All About Strategic Workshops: Our Most Popular Service This Year

Working in a digital agency is usually associated with projects in the realm of a website or mobile application development. But what is usually overseen is that in order to design and build a successful digital product – you first need to understand your Client’s business- their growth strategy, business model, and customers.

Because a digital product – whether it is a website or business process digitization behind – has to contribute to a business measure of success: customer experience improvement, growing revenue, or increased eiciency.

Having worked with global Clients on various digitization projects over the years, Q agency has gathered extensive knowledge and best practices from dierent industries and markets. In a way, working in a digital agency is similar to being a consultant on digitization topics. With the idea of sharing knowledge with our Clients, 2 months ago we started a new initiative – Strategic Workshops.

Platform for a structured brainstorming

The goal of the workshop is to provide relevant insights and our ideas on digitization topics of importance to our Clients. Every workshop is tailor-made and focused on topics previously agreed with a Client during the preparation phase. This phase includes a Client Interview where we get a better understanding of the Client’s business goals (short and long term) and set a workshop focus.

For some, the focus was on growing their business through increasing digital presence, and for others, it was about digitization eorts around their B2B business model.

After a Client interview, our Product Strategy team prepares a workshop structure that includes various framework methods. Those methods help our Product Strategy team running the workshop and key business stakeholders from the Client-side participating in the workshop – CEO, Heads of Digitization, Marketing, and Sales – to brainstorming together.

Due to the current situation, all workshops are held online but that does not make it any less eicient than the real one.

It’s all about the user

Every workshop starts with 2 essential topics: Target customer base, where we focus on understanding the experience and needs behind specific user persona, and Brand wheel, where we engage in interactive discussions on how the brand is represented. The latter is especially useful as it reveals a gap between where the Brand is and where it wants to be, having in mind clients’ digital presentation and communication to their target base.

Where possible, we also conduct user research to better understand the target customer base. For example, during one workshop, we recommended ideas around targeting early adopters: how to communicate to them through the digital touchpoints and build a value proposition based on the user research insights.

This part of the workshop is highly important as it is about re-thinking value proposition and go-to-market strategy. We really need to think about the users and value we are bringing to the market first, and then how to translate these ideas into digital.

Thinking about a digital product, but through diverse industries

When thinking about a digital product (for example a website), the first instinct is to compare yourself with your competitors. However, looking beyond your industry can open doors to new ideas (design or content-wise) that can really set you apart from your competitors.

One of our client CEOs said: “I never thought about approaching it from this angle.” Because Q has worked on a diverse range of projects, we can bring the know-how and “think outside the box” to propose innovative ideas. Also, our digital knowledge gives us credibility for the immediate creation of a digital product strategy and roadmap.

Mapping ideas to digital product

Finally, we move to ideating digital product(s). By this point, we have talked about the business model, competitive landscape, and the target customer base – user personas, their experience pillars, and the value which the Client’s product is bringing to the market. Based on the key takeaways from these topics, and combined with our prepared list of ideas and insights, we go into the final workshop phase – mapping a roadmap and key elements of the go-to-market strategy together.

Setup was perfect. I had the feeling everybody attending was an expert in their fields so all input was valuable and we covered a lot of dierent aspects and spots someone else might have overseen. I liked the proactive thinking and idea introduction as we saw a dierent kind of approach towards a challenging task of itself “how could a consumer think, what might they like right away and why would they be using it.

We have received a lot of positive feedback from our Clients following the Strategic Workshops. Clients found our extensive approach, thinking, and workshop results deeply valuable for their business. For us, this approach underlines the importance of building partnerships with our Clients by creating a platform not only for sharing our knowledge from dierent markets, industries, and digitization projects but also our passion for what we do.