Product Workshop

01The room

Who takes part, and what to bring

Get the people who touch the product: founders, product and engineering leads, design, and whoever talks to customers all day: support, sales, success. They know what users actually say.

Keep it under ten people. Product discussions go deep quickly, and depth matters more than coverage here.

Setup

• A 90-minute block, whiteboards, stickies (40 per person), Sharpies, the same kit as the brand sprint.
• Bring evidence into the room: support tickets, churn reasons, usage numbers, sales objections.
• Set the frame before starting: we're describing what the product is for, not designing screens.

02Phase 1 · 30–45 min

Jobs & pains brainstorm

Use two sticky colors. On the first: every job users hire the product for — 'get paid faster', 'prove compliance', 'look prepared in the Monday meeting'. On the second: every pain around that job — what's slow, confusing, manual, or scary today. One job or pain per sticky, said out loud as it lands.

Push past features. 'Dashboard' is not a job; 'know if we're okay without asking anyone' is. Include provocations here too: jobs for users you don't serve yet, pains nobody wants to admit to.

Run 10-minute rounds until two full minutes pass without new ideas.

03Phase 2 · 30–45 min

Now, next, never

Three columns on the board: Now, Next, Never. Place every sticky as a group. Now means the product has to do this job well today; Next means it comes after Now is true; Never means the product is explicitly not for this, and writing that down is worth a lot.

Expect disagreement; that's what the sorting is for. When a sticky won't settle:

End the session with a photographed board. If the Now column holds more than a handful of jobs, the choosing isn't done yet.

When a sticky gets stuck

• Ask who feels this pain — if it's a segment you wouldn't take on, it belongs in Never.
• Ask what breaks if the product never does it — 'nothing' is an answer.
• Separate the job from the feature request — users ask for features but hire for jobs.
• Ask whether anyone would pay for this alone.
• Skip it and come back — a later sticky often settles it.

— Break —

04Phase 3 · 30–45 min

Journey mapping

Second session. Draw the user's path across the board: arrive, evaluate, adopt, use weekly, renew or leave. Place the Now and Next stickies where they happen on that path. Clusters and gaps show up immediately: three stickies at adoption and nothing at renewal tells you something.

Name each stage in the user's words. Mark the moment of first real value and count the steps it takes to get there. Every step before it is a cost.

05Phase 4 · 30–45 min

Distilling into principles

Transpose the board into a document: the product principles (how this product makes decisions, four maximum), the Now list in priority order, the Next list with a trigger attached ('after 100 paying teams'), and the Never list with reasons.

Close with product comparisons in the same "more like ___ than ___" format, using products everyone knows, ideally outside your category. They anchor scope the way brand comparisons anchor tone.

Comparison examples

• More like a checklist than a dashboard
• More like Stripe than Salesforce
• More like a thermostat than a cockpit
• More like WhatsApp than Slack

06What comes out

The document

A product brief: the principles, a prioritized Now/Next/Never list with reasons, and a journey map with the first-value moment and the gaps marked.

It feeds the proposal directly: scope comes from Now, phases from Next, and the Never list keeps the engagement honest about what's out.