Workshop
Product Design Foundations Workshop
A 6-module workshop with hands-on activities to equip junior designers and teammates from other disciplines on essential product design skills.
TEAM
2 x Product Designers
CONTRIBUTIONS
Developed workshop content and activities
Prepared activity handouts and materials
Planned schedules and logistics
Project overview
I co-created the Product Design Foundations Workshop with another skilled product designer to impart essential skills in product design.
This comprehensive workshop covers the entire product design process, from research and ideation to validation. It introduces concepts and tools that involve the entire team in shaping the product together, emphasizing and encouraging cross-functional collaboration.
This workshop is designed to be inclusive and suitable for non-designer roles as well, fostering a unified approach to product development.
Workshop Structure
The workshop is divided into 6 modules, each designed to be engaging and practical:
Theory: Introduction of key concepts in an easy-to-understand format.
Activities: 1 or 2 hands-on exercises to practice the newly learned concepts.
The workshop can be delivered as a full 3-day immersive experience or as individual modules tailored to specific needs.
Purpose
The primary goals of creating this workshop are:
Enable Client Designers: Provide clients' design teams with foundational product design skills.
Onboard New Hires: Quickly bring new team members up to speed with essential product design knowledge.
Upskill Client Product Teams: Equip the entire cross-functional product team with a basic understanding of product design to foster better collaboration and product development.
Workshop outline
Introduction to Product Design
This module provides an overview of essential concepts in product design. Participants will learn what product design entails, explore key principles of user-centered design and understand the role of a product designer.
Learning outcome: Understanding the breadth and depth of product designer roles and responsibilities
Module 1
Shaping Our Understanding of Users
In this module, participants will learn about the importance of understanding and addressing user needs in product design. They also learn about empathy, and practice how to cultivate a deeper understanding of your users, leading to more effective and user-friendly products.
Learning outcome: User discovery, crafting accurate personas of the target users
Module 2
Assumptions 101
This module covers practical techniques to help product teams identify the right problems to solve, and most importantly, which ones first. Participants will learn how to generate assumptions, how to prioritise them based on various criteria and methods of validation.
Learning outcome: Assumption generation, prioritisation techniques
Module 3
Running Good User Research
This module provides an understanding on why user research is the key to successful products. Participants will learn what user research is, how to set clear research goals, gain hands-on experience in crafting effective research questions and practice conducting the interviews.
Learning outcome: User research methodologies, user interview planning and execution skills
Module 4
Everyone Plays a Part in Design
Learn about the importance of a cross-functional team in creating successful products and the advantages of designing together as a team. Participants will understand how non-designers can actively contribute to the design process through different design-led activities.
Learning outcome: Design facilitation, lean design iteration with cross-functional team
Module 5
User Testing Foundations
This module provides an overview of user testing, emphasizing its critical role in product development. Participants will gain an understanding of usability testing, the key focus areas and gain hands-on experiences the best practices.
Learning outcome: Usability testing, script writing, solution validation
Module 6
Feedback from the participants
“Solid content - the information was straight to the point, and best practices were presented in a very concise and digestible way.
Your experiences as designers and knowledge on the methodology of involving designers, product manager and engineers were super valuable.”
“Thank you to the facilitators for creating such a safe space for us to raise questions and for sharing your knowledge openly with everyone.
We had a rare chance to learn and share with other designers, practice the skills that we have learnt, and bounce off ideas with other participants. I don’t get to do this very often.”
“In the past 3 days, I got to observe how the facilitators organised and ran activities - it helped me with learning how to facilitate and run internal activities in my own job.
I learned that having different perspective as a balanced team was very helpful. I was able to observe what other roles (PMs and engineers) can contribute in a design activity. I witnessed that it takes a team to improve a product.”
