2.3 Strategic event storming
Adopt a design approach that focuses on your customer and isn't mired in the past. This means understanding the ideal product, documenting it in ways everyone can understand, and imagining the future.
This is another meaty chapter. I wanted to provide a really thorough example (unlike so many other short articles on event storming). We’ll walk through one of our core customer-facing use cases, building out an actual event map using steps that describe the approach, offer tips for successful workshops, and discuss how to lead up to it. And of course, there’s templates. Event storming is one of my most powerful tools I use to bring value to my own customers. I hope you find it insightful!
Introduction
We’ve established our strategic vision, we know what our business objectives are, and we know what to measure to deliver a successful project. We’re ready to move into design.
You’re building something new. We need to discover how this new thing works, in essence explore its complex inner workings, discover the details of what makes it unique and different and worth implementing. And, we have to make sure what we build creates value for our customer — that it stays true to the promised features and benefits we’ve committed to deliver. Too often, teams enter the design phase without a strategic approach, leading to isolated design sessions and repeated “refine and correct” follow-ups. Event storming’s emphasis on collaborative work gets everyone working together toward a better solution.
Strategic event storming will reveal a lot about your product, its features, and what you need to deliver to be successful. It’s transparent, putting essential business knowledge in front of everyone instead of burying important facts in findings that only some of the team will read. It creates complete workflows because it demands that each contributor is satisfied with what gets recorded in the system. The entire format and workshop drives accelerated group learning — rapidly infusing everyone with comprehensive knowledge about the business. It’s so much better than shuttling between discovery interviews, domain experts, and design sessions hoping that nothing falls through the cracks.
If you haven’t read My formula for running a successful workshop, I recommend it. Event storming is a complex topic. Being well-prepared is important.
The most transformative aspect of event storming as a design process that creates a relentless focus on outcomes: What happens in the system as a result of actions in the system. It does this by recording what matters in the operation of a product. You end up delivering a far more fit for purpose product instead of getting mired in the past, in old technologies, or in outdated ways of thinking about the business.
Event storming gives us the right tool to meet our delivery promises. Its unique approach to exploring a problem space lets us delve deep into organizational and operational inner workings, giving us visibility into ways of working and how outcomes are actually achieved day-to-day. It also pushes us to step away from preconceptions by intentionally shifting the focus away from technology, and toward relevant business events. In other words, it gives us an opportunity to rethink and reimagine while we create something better.
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