A variety of exercises
The eager participants were given a number of tasks to sink their teeth into.
One of the exercises was to impersonate a developer working for an e-commerce company in search for a flexible way to store and manage content. That person was said to have excellent coding skills, but minimal knowledge of Contentful.
After being split into two smaller groups, each group was asked to come up with a solution for displaying content on different sized screens and resolutions.
Creativity and Post-it notes
It didn’t take long before the whiteboard was full of colorful post-it notes. The scribbled down ideas soon formed a landscape of opinions and solutions. An important aspect of the workshop was to bring together people from different departments. This way, everyone can offer their unique perspective on carving out ideas and improvements.
The importance of feedback
Contentful is all about teamwork, and this collaborative design workshop was no different. After everyone had stuck their post-it notes to the whiteboard, the attendees took turns in further explaining their own ideas as well as giving each other feedback.
What the attendees thought
Julia, one of our backend JavaScript developers, said that she was impressed with how easy it was to further improve design ideas based on everyone's feedback. She acknowledged that collectively iterating through the sketches helped the group to come up with new solutions - and to inspire each other.
Perhaps most importantly, Julia says that she now feels more confident in putting forward her own thoughts and ideas on design.
Another attendee was Maritza, one of our product managers from the Product Success team. She said that the workshop helped her to understand how Contenful’s users might have different ways of learning, and that Contenful should tailor its product onboarding experience to enable different learning paths.
Maritza further explained that she was happy to see that there was so much power in collaboration, and that the idea of bringing people from different departments together made her aware of how problems or solutions can be viewed from many different angles.
Not just a playful exercise
Time flies when you’re having fun. But even though the group shared a good number of laughs during the two and a half hour workshop, the idea is that the participants will pick up skills and cooperation methods such as providing feedback in an actionable and respectful way.
Creating and learning together
The facilitator of the Design Workshop was Mălin Sofrone. His Contentful business card says Product Designer, and he put together this inhouse workshop to help us grow and move forward as a company - as well as individuals.
And did we mention we're looking to further expand our team? Have a look at our current job openings and apply today!
