I was heading into a sales meeting for a potential client, to talk with them about what an engagement could look like. Going into it, we knew there were a lot of challenges that the client wanted to address, that spanned across multiple teams and departments. We wanted to run a quick, simple design exercise that would surface opportunities for improvement, align their team on priorities, and outline a plan for how to address them in our engagement.
Enter the Lightning Design Jam. This little exercise packed a big punch and checked all the boxes we had around surfacing opportunities, brainstorming solutions, and aligning the team on a path forward. The format is simple. As a team you start by acknowledging what’s currently working well and what needs improvement, and you end with an action plan on how to address the challenges you’re facing. It’s so simple and lightweight that it can be applied to virtually any problem that you’re trying to gain consensus on.
It was so effective in this particular sales meeting that I’ve been using it ever since for a whole variety of challenges. For example, I ran this exercise with the Director team in Boston to help us decide our objectives for the quarter. We use it on client projects when trying to determine new feature releases and product roadmaps. Now we are using it again with the HBR product team in our latest workshop, to help them tackle some challenges they’ve been experiencing around bringing new features to HBR.org.
We invite you to watch us run this exercise with HBR, so you can learn how to apply it to your own team and decision-making process.
This workshop will include:
- A full, 1-hour Lightning Design Jam with a product priorities prompt
- An overview of the Design Sprint methodology and use cases
- Live Q&A with you the audience
- Recording available for registrants post-event
This workshop is ideal for:
- Business leaders adapting to rapid market changes
- Product leaders reevaluating product priorities and strategy
- Team leads who need to galvanize their team around problem solving
I’ll be facilitating this workshop, with a few members of the HBR product team as the willing participants. It’s going to be live, unscripted, and fun. Real-time decision-making at its best!
Join us on April 30 at 12pm ET – let’s jam!
