Developing a new product involves a lot of unknowns and just as many moving parts. There are multiple stakeholders to consider, each with their own view on required actions, order of priority and end goals. There’s also the modern hurdle of geographically diverse teams. So, how can you facilitate a more effective product development process? By choosing to host your design workshop online , you can overcome many of the obstacles associated with coordinating work across physical locations.

This article examines five common pain points for business teams and how they can solve them through remote workshopping — with a few success stories from our designers.

1. Aligning multinational teams

Problem: You have a globally distributed team that’s tricky to gather together when you need “collective genius”

Ad hoc user research and discussions about emerging trends are a key part of building something new — be it an application, a site, a process or a new service. But this simple task becomes a significant hurdle for fragmented teams, where the Head of Product might be in the USA, the developer team in Germany and the Marketing Manager in China. Physical meetings between these key players may only happen once or twice a year, for a one-week offline sprint, and under the less than optimal condition of jet lag.

Solution: Hosting regular alignment workshops online using collaboration tools

Offline workshops possess something that’s impossible to recreate online — the warmth of a chat over coffee, scribbling down ideas on colorful post-it notes and flip charts and, of course, the primal feeling of creating something with your hands. At the same time, bringing people together from different locations for a week poses its own problems. And if the activity you have planned ends up taking less than a week, all that effort and expense on travel and accommodation hardly seems worth it.

Fortunately, there are a plethora of online collaboration tools nowadays, such as Miro, Mural, Whimsical, etc. Not only do these include a suit of templates that allow you to wrap your online workshop with near-ready deliverables, they also eliminate the pitfall of illegible handwriting.

Next, there’s the issue with time zones. Say, the China-based Marketing Manager and the US Head of Product want to arrange an online meeting, it’ll involve a very late night or very early morning for both parties — neither ideal. While there’s no getting around the time difference, holding a workshop online tends to offer more convenience. Colleagues can log into the collaboration workspace from the comfort of their own homes, keeping their cameras switched off to save the embarrassment of tired faces!

ELEKS’ Design Manager, Slava Shestopalov, says, “holding regular workshops online is inevitable and fundamental for our team, which is distributed between locations like Berlin, Singapore, Warsaw, Krakow and Washington”.

Slava is currently acting as design consultant to one of the world’s leading legal firms. Last month, his team developed a scalable rapid prototyping process — to consolidate innovation and design best practices among lawyers, and to discover new business opportunities. Since switching to hosting online design workshops, Slava has had to get creative with his team’s methods of working but, so far, it’s proven even more efficient than offline collaboration. Storyboarding, for example, has become less biased, with each participant able to have their say and explore their own creativity without being influenced by each other’s sketches before team review.

2. Consolidating team wisdom

Problem: Project teams lack a clear picture of each participant’s experience and expertise

When a new product or service requires rapid scale-up, new team members join the project, bringing with them their own unique experiences. What inevitably happens is a misalignment in perception — what we often refer to as individuals “living inside their own heads”. Each team member ends up guessing at what their colleagues know or think, instead of observing or asking directly. This leads to team conflicts, as well as overlapping work streams or duplicating workload because tasks have been completed incorrectly, based on whims or assumptions.

Healthy collaboration should involve gathering individuals in one workspace to openly “unpack” everything, thereby discovering everyone’s similarities, differences and unique contribution potential.

Solution: Host an “idea smash” via an online workshop

A solid solution is the result of incorporating the strategic intents of a business with its end-users’ needs — and communication is the key to achieving this harmony. But what happens when the team can’t meet in person because, for example, they’re in quarantine with no possibility to travel? Businesses shouldn’t have to compromise simply because there’s no physical office space to work from for a period of time. That’s why moving workshopping to an online format is so valuable to the collaborative process. Never more so than in the current global pandemic.