment on what would and would not be covered Get the content spot on — we validated ideas and prioritised the most important things to cover in the time we had. Gathering questions from people ahead of the session is a great input for deciding on the most relevant content. Ideas for follow-ups — for things we didn’t have time to cover, we could suggest as follow-up conversations or workshops.

Surveys definitely aren’t the only way of doing this. If you have time and access to the participants ahead of the session, having 1–1 discussions will give you higher quality insights as you can ask clarifying questions like “why is that your top choice?” or “why are you interested in that topic?” Make sure you ask open-ended questions because it allows you to find out more than you anticipate.

Thanks for reading. This is my first blog post on Medium so I’d really appreciate any comments or feedback!