Workshops that work: How to align teams and get things done

One of the biggest factors in the success of product teams - and organisations as a whole - is how effectively they collaborate.

It’s one of the highest-leverage areas to improve. Never mind your strategy, how much time you spend with users, or how well you measure product performance and set goals - if your collaboration is sub-optimal (or frankly dysfunctional), you’ll make it exponentially harder to win.

Remote and hybrid working has only made this more obvious. On the one hand, teams spend far less time together. On the other, it’s forced us to get serious about the tools and techniques that actually increase collaboration. Done right, these don’t just compensate for distance - they help build better relationships and more productive teams. In this article, I want to share our approach to workshopping. It’s one of the most effective tools in our locker to get teams aligned and heading in the right direction. You’ll see threads of this thinking in a lot of our articles and templates, but we’ve never explicitly written it down - until now.

What is workshopping?

At its core, a workshop is just a structured conversation. A way to bring the right people together, create focus, and move a decision, idea, or plan forward.

It’s not a silver bullet - you don’t need to “workshop” everything. But when there’s ambiguity, competing perspectives, or a risk of the loudest voice dominating, workshops can create a fairer, faster path to alignment.

Warning signs to look out for

These may suggest it’s time to a) help your team(s) sharpen their workshopping skills, or b) bring more structure to your sessions:

• No artefacts or outputs are created
• Agendas are ignored or rarely completed
• A vocal minority dominate discussions
• Decisions aren’t reached
• The same ground is covered repeatedly
• Energy, morale, and impact decline over time

Deciding whether to workshop

It’s important to remember that not every problem needs a rigorously planned session. The temptation is to default to workshops for everything, but that quickly leads to fatigue.

Instead:

• Async by default. If something can be resolved with a short doc or a quick Slack thread, do that first.
• Sometimes no structure is better. A one-to-one or an urgent huddle might beat the overhead of scheduling and prep.
• Workshop when it matters. Use it when alignment, creativity, or fairness are needed - not just because it’s in a playbook.

Prep

The success of a workshop is usually won or lost before it even starts. A bit of upfront effort makes everything smoother.

• Get the right people. Invite only those who need to be there - decision-makers, key contributors, diversity of perspectives.
• Create an artefact. Something tangible - a draft strategy, a customer journey, a problem statement - as the focal point.
• Set up clear structure. Define what success looks like, and design exercises to get you there.
• Consider the format. Remote, hybrid, or in-person - each has its own logistics. Plan accordingly.
• Create a workshop board. Miro or similar, or a physical whiteboard - whatever your team prefers, pre-load it with frames, stickies, and exercises.
• Ask for help - you don’t need to go it alone. Having a note-taker, or somebody primed to support you should you encounter any technical hitches, can pay dividends. Don’t try to facilitate, capture, and contribute all at once.
• Align beforehand. Chat with your product trio or key stakeholders. A pre-mortem helps you pre-empt challenges and even prep canned responses.
• Share the plan early. Desired outcomes, agenda, and the board itself - so participants can digest before they arrive.
• Schedule generously. Book 50% more time than you think you’ll need. Leave buffers between meetings.
• Stress-test logistics. The meeting room, the dial-in link, building sign-in, Miro access - don’t leave this to chance.

Running the session

• Facilitation is about keeping energy high, voices balanced, and momentum moving.
• Be on time. Give five minutes for stragglers, then start.
• Icebreakers (optional). Use them if the group needs warming up, or if you’re using unfamiliar tooling. Skip if everyone knows each other and are used to workshopping.
• Be firm, but flexible. Stick to the agenda, but leave room for the occasional rabbit hole.
• Car park ideas. Don’t lose tangents - capture them and move on.
• Add constraints to your sessions - timers, limits on stickies, dot voting to prioritise. They keep sessions brisk and inclusive.
• Make space for everyone. Actively draw in quieter voices.
• Balance talk and doing. Mix structured exercises with open discussion.
• Don’t forget next steps. Ringfence time for actions. If you’ve prepped draft next steps, even better.

Wrap-up

A workshop without a follow-up is just theatre. To make it count, block out time to write things up - the more you capture and converge during the session, the easier this will be afterwards.

Share outcomes the same day while the energy and context are still fresh. The sooner you close the loop, the more momentum you’ll carry forward.

Finally, translate discussion into action. Create tickets, schedule follow-ups, and assign clear owners. Without this step, even the best workshop risks fading into nothing more than a conversation.

Being a good participant

Facilitation isn’t everything - participants carry responsibility too. A good session depends just as much on how people show up as it does on who’s guiding the conversation.

Start with self-awareness. Know when to press your point and when to let it go. Ask yourself: Do we really need to bottom this out now, or could it be handled offline? That small pause in judgement can save the group a lot of time.

Preparation also matters. Do the pre-read so you don’t turn up cold. You’ll contribute more meaningfully, and the whole group benefits when everyone is working from the same baseline.

Lastly, support the facilitator. Help keep the conversation on track by gently nudging discussions back when they drift. The “car park” isn’t just their job - it’s everyone’s role to keep the workshop focused and productive.

Our favourite tools

The best tools are the ones that are simple and reliable. For digital sessions, whiteboards like Miro, FigJam, or Lucidspark make it easy to capture ideas, structure exercises, and keep remote teams engaged. They’re flexible enough for anything from quick brainstorms to multi-day strategy workshops.

And the techniques you use within sessions matter just as much - whether you’re working on a virtual board or a physical wall:

• Stickies — Capture individual ideas fast, making it easy to see everyone’s input side by side.
• Timers — Keep momentum high and avoid conversations dragging on.
• Dot voting — Quickly spot group preferences and narrow options without endless debate.
• Affinity sorting — Cluster related ideas into themes so patterns and priorities become clear.
• Stack ranking — Force tough trade-offs by ordering options from most to least important.

These techniques are simple, but they’re what turn a free-flowing conversation into clarity, structure, and decisions.

Our favourite workshops

We've a growing set of workshop templates on Hyperact's Miroverse space. A few of our favourites are:

• Assumption mapping - A way to surface and visualise all the assumptions underlying a new initiative, so the team can see which ones are most urgent or risky and prioritise what to test or validate first.
• Story mapping - A technique for laying out product capabilities or user journeys in sequence, so the team can visualise the flow, spot gaps or dependencies, and slice work into meaningful releases.
• Premortem - A structured session where you imagine that a project or release has failed, then work backward to identify possible failure modes and mitigation strategies before they occur.
• Empathy mapping - A method to step into your user’s mind and explore what they say, do, think, and feel, so that design and decisions are grounded in real user perspectives.
• Affinity sorting - A way to group user research findings into themes, helping the team surface patterns and structure messy input.
• Service blueprinting - A visual diagram of all user interactions and the backstage systems, processes, and actors supporting them, useful to understand where friction lies and how the service could evolve.
• Metrics storming - A session to map product metrics to business outcomes (using tools like a metrics tree) so that teams align on what really matters, spot gaps, and prioritise measurement.

Other resources

There’s a whole ecosystem of inspiration and ready-made templates to draw from. Pip Decks offer curated sets of battle-tested workshop methods, each designed to help you navigate tricky situations with confidence. Miroverse is a community-driven library packed with templates from practitioners around the world - a great place to spark ideas or borrow a structure that’s already proven to work. The Hyper Island Toolbox adds a free collection of methods focused on collaboration, innovation, and team dynamics, making it especially useful for people and culture-centred sessions. Jeff Patton’s User Story Mapping remains a go-to reference for teams looking to visualise product backlogs and align around customer journeys. And for a deeper dive into product strategy and facilitation, Ant Murphy’s Product Pathways offers detailed resources and guides you can put straight into practice.

In summary

Workshops aren’t really about sticky notes, whiteboards, or flashy templates - they’re about building the conditions for teams to collaborate well. With the right people in the room, a clear structure to guide them, and follow-through that turns talk into action, workshops become one of the most powerful tools a product team has.

Done well, they accelerate decisions, surface ideas that would otherwise stay hidden, and stop the loudest voices from winning by default. More than that, they strengthen relationships, sharpen focus, and build confidence across the team.

A good workshop doesn’t just move a plan forward - it makes the team itself stronger.