Design Thinking
Workshops for Innovation Teams

WANDR facilitates design thinking workshops that take cross-functional teams from misalignment and stalled momentum to clear priorities, shared direction, and actionable next steps in one or two days.

Book a workshop consultation See our work

"WANDR's workshops go beyond theory. Every exercise is tied to a real decision."

Vanessa Wong, VP of Product at Poshmark

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"WANDR brought fresh perspective and innovative thinking that helped our teams tackle problems we'd been circling for months. They know how to get a room of people aligned fast."

Luis Cordova, Marketing Communications Chief, AFWERX

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“We got a whole new perspective of how we need to build our product after our workshop with Wandr. They taught us new ways of approaching the same problem and we really appreciate their energy and enthusiasm.”

Brian Rodriguez, Founder

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LA - Silicon Valley - Austin - Miami - Mexico City

Design Thinking Workshops Trusted by Adobe, The U.S. Air Force, and Poshmark

Ten years. 50+ organizations. We've facilitated design thinking workshops for early-stage founders, Fortune 500 product orgs, and U.S. Air Force teams, and after that many sessions you learn exactly where a workshop goes wrong.

Most facilitators don't build products nor work in tech. We're product designers and UX strategists first, so every exercise is grounded in how things actually get made and how a room of fifteen actually reaches a decision.

Which is why ours don't end with a wall of sticky notes. They end with problem statements, prioritized opportunities, and assigned next steps that carry into your work the following week.

Dotted world map showing Wandr locations

Proven impact

Design thinking workshop
in practice.

We've run workshops with organizations that have high standards and no patience for theory.

FORTUNE 500 · 3-Day Workshop

Adobe

Adobe sponsored a three-day design thinking workshop series for founders in its own community, ten per cohort, run across multiple groups. Founders learned the methods by building and testing real prototypes in Adobe XD over the three days rather than watching someone demo the process. They left with something they could run themselves, which was the point: a structured way to approach problems back at their own companies.

"While their skills were valuable, it was ultimately their client management and interaction that impressed us."Brett McLaughlin, CTO, Sticky.io

See full case study

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT · 1-Day Workshop

U.S. Air Force

One-day design thinking workshops run with teams across the U.S. Air Force, repeatedly over several years. Different commands, different roles, different problems — some of which the teams had been working for months. The framework held across all of them, and it was taught so people could keep using it on their own decisions long after the session ended.

"Without WANDR, we wouldn't have been able to effectively communicate our product's value proposition."Alex Dunbrack · Co-founder & COO, Vectrix

See full case study

Case 01 / 02

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By the numbers

Design thinking workshops that compound.

2000+

participants across every workshop we've run

50+

workshops facilitated across a decade

03Format

2 Days

from misalignment to a direction the whole room owns.

04Room-size

10-15

typical participants, enough for real friction without losing the thread.

05Output

problem statements, prioritized opportunities, assigned next steps.

06Case study

ADOBE

chose WANDR to teach design thinking to its founder community.

See case study ↗

Trusted by

The reality

The problem was never the ideas.

It was aligning on which one.

01 / 04

$75B+

estimated annual cost of misalignment in the workplace — wasted meetings, redundant work, and decisions that get reversed.

McKinsey & Company

01 / 04

86%

of employees and executives cite lack of collaboration and poor communication as the primary cause of workplace failures.

Salesforce State of the Connected Customer

01 / 04

more likely to ship solutions that get adopted, when teams align on problem definition before ideation.

IDEO DESIGN THINKING RESEARCH

01 / 04

2 Days

is all it takes for a well-facilitated design thinking workshop to create the alignment that most teams spend months trying to achieve in meetings.

WANDR workshop data

Our Design Thinking
Workshop Process

Every workshop is designed around the specific challenge your team is facing, not a generic agenda pulled from a template. We define the right format, the right exercises, and the right outcomes before anyone enters the room.

5 phases →

Phase 01Discover

Workshop Planning & Format

We define the right format upfront (one-day or multi-day, remote or in-person) based on your team's goals, size, and constraints. Every exercise is chosen for your specific situation, not recycled from a previous client.

Phase 02Plan

Problem Framing & Alignment

We align your team on the core problem, key assumptions, and success criteria before jumping into solutions. This step alone prevents most of the circular debates that kill workshop momentum.

Phase 03Design

Structured Ideation

Guided exercises help generate focused, high-impact ideas grounded in real product and business constraints, not abstract brainstorming that produces 200 sticky notes and zero priorities.

Phase 04Deliver

Prototyping & Exploration

Key ideas are turned into simple prototypes, flows, or Pecha Kucha presentations, making them tangible and easier for your team to evaluate, challenge, and build on.

Phase 05Measure

Synthesis & Next Steps

We distill insights, define clear next steps, and assign ownership so the momentum from the workshop carries directly into your product, design, and engineering work the week after.

Phase 01 of 05

→ Continue scrolling

What you get

Every Design thinking workshop
is tailored to your team’s needs

A strong design thinking workshop delivers more than ideas. It creates the clarity and direction your product and development teams can act on immediately.

01 / 06Problem Statements

Problem Statements

The problem the room agreed to solve, written down and rooted in real user needs. Usually two or three, sharp enough that nobody can reinterpret them next week.

02 / 06Opportunity Map

Opportunity Map

Ranked opportunity areas scored against business and product goals, so the team knows what comes first and what's parked.

03 / 06Solution & Concepts

Solution & Concepts

Early directions made concrete — sketches, flows, and rough prototypes your team can react to and hand to engineering.

04 / 06Decision

Decision

What the room decided, what it rejected, and why. The document that stops the same debate reopening in six weeks.

05 / 06Action Plan

Action Plan

Next steps with names attached and a sequence, not a wall of post-its nobody acts on.

06 / 06Workshop Artifacts

Workshop Artifacts

Everything generated in the room, captured and organized — the boards, the exercises, and the raw material behind every decision.

Compare

How WANDR’s Design Thinking Workshop compares.

	In-house Facilitation	General Facilitator
Neutrality	Someone in the room reports to someone else in it	Neutral but unfamiliar	Neutral, and briefed before day one
Product fluency	Deep, but only one team's view	Process expertise, not product	Product designers and UX strategists first
Pushback	Hard to challenge your own leadership	Unlikely to risk the engagement	We challenge bad ideas
Outputs	Notes and a Miro board	A well-run session	Problem statements, priorities, assigned owners
Participation	Whoever should facilitate can't contribute	Everyone contributes	Everyone contributes, including your leads
After the room	Momentum fades by the next sprint	Facilitator leaves, work stalls	We can take the output into design and build

What our clients say

Verified Clutch reviews.

No. 01

“

We've completed about 20 successful projects together at this point. Some of them have been well-reviewed on Clutch, which is an important metric. As a result of their support, we were able to close more deals and increase our revenue as well. Our partnership was a key factor in closing up to 10 of the projects we did together.

David BarlevCEO, Goji Labs

See full Clutch review

No. 02

“

We flew out for a two-day brainstorming/whiteboarding session at their offices. We went through what we wanted to accomplish, what our message was, and what our product was. After this, they had an idea of the message we wanted to create around a brand and really creating the brand and the look and feel of that on the web. They designed and built a responsive website, which was fantastic.

Michael CaplovitzCEO, GotChkd

See full Clutch review

No. 03

“

After we hired WANDR, I went to LA for the project kickstart meeting, where we spent two full days brainstorming the project, reviewing each detail on the project requirements. The project evolved very fast, they were very responsive and very easy to communicate, beyond expected in availability.

Marcio AlexandroniCTO, Areatec Tecnologia

See full Clutch review

Why Wandr?

Design Thinking Workshops
That End With Decisions,

Not Sticky Notes

‍

01 · Who runs it

Product designers, not generic facilitators.

We are UX strategists and product designers first, which means every exercise we run is grounded in how products actually get built and how teams actually make decisions. We don't bring a generic workshop playbook. We bring a decade of product design experience into every room we facilitate.

02 · Our clients

Trusted by teams with no patience for theory.

Adobe chose us to represent design thinking to their own founder community. The U.S. Air Force brought us back across multiple teams. Poshmark's leadership spent two full days working through their 10-year vision with us. These aren't organizations that tolerate workshops that don't deliver.

03 · The method

The same framework behind every WANDR engagement.

Our design thinking workshop methodology is not a separate offering. It's how we start every client engagement at WANDR. Every product we've designed, every MVP we've shipped, every audit we've delivered started with this framework. That's not a credential. That's a track record.

The difference

Same team. A shared direction
‍they can actually execute on.

Most teams don't walk in short on ideas. They walk in unable to agree which one to build, so the same debate reopens every week. Here's what two days changes.

Mercy For Animals website after the Wandr redesign

Mercy For Animals website before the Wandr redesign

BeforeAfter

Before The Workshop

✕Strategy feels abstract, disconnected from what engineering is actually building
✕Stakeholders disagree on priorities, so every meeting restarts the same debate
✕Good ideas across the team, but nothing moves because nobody owns anything
✕Product, design, and engineering are solving different versions of the same problem

After The Workshop

✓One problem statement that product, design, engineering, and leadership all agree on
✓Prioritized opportunity areas tied to business goals and user needs, not personal preference
✓Early solution concepts with assigned owners and a clear path to execution
✓Momentum that carries into the following week, because it ended with next steps, not a PDF

This is what every WANDR design thinking workshop delivers·regardless of whether you're a 3-person startup·or a cross-functional enterprise team.See full case study

Who this is for

You understand that the most expensive thing in a product organization isn't bad design… it's misalignment. Every week your team spends debating the wrong question, rebuilding something that could have been decided in a room, or shipping something nobody agrees was the right priority is a week of runway you don't get back

We work with Innovation Leaders, VPs of Product and founders who know their team is capable and just needs a structured session to get everyone pointing in the same direction. Whether you're kicking off a new product, realigning after a pivot, or breaking a strategic deadlock, a design thinking workshop is the fastest path from ambiguity to momentum.

First step

Not sure which workshop format is right for your team?

Tell us what your team is working through (a new product, a strategic pivot, a cross-functional alignment challenge) and we'll recommend the right format, length, and structure for your specific situation.

30 minutes. No commitment. Just clarity on whether a workshop is the right next step.

Book a workshop consultation

Sample report

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Design Thinking Workshops

Frequently asked.

Click any question to expand. If yours isn't here, write to us.

Design thinking workshops work best with cross-functional teams: product managers, designers, engineers, and a decision-maker with authority to commit. Ten to fifteen people is the practical range — enough for real disagreement, small enough that everyone contributes. The specific mix depends on the challenge, which we work out with you during planning.

A design thinking workshop moves through structured activities: problem framing, ideation, prototyping, and synthesis. Every exercise ties to a real product decision rather than a general creativity exercise. Our Poshmark offsite ran Future Mapping, BHAG definition, How Might We, Crazy 8s, and Pecha Kucha pitches. Adobe sessions combined the methodology with live prototyping in Adobe XD. Each agenda is built for the specific team and challenge.

Most design thinking workshops run one to two full days. Product strategy workshops typically need two; multi-team enterprise alignment can require three. Half-day formats work for narrowly scoped problems. We set the format around what the challenge requires rather than what's easiest to get on calendars.

Hire an external facilitator when stakes are high, alignment is weak, or teams are pulling in different directions. Adobe, the U.S. Air Force, and Poshmark all chose external facilitation, and all came back for more sessions. Internal facilitation works for incremental problems on teams that already agree. The tradeoff is that whoever runs the room can't fully participate in it, and internal facilitators rarely challenge their own leadership.

Brainstorming produces ideas; a design thinking workshop produces decisions. Every exercise is tied to a real product constraint, and the session ends with prioritized opportunities and assigned owners rather than a list of possibilities. We're product designers and UX strategists first, so the output is shaped to move directly into design and engineering work.

Design thinking workshops sharpen product strategy by forcing teams to define the problem, test assumptions, and rank priorities before resources are committed. The Poshmark leadership offsite defined a ten-year BHAG and surfaced the specific obstacles blocking it, giving the team a strategic foundation they could act on immediately.

Every WANDR design thinking workshop delivers agreed problem statements, a ranked opportunity map, early solution concepts, a record of what was decided and rejected, and next steps with named owners. The captured boards and exercises come too, but the boards are the byproduct — the decisions are the deliverable.

Design thinking workshop pricing depends on duration, number of participants, and whether the session is remote or in person. Single-day facilitated sessions sit at the lower end; multi-day enterprise engagements with pre-workshop research at the higher. We scope after understanding the challenge, and we'll tell you if a workshop isn't the right instrument for it.

Yes. We've run remote design thinking workshops since 2020, including a two-day founder kickoff over Zoom and Miro at the start of lockdown. Remote sessions need tighter time-boxing and more pre-work than in-person, but they produce the same outputs and let you include people who couldn't otherwise attend.

Your team leaves with owners assigned and a sequence to work through, so execution starts the following week rather than after another round of alignment meetings. Some teams take it from there. Others continue with WANDR into design and build, since the same team that framed the problem is already up to speed on it.

Ask a question

Let's get your team aligned.

Let's figure out

‍What you actually need

Tell us what your team is working through. We'll recommend the right workshop format and tell you honestly whether facilitation is the right next step or whether a different engagement would serve you better.

Ready to go further?

Book a workshop consultation

Our blog

Design Thinking Workshop related reading.

Design Thinking Workshops for Innovation Teams

Adobe

U.S. Air Force

Workshop Planning & Format

Problem Framing & Alignment

Structured Ideation

Prototyping & Exploration

Synthesis & Next Steps

Problem Statements

Opportunity Map

Solution & Concepts

Decision

Action Plan

Workshop Artifacts

Product designers, not generic facilitators.

Trusted by teams with no patience for theory.

The same framework behind every WANDR engagement.

Get started in seconds.

An Introduction to Design Thinking Process

Design Thinking
Workshops for Innovation Teams