What and Why workshop

Inspired from Lightning Design Jam by AJ&Smart

When I was interning at ServiceNow, I did not have clear requirements. So to get clarity I conducted a workshop with Product Managers. The workshop proved to be very successful for multiple reasons -


  1. I was able to define project value as well as focus


  2. I was able to connect with a bigger team and showcase myself which is an important part of internship

  3. Since I am new, this activity helped in building trust

Workshop :


I started with a quick ice breaker activity where I asked participants ( 2 PMs, 1 UX Researcher & 1 UX Designer) about their first job. After that I gave them a intro about my internship project which is to build an insurance portal for small business owners.


Activity 1 : What and Why brainstorming, What - What exactly do we want provide through this portal ? Why - Reasons for building this portal ? Each person writes their ideas for what and why. (8 min) Then , Each person reads their ideas for each and adds to the board (no discussion).

Activity 2 : Affinity Diagraming and Voting. After brainstorming we group similar what and why's together and then conducted a voting session where participants voted 3 most important what and why and discussed it for 5 mins


Result: I was able to define the most important use case and reason to build the portal which is what my internship project focused on.

2025, Tanya Bansal