It's workshop week over at me HQ. My designer buddies and I worked on setting up an exercise to do customer journey maps for B2B customers.

Getting stakeholders outside of product, design, and engineering into the room, talking about customer journeys, persona, feelings, needs, etc. can be a daunting task.

Stakeholders on the commercial sides of a business are often unaccustomed to these approaches. Some have had little exposure to approaches like design thinking, user research, and even value proposition design.

We in the Europe tech world feel this quite strongly.

Therefore it's important to find the right balance and introduce folks to exercises that may be wholly new to them, and may even be a bit scary at first.

Often they'll dismiss these approaches as "childish" or "not serious enough," or will wonder what true benefit they stand to derive from such workshops.

But when done properly, they come out of these workshops better equipped to work with their customers and with much greater confidence in product designers.

How do you engage with your commercial teams? What are the pitfalls you've learned to avoid?