Workshop Templates

Find inspiration for your next session. High-quality workshop and training session outlines from experts.

Feature Sprint for Startups

Designed for early-stage startups, this 3-hour workshop agenda is a step by step process that will help a team align on company purpose, develop a long-term roadmap, and prioritize the feature set of your app or service.

You'll align on what your MVP (minimum viable product) is and generate customer-centric features you can move towards developing too! This process can help quickly clarify and solve many of the problems young start-ups have, for example:

Teams that have been “going in circles” when talking about next steps
Have a lot of ideas but don't have a starting point
Lack clarity about the specific value proposition for marketing, web, and social content

Tips for running this workshop online

Pick an online whiteboard tool that allows you to use a large, zoomable canvas.
If you’re not using an online whiteboard, we’d recommend using a collaboration tool such as Google Docs to collect the information for each step under a separate heading. Invite everyone into the document to share their ideas but be very clear in regards to editing rights.
When facilitating group discussion, we’d recommend that participants use non-verbal means to indicate they’d like to speak. You can use tools like Zoom’s nonverbal feedback tools, a reaction emoji, or just have people put their hands up. The facilitator can then invite that person to talk.
Use built-in dot voting tools or allocate dot shapes manually in your online whiteboard tool for the voting section. If using Google Docs or similar, have people comment to indicate a vote.

Feature Sprint for Startups from Justin Mertes at Crema.

Want more context? Watch this video from Justin on how the feature sprint helped Vera, a plant care app.

Justin Mertes

Coach and design sprint facilitator at Crema

4 days

Design Sprint 2.0

Step-by-step process for solving big problems and testing new ideas in just 4 days. Design Sprint 2.0 is simply the most up-to-date, semi-official version of the Sprint. One of the biggest differences between the original Design Sprint and the Design Sprint 2.0 is that 2.0 is optimized to work not just in startups, but also in large organizations that don’t necessarily have time to commit an entire week to the full process.

It takes four days instead of five.
You only need the full Sprint team for two days instead of five

Jake Knapp

Writer, designer. Author of SPRINT and MAKE TIME

06:20

Remote problem solving workshop

A problem-solving workshop designed from the ground up for remote teams and those working online. Facilitate a group through a collaborative problem-solving process remotely and generate quick, effective solutions!

Objectives:

Identify what your current organizational challenges are.
Generate ideas for effective, quick to implement solutions and choose which solutions to implement.

Set up:

Choose a video conferencing tool to host the meeting - Zoom, Google Hangouts, Adobe Connect or whatever tool your organization prefers is fine!
Choose an online collaboration tool to work in - you might use an online whiteboard tool such as Mural or Miro, or collaboration tools such as Slack and Google Docs. We have instructions for both in this template 🙂
Choose one person from the group to be the facilitator and lead the group through the process.
Choose one person from the group to be the decision-maker, who whenever teams are deadlocked on a vote, can make the final call. Should be a senior team member or applicable team lead.

Optional:

Have a co-facilitator to moderate the text chat channel of your video conferencing tool and/or lead certain sections of the agenda. Facilitation is hard work - share the load where possible!

SessionLab

SessionLab Templates

01:05

Remote retrospective workshop

The Remote retrospective workshop is a great way to debrief a team after a period of work has been completed.

This could be anything from a long-term project, to a short workshop. Therefore the activities in this agenda can be lengthened or adapted, depending upon your desired outcomes.

This session is designed to be run remotely, and it will give the participants time to reflect, assess the outcomes of the recent project and organise their next steps by prioritising the tasks which would be most beneficial to them.

SessionLab

SessionLab Templates

01:20

Persona Empathy Workshop

Personas are one of the most popular tools in user research, and are a great way to create shared understanding about users. But they are useless unless people know what they are and how to utilize them.

Designed for research or user-focused teams who want to help others in their organization understand the value and importance of customer personas, this 1-hour 20 minute workshop agenda is highly focused step by step process that is simple and easy to run.

You'll demonstrate the power of personas and how preconceptions about users and customers are often incorrect.
Your team will gain some of the tools necessary to better empathize with users and employ personas across the organization
You'll generate ideas on how to solve problems and meet the needs of your chosen customer persona

This workshop is intended for groups and organizations that are already using or start to use customer personas and who are trying to extend the understanding and use of personas across an organization. You may run this with participants in less user-focused parts of the organization, or to begin demonstrating the value of personas to your team in a concise, effective way.

Tips for running this workshop online

Pick an online whiteboard tool that allows you to use a large, zoomable canvas.
If you’re not using an online whiteboard, we’d recommend using a collaboration tool such as Google Docs to collect the information for each step under a separate heading. Invite everyone into the document to share their ideas but be very clear in regards to editing rights.
When facilitating group discussion, we’d recommend that participants use non-verbal means to indicate they’d like to speak. You can use tools like Zoom’s nonverbal feedback tools, a reaction emoji, or just have people put their hands up. The facilitator can then invite that person to talk.
Use built-in dot voting tools or allocate dot shapes manually in your online whiteboard tool for the voting section. If using Google Docs or similar, have people comment to indicate a vote.

Persona Empathy Workshop from Maxwell Forrest.

Maxwell Forrest

UX Research Specialist

07:15

Team Development Day for a New Team

This full-day team development session can be delivered to teams that are relatively new but preferably already have some experience in working together. Workshop Objectives:

Understand what a real team is and why it is important
Become clearer about their collective purpose and goals
Experience working effectively as a team and help team members to feel more comfortable with one another
Take part in a fun, memorable and engaging experience

Shirley Gaston

Managing Director at Azesta

01:15

One-hour Brain Sprint

A simple recipe inspired by the Design Sprint to get the most out of a brainstorming session and to be concise. Objectives:

Effectively generate ideas while avoiding the common pitfalls of regular brainstorming sessions.
Be concise and timebox all of the exercises to ideate faster.
The brain sprint aligns a group of creatives and avoids discussions.

Sabrina Goerlich

Founder and Strategic Designer at Asenauer’s Designsprintstudio

08:00

Enterprise Design Starter Kit

Enterprise Design is the design of ambitious endeavours. It is about bringing together all the elements needed to make an enterprise successfully deliver, using a holistic and systemic design approach. The free Enterprise Design Starter Kit provides you with a set of canvases, exercises and cheat sheets, that will help you to get started with Enterprise Design. It will guide you through all parts of the Enterprise Design Framework. This one day workshop format is designed for teams of designers, architects and stakeholders, and can be used for exercise purposes and actual enterprise challenges.

Milan Guenther

Partner at Enterprise Design Associates

02:35

Emotional Culture Workshop

A compact and hands-on workshop to define the emotional culture of your team or organisation with the help of The Emotional Culture Deck. NUMBER OF PEOPLE: up to 30 people LENGTH: 2.5 hours Get your Emotional Culture Deck at: https://theemotionalculturedeck.com/

Jeremy Dean

Founder of riders&elephants and creator of The Emotional Culture Deck

03:10

The Three-Hour Brand Sprint

This 3-hour workshop helps to make the abstract idea of “our brand” into something concrete. After doing the exercises, the team gets a common language to describe what their company is about — and all subsequent squishy decisions about visuals, voice, and identity become way easier. Source: Google Ventures Library (includes further detailed explanation):

https://library.gv.com/the-three-hour-brand-sprint-3ccabf4b768a

Jake Knapp

Writer, designer. Author of SPRINT and MAKE TIME

08:00

Ideation Workshop

Ideation Workshop Guide - a one-day agenda template for innovation sessions, tips & tools included. Ideation is the process of forming ideas and concepts. In the corporate environment, “Ideation” defines the generation of new ideas and concepts to solve specific problems, either problems that your customers or clients are facing (thus creating business concepts for new products and services that your organization can provide them with), or problems that your organization is experiencing (thus resulting into improvements in the internal structure or processes).

Facilitators: 1-2 experienced facilitators
Participants: 12-30
Difficulty level: medium
Time: full day
Goal: come up with a large number of innovative ideas and inspire participants with disruptive cases, future tech and trends and opposite thinking.

Credits to Board of Innovation for the workshop template. You will find the original version here.

Output: 1-2 concept cards per participant

Board of Innovation

Innovation Consultancy

2 days

Leadership development workshop (ideal for new leaders)

Encourage an understanding of effective leadership values and an awareness of different leadership styles. This workshop is ideal for participants who are stepping into a leadership role for the first time.

Ute Nitschke & Nadja Petranovskaja

Psychologists and facilitation experts

03:55

Digital workshop template with Axis

Axis is a web-based application for running workshops digitally. Participants join and collaborate through their device whether in the room or joining remotely. There is no write-up, just download the workshop outputs. Whether you are new to facilitation or an experienced practitioner, you can look like a facilitation super-star by using Axis’ best practice workshop methods. Drive participant engagement, alignment and innovation whilst using anonymity and voting to surface hidden truths and prioritise the best ideas. Join Axis at www.axis.ws

Axis Workshops

Workshops. Reinvented.

2 days

Large group workshop agenda - from World Bank Development Forum

This workshop agenda shows a practical example of how to manage a group process with 300 participants and keep it interactive through a 'design + data' approach. The original session was delivered at the 2017 Development Finance Forum, held in Accra, Ghana, for a diverse group of stakeholders on how invest development capital in West Africa.

theDifference Consulting

Collaboration.Ai

08:00

Team workshop with WonderCards

Encourage team development when working towards common goals or when addressing complex issues. This workshop focuses on the importance of teamwork to succeed within an organisation

Nadja Petranovskaja

Business Psychologist, Entrepreneur and creator of WonderCards

02:05

Options Map Workshop

Ever had struggles to generate and select options within a short time frame? The Options Map is a tool to facilitate idea and option generation for nearly any topic. It uses brainwriting to generate ideas, and then prioritization combined with the Walt Disney method to narrow down and challenge the best ideas. This session is particularly useful when you want to cut out tedious discussions about pros and cons of an idea and still add a lot of information about it, finding ways on how to improve on it and make it feasible. Besides using it as a stand-alone short session when needed, you may also incorporate Option Mapping in longer workshops where idea generation and idea assessment is important.

Manuel Grassler

Service Designer | Design Thinker | Creative Consultant

06:40

Collaborative Rapid Prototyping

Prototyping is where all the ideas come to life in a Design Sprint. Storyboarding locks in our prototyping plan, which we have to execute in one day. This recipe allows various makers to contribute to a digital prototype in parallel, which leads to building deeper and more involved prototypes.

Source: Google Design Sprint Kit

Douglas Ferguson

Design Sprint + Innovation Workshop Facilitator at Voltage Control

03:00

The materiality analysis workshop - a powerful tool for sustainable development

In this participatory and fast-paced template session, the participants conduct an initial materiality analysis together. The materiality analysis is used to filter out the most pressing issues within sustainable development. The results can be used for developing strategies and new products and services within the domains of sustainable development, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), social entrepreneurship, zero waste, circular economy and much more.

Evelina Lundqvist

Founder and CEO at The Good Tribe

03:30

Communication for Youth

Introduction to communication - workshops for young people. Teach youths to tailor their language to engage with different people effectively.

Aga Leśny

Trainer & Experience designer

01:45

Team Canvas

The Team Canvas is Business Model Canvas for teamwork. Team Canvas is a strategic framework that helps bring team members on the same page. Based on our experience with startup teams and creative agencies, it is made to align teams, increase cohesion and performance and to create productive team culture, fast. Team Canvas works across multiple touchpoints:

creating a team;
clarifying goals and addressing overall team performance (e.g. when you feel stuck as a team, or when you need to get a lot of stuff done);
growing and onboarding new team members;
general alignment sessions (recommended every 2-3 months