Co-Creation Journey Workshop with real users

Hi all, I'm currently preparing a co-creation workshop where I will be facilitating some journey mapping together with real (future) users for a user flow that only exists as a concept yet. The users don't know each other. Basically the journey activities are set and I will go through the expectations, pain points, gain points and moments that matter with the users. Goal is to get user feedback at this early point in the development phase. Now I need the advice from this great community on two points, I'm currently struggling with:

When running journey workshops with internal teams, I always introduce a persona and we will look at the journey from the persona's perspective. As I now have real users, I'm not sure if this is necessary as they don't have any business perspective or might even be hindering, because they might feel like it restricts their thinking (like: I would find this and that bad but maybe the persona doesn't so I'm not gonna say it). On the other hand side, the persona might enable them to speak in more truth because it's not *them* saying something.

Usually I would have people write down their expectations/pain points/gain points and post to the wall step-by-step, row-by-row. For the real users I'm not sure if it's the best way, because I would *like* to have some discussion and get more insight into their thought process which I feel could be restricted by silent brainstorming. On the other side I feel like silent brainstorming could be nice for more shy people especially in this set-up where the users also don't know each other. Also, we don't have a ton of time, so silent brainstorming + extensive discussion is not an option. One option might be combining e.g. two journey activities to save a bit of time.

Any best practices and thoughts? :)

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