Product Design Workshops are crucial for the successful development of both mobile and web-based applications. It not only can improve the overall quality, but is crucial to finding the PRODUCT MARKET FIT. 

Product Design Workshops can greatly increase the ROI from the digital projects by:

1. Helping to clarify the product vision.
2. Focusing on the business value delivered to its users. 
3. Introducing the customer perspective with user personas. 
4. Viewing all processes (customer journeys) from the user perspective.
5. Analysing different side scenarios and evaluating their impact. 
6. Creating the mockups and visualising the user experience. 
7. Testing the mockups with users. 
8. Validating hypothesis BEFORE starting actual development. 

Product Design Workshops are extremely important to SAVE to money spent on development, because they:

1. Help the development team to understand the what are the business needs.
2. Introduce the creativity in the development team, which understands the business need and can propose some advanced technical solutions. 
3. Answer all crucial questions so that the development team don’t need to waist time on finding guidelines / answers on their own. 
4. Avoid the situations when some irrelevant business cases are prioritized over crucial scenarios.

Great Product Design Workshops usually consist of the several structured phases and the final scope depends on the time allocated for the workshops. 

The minimal scope allows usually last between 3-4 hours and allows to:

1. Create the STAKEHOLDER MAP to name are important actors in the process and make sure nobody is left unattended.
2. Design the main CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP for the ‘happy path’, which is the main scenario happening on more than 60% of cases.

Longer workshops of 5-7 hours allow to:

1. Create alternative CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPs for the most important side cases, to narrow down the scope of deliberately and thoughtfully ignored cases.
2. Create the SERVICE BLUEPRINT MATRIX to transfer the impact of certain steps across the visible and hidden parts of the system (including the backoffice apps and automated processes). 

It is crucial that for the Product Design Workshop all relevant internal actors from the STAKEHOLDER MAP are represented as well as some actors from the key partners supporting the process. Without the properly balanced team some team members can push for the solutions which later on will be hard to introduce. 

What is also important is the representation of the highest possible authorities, to at least during the first two stages of the workshop to guarantee the alignment with the general strategy and integrity of the goals. This also grants credibility to the discussed project and increases the engagement of other team members.