Finally, my newsletter is going live, next Tuesday! If you subscribe, on July 16th, 2024, you'll get the first email of my newsletter - The Silent Innovator. 🎉 In it, you’ll find content on innovation, UX Research and Design, Workshops, and Facilitation. Sometimes, I might share my personal stories as well! I’ll mostly share content on the innovation techniques (workshops, sprints, etc.) and methodologies (design thinking, lean, etc.) and try to show you how you can apply them in your everyday work or even life. Little more than a month ago, I started my journey as a solo Product Strategist, Workshopper, UX Researcher & Designer. Unfortunately, all the things I wanted to work on were not achievable while working a full-time job - writing a newsletter is one of them. So, follow me to learn with me, to see the ups and downs, dos and don'ts. Hopefully, you’ll find value in my content. 🙌 You can subscribe by hitting the link under my name!

When I lived in Canada I signed up with Retreatify (https://www.retreatify.com/) which helps organizations with planning corporate retreats and offsites. They take care of the venues, catering, logistics and also have a database of vendors that run different workshops and team building activities. I did not get a ton of inquiries through the website (also because of covid) but now I do get the odd request, but they think I am still based in Canada. So I was wondering if there are similar platforms or companies that are based in Europe. Have you worked with any of them and found them useful or not to find new clients?

This post is inspired by one of the previous questions in the group (can't remember the person's name atm, will edit later). It's a common Design Sprint myth that design sprint isn't very useful for new products but works only for the products that need refinement. While it's understandable for this to be a common standpoint, there are very solid arguments why that's not the case and I'll lay out just a few of them. It's ok not to have a specific product and it's ok to assume things in the Design Sprint. The Design Sprint is here to help us "solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days" (or four days in the case of DS 2.0). So, DS is here to make assumptions, and to test if the idea works in the real world. You can deal with specifics in the later stages of product development. There will probably be the whole UX process for defining specifics, where you can use user interviews, user journey mapping, discovery workshops, etc. Also, remember the hotel robot from the Sprint book. That being said, if you're doing Design Sprint for a new thing, a thorough expert interview should help. Having a UX designer or researcher on the team helps because they usually know general research, the basics of psychology, and behavioral patterns. Together with the team, you'll be able to define and assume what a good customer journey will be and test it out on the testing day or later as a follow-up to the Sprint. Test ideas freely, and don't be afraid to fail! Feel free to add to this and describe your experiences!

Hi guys! How are you? I have a question about the map exercise in the Design Sprint: The map works good for a customer journey that already exists, but what about we are dealing with a need that customers don't know they have yet, or if there isn't an existing solution that customers already use to meet their needs, in other words, what should we do if there isn't a journey that users go through? For example: before Facebook launch for the first time, how would be their map?

After reviewing some basics videos on Workshop (Thanks to @Aj Smart youtube channel), I'd like to execute what I learned. So want to run a workshop with my team or any workshop opportunity I'll find in the future, but how can I convince someone to run a workshop??