Let's make a decision. We Don’t Need Another Workshop.

Collaboration is only useful when it moves the work forward.

There is a familiar scene in product development: a crowded calendar invite, a carefully prepared Miro board, dozens of sticky notes and an hour spent discussing a problem everyone has already discussed before. The meeting ends with agreement that the conversation was “really helpful,” followed by a promise to circle back.

What remains unclear is what anyone actually decided.

Collaboration is essential, particularly inside enterprise organizations where a single product decision can involve design, engineering, operations, research, risk and business priorities. The problem begins when collaboration itself becomes evidence of progress. A full calendar can look like momentum, but participation and progress are not the same thing.

The endless pursuit of alignment

Teams often treat alignment as unanimous agreement, which can keep decisions open far longer than necessary. Product may have one priority, research may reveal another, engineering may introduce a constraint, and operations may understand consequences that no one else can see.

Those perspectives should inform the decision, but they do not all need to arrive at the same conclusion.

Good alignment means the relevant perspectives have been considered, the tradeoffs are understood and the person responsible for the decision has enough information to make it.

Start with the decision

Before scheduling a workshop, I think teams should be able to answer one question: What needs to be different when this meeting ends?

And no, “We need to align” is not an answer.

“We need to choose which problem to prioritize” is. So is deciding between two approaches, resolving conflicting requirements or determining what can realistically be delivered.

Once the decision is clear, the meeting can be structured around the evidence required to make it. Research, business goals, technical constraints and operational realities become inputs to a decision rather than material for another round of discussion.

Sometimes collaboration is really an ownership problem

Many meetings drag on because everyone has been invited to contribute, but nobody knows who ultimately makes the call.

A healthy team distinguishes between having input and having ownership. Designers can advocate for the experience, researchers can bring evidence, engineers can identify technical implications, and operational partners can surface downstream consequences. Those perspectives make decisions stronger without requiring every participant to have equal authority over the outcome.

Without that clarity, teams can end up making decisions through exhaustion. The option that encounters the least resistance eventually survives.

Measure collaboration by what happens next

I’ve become less interested in whether a meeting felt productive and more interested in what became possible because it happened.

Did we make the decision we came to make? Is there a clear owner? Do we understand why we chose this direction? Does everyone know what happens next?

Workshops, critiques and stakeholder reviews can all be valuable. But they are methods, not outcomes. Their value comes from helping teams understand something, resolve something or move something forward.

Sometimes another workshop is exactly what a project needs.

But sometimes the better question is simply: What decision are we actually waiting to make?

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