A design strategy workshop is an activity that places designers, relevant decision-makers, and subject-matter experts, in a room where the walls are covered with long scrolls of paper. For a period of a few hours, everyone works collaboratively, using post-it notes and other simple aids, to map out the journey of customers from the time they become aware of the product, through their purchase experience, and throughout key usage points.

Participants use research data and their own experience to identify strength and weakness points along the journey. Journey maps are extremely efficient in concentrating large amounts of qualitative and quantitative information in a compact visual form which is easy to digest quickly. Journey maps are especially effective to visualize a high-level flow.

The primary goal of such workshops is to facilitate the creation of shared understanding among all stakeholders of the challenges and opportunities of moving towards a new experience strategy. The concentration of all pain-points in a single visual document makes a journey map a unique tool for thinking holistically through issues of experience continuity, re-sequencing of process, and prioritization of efforts. Think of the workshops as a decision support tool that addresses a couple of important issues:

• Leadership has to make hard, sometimes critical decisions around priorities, budgets, and resources. Ironically, the nature of such decisions place a distance between the needs of experience and the cold realities of practical management. It is easy to forget the end user when you look at an Excel spreadsheet.
• It is also best to reach an organizational alignment around the approach. However, because each group involved in the project has its own agenda, such an alignment can be difficult to attain, and relevant gaps around the experience are not likely to surface without an appropriate facilitation.