Practical tips for product managers facilitating innovation workshops

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TLDR

Innovation strategy workshops offer a powerful way to reimagine product roadmaps—if done well. In this episode, I’m interviewing Amy Meginnes, a seasoned innovation workshop facilitator from Philips & Co., who shares a framework for designing, executing, and following through on workshops that deliver real outcomes. From doing pre-work and selecting the right participants to engaging activities, convergence techniques, and post-workshop follow-through, Amy breaks down best practices, common pitfalls, and actionable tips for product leaders aiming to run workshops that truly drive value.

Introduction

Your next breakthrough product isn’t hiding in market research reports or competitor analysis. There’s a better way—a well-run innovation strategy workshop. Done right, this workshop can transform your product roadmap, but done poorly, it waste everyone’s time and leave teams more frustrated than inspired. You’ve probably sat through workshops that generated hundreds of sticky notes but zero real outcomes. Or maybe you’ve been asked to facilitate one yourself and wondered how to avoid the common pitfalls. In this discussion, you’ll learn the framework for designing, running, and implementing innovation workshops that actually drive results—from choosing participants to converting ideas into funded initiatives.

Our guest is Amy Meginnes. Amy brings 15 years of experience facilitating innovation workshops for Fortune 500 companies. She’s developed breakthrough strategies for clients including SCJ Johnson, National Science Foundation, World Trade Center Association, US Foods,  Honeywell, and has helped organizations from startups to enterprises transform their innovation processes. She is a strategist at Phillips & Co., a leading strategy and innovation consultancy based in Chicago.

Summary of Concepts Discussed for Product Managers

The Power of Innovation Strategy Workshops:
Innovation workshops provide focused time away from daily routines, encouraging teams to reimagine their products and strategies with fresh, creative thinking.

Essential Pre-work:
Preparation sets the foundation for a successful workshop. Facilitators should interview or survey those closest to the product—frontline employees, customers, and potential users—rather than just executives. Participants benefit from simple pre-work, such as answering a few questions or reflecting on market gaps, ensuring they’re ready to think big and avoid feeling overwhelmed.

Defining Strategic Opportunity Areas:
Amy focuses an innovation strategy workshop on identifying strategic areas of opportunity or whitespaces. These could be new customer segments, differentiators in service delivery, or deeper exploration of technologies like AI. These areas should be identified based on data and customer insights gathered during pre-work, ensuring the workshop targets opportunities with real business impact.

Workshop Structure and Participants:
Amy recommends a workshop duration of 1.5 to 2.5 days. Innovation workshops work best with diverse groups—cross-functional specialists, customer-facing team members, decision makers like a product VP, and, ideally, some actual customers. A manageable group size and variety of perspectives help fuel more productive and energized sessions.

Including Customers and Experts:
Direct customer involvement in workshops or special customer summits provides firsthand feedback and valuable ideas. Inviting outside expert ideators further expands the team’s thinking, challenges assumptions, and helps visualize concepts, making ideation more tangible.

Setting Up a Safe Space:
Start the workshop by setting expectations and creating a psychologically safe environment with playful tools to encourage divergent thinking. Amy hands participants foam balls and invites them to practice throwing them at anybody who is being a naysayer.

Exploring Whitespaces:
During the workshop, Amy takes the team on “excursions” to explore strategic areas of opportunity. This can involve short group discussions or hours-long activities. Amy recommends active, tactile, and varied activities. Collect materials that participants create and have a person at the workshop whose job is dedicated to recording ideas. Amy shares a few ideas for excursions:

Process Map Activity:
One possible activity is visually exploring a process flow. Represent the steps in a process, such as a customer interacting with the product, on a wall. Have participants get out of their seats and talk through pain points. Then sit down and iterate on how the team could address the pain points.

Explore a Different Industry:
Remind participants that 99% of the problems they are experiencing in business have already been solved somewhere else. Get inspiration from how a company in a different industry or a different country has solved a similar problem.

Converging on Ideas:
Wrap up the session by narrowing down ideas through voting or targeted discussions. Invite participants to invite concepts against specific business criteria, such as revenue targets or customer retention, to ensure the winning ideas link directly to organizational goals.

Post-Workshop Follow-Through:
Successful workshops require strong follow-through: assigning ownership of ideas to individuals or small teams, thoroughly documenting discussions, and using established rubrics to assess and advance concepts. Clear accountability and process ensure ideas translate from sticky notes to practical action.

Facilitators’ Energy:
Amy says that being a good workshop facilitator is all about energy. She recommends that facilitators amplify their energy 10% in meetings and 30% in front of an entire room. If leading with high energy doesn’t fit your style, consider finding a colleague who thrives in that role to maximize impact.

Useful Links

• Connect with Amy on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Phillips & Co.
• Connect with Phillips & Co. on Instagram

Innovation Quote

“Aim to be heroically consistent, not consistently heroic.” – unknown

Application Questions

1. What’s the most common pitfall you’ve seen (or experienced) in innovation workshops, and how could it have been avoided?
2. Who outside of your product team could you invite to your next workshop to bring in truly fresh perspectives?
3. What pre-work activity would best help your introverted teammates prepare for a successful ideation session?
4. How do you ensure that workshop ideas actually get resourced and executed, rather than dying on sticky notes?
5. What rubric or criteria could you co-create with key stakeholders to evaluate and advance the best workshop ideas?

Bio

Amy brings 15+ years of expertise in strategy, research, and innovation, transforming organizations from start-ups to the Fortune 500 across technology, life sciences, healthcare, retail, and hospitality. A University of Iowa graduate and former Archeworks fellow, she applies human-centered design to tackle complex challenges – from Chicago’s housing crisis to global education equity as Board Chair of Pangea Educational Development.

Thanks!

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

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