What is a Workshop Episode Summary

I’m thinking Spring today, I don’t know about you guys. It’s sunny and all the snow is melting and I’m here for it. I’m also here for this next episode of AAI which is all about workshops. What is a workshop? How can they help us deduce the product that will work for you? We get a lot more answers when we spend time digging and a workshop gives us the space to do that.

From activities through to questions, we truly want you to think about your business and where you want it to go. How will this product fit into your business, how will you go-to-market with it? If these are questions you’re asking, going through a workshop may be beneficial to you.

As always, listen in, and fill out the form here to ask questions or Schedule a Workshop!

Full Transcript

Erin Srebinski: [00:00:16] At City Innovation Labs, we run a bunch of workshops to help people figure out what they’re doing, what they need to build, if they’re even ready for custom software. Josh, what exactly does a workshop entail and why would anyone want to do this?

Josh Barker: [00:00:47] Yes. Great questions. So a workshop really helps our clients take a step back and really analyze something before proceeding forward with the next steps of software engineering or prototyping or whatever it is. It allows us to really take focus on what we’re trying to accomplish.

It brings crystallization to the path we’re headed towards. Oftentimes it leads to pivoting within that conversation in terms of strategy, go to market strategy, how they’re about to do something.  It’s crucially important because it is that compass moment where you take out your compass and you go, which direction am I headed? And so if you don’t have that compass moment, you could actually be going in the complete wrong direction.  That’s really what we want to help avoid . Go in the right direction.

So it’s your GPS, if you’re a younger generation that’s like, what the heck is a compass? Oftentimes someone will come to us and say, this is what we’re trying to accomplish.

No, one’s coming to us saying we want a workshop, right. Because that’s not the result of what people want.

Erin Srebinski: [00:01:49] No, they’re not looking for that.

Josh Barker: [00:01:51] They’re not looking for a  workshop, but we offer  that compass GPS. Right?  They’ll say, here’s what we want to do, here’s what we want to build, here’s what we’re trying to achieve. And so then it’s our jobs, in that pre consulting, pre-workshop moment, to help them understand. Going back to our Product Validation Funnel, helping them understand where they’re at in the Product Validation Funnel and why.  That’s where we’ll spend time pre consulting and pre-workshop, helping them understand where they’re at.

We’ll ask a series of questions of how have you validated this? What experiments have you run? And sometimes they’ll say, I don’t even know what an experiment is and we can help educate them on assumptions and our process. Then once we get a standard of where is that company and the product validation funnel.

The nice thing is with our workshops we definitely are believers in meeting them where th...