Designing an MVP workshop

Key learnings from the Workshop Survival Guide

Last week, my colleague Ivy and I put on a workshop at Le Wagon coding bootcamp. It was great to meet some bright student developers and bounce around ideas.

When planning this workshop, our lives were made a whole load easier by having a flick through The Workshop Survival Guide, a book by Devin Hunt and Rob Fitzpatrick.

I can’t recommend it highly enough, so check it out if you’re interested. Here are a few key take-aways.

“Every workshop lives or dies by two factors:
(i) what the audience learns; and
(ii) how the audience feels.”

— The Workshop Survival Guide

Know your audience

Workshops are all about exchanging knowledge. People are willing to spend an hour or more of their time with you, and in return you teach them something new.

For a workshop to be really worthwhile, knowing your audience is key. Not only should the subject matter be relevant for the audience, the level of assumed knowledge of the subject matter when running the workshop also needs to be properly calibrated. The way that you run the workshop will also need to vary depending factors like length and the size of your audience.

Consider the demographic of the audience, why they may have decided to attend your workshop, their aspirations, mindset and prior knowledge. Also think about any concerns they might have going into your workshop, and try to head them off.

When planning our Le Wagon workshop, I knew that students could likely be aged anywhere between 18 and 50, from all countries and walks of life, and with many different plans of what to do next. However, bootcamp students tend to be united by an entrepreneurial drive and a desire to learn more about digital product development. For this reason, and given we have expertise and insight in this area from working at Lexoo, we chose to teach a workshop on designing an MVP.

Define your Learning Outcomes

The Workshop Survival Guide talks about structuring your workshop around key Learning Outcomes. You can’t teach your audience everything about your chosen subject in only a few hours, so focus on a few key themes that you want to get across.

Our workshop plan started out life as a skeleton structured around two Learning Outcomes, each with a number of smaller take-aways nested underneath.

Mix up tempo and teaching style

For longer workshops, the Workshop Survival Guide discusses splitting your workshop into ‘chunks’ of workshop time, generally no longer than 90 mins. Work out when to take breaks and how long for, and then organise workshop ‘chunks’ focusing on each Learning Outcome around these. Since we were only holding a 1 hour workshop this wasn’t really relevant for us.

Tempo and teaching styles are also important. Try to mix up the tempo and teaching style often. This is the best way to maintain the audience’s energy and attention.

Workshops need to contain some aspect of you explaining stuff to the audience — lecture elements. But too much lecture and not enough doing is likely to get boring. Mix lecture elements with other formats like small group discussions, ‘try it now’ practice, scenario challenges and Q&A.

Try to switch up the teaching style at least every 20 mins. Varying the length or group size for activities can help to add some variation.

Our MVP workshop was structured like this:

Plan your exercises

We started with a few short sharp challenges in small groups designed to demonstrate how important it is to properly define your user and the problem they’re trying to solve. We then moved on to a longer ‘design an MVP’ exercise based on a number of interesting case studies:

• Ocado Technologies: This is a white label logistics platform for supermarket chains around the world who want to take their businesses online. It started out life as a chocolate delivery system where product managers would deliver orders from the office vending machine to employees’ desks.
• Dropbox: To prove that it was worth building, founder Drew Houston created an MVP for Dropbox to test the hypothesis: if we provide seamless file synchronisation to customers, will they buy it?. He didn’t even have a product, just this 3 min taster video. The beta waiting list went from 5,000 to 75,000 people overnight.

• Airbnb: In 2007, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia had moved to San Francisco and they needed help paying their rent. At the time, the city was also hosting a big conference and hotel rooms were in short supply. They built a website offering air mattresses in their living room, and a number of people paid to stay. The founders were able to test a key (and risky) proposition: would people pay money to stay in a stranger’s house.

So there you go - think big, test small, and build a great MVP workshop!