Event Storming a startup idea remotely

We performed an event storming workshop recently for a new product idea being incubated within a larger organization which has seen phenomenal growth over the last few years and a very successful engineering culture and team.

Event storming has emerged to be a great way to align business stakeholders and engineering teams in taking the best design decisions for the product. This post is not about the technique but a reflection on how well remote collaboration lends itself to conducting event storming workshops. You can find more about event storming here. So let me take you through our experience of conducting our event storming.

Before starting we decided to revisit the book Event Storming by Alberto Brandolini, for a quick revision of the key ideas and approaches. The chapter on Big picture workshop is sufficient if you don’t want to go through the entire book, as it highlights the key concepts. However, since the approach itself is evolving as we learn from the experience of others, feel free to adapt the approach to suit your environment.

Participants: 2 key business stakeholders, 1 lead engineer, 1 product manager and facilitator

We planned this in a smaller working group as we wanted to perform this as a controlled exercise which we felt could be managed better remotely.

Tools: Miro, Wacom Pen tablet, 2 monitor setup for all participants (one with Miro full screen, the other with the video call and the facilitator’s Miro board on screen share mode), Google Meet for video conferencing with external speaker and mic (some with headphones)

Here is the agenda we planned for the day of the workshop.

On the day of the workshop, the facilitator started by inviting everyone to reflect on the goal for the workshop that he proposed:

Explore the business process as a whole and identify opportunities, risks and ideas. Marking as hotspots which require further investigation

As this was an exploration workshop, the goal was modest and more to discover than to dive into details. Explicitly stating the goal at the start of the workshop helped align everyone on expectations.

Next, we walked them through the toolset we would be using in the day. Primarily, we wanted the participants to be comfortable with using Miro as effectively as possible and not distract them from their thought process. Hence, we shared a list of just 4 shortcuts to use the board effectively and allowed the first 5 min for everyone to get comfortable with using these shortcuts.

N: New sticky note ( we kept the default color to orange so every time you select N it opens an orange sticky note

M: mini map to easily navigate across the board by showing and hiding the map view

Ctrl + D: Duplicate element

T: Enter text

We also created a set of sample stickies which users could duplicate in case they wouldn’t remember the shortcuts. This way all they needed to know was Ctrl + D to duplicate.

Armed with the equipment and skilled at using them, we were ready to begin.

We provided only one instruction to get started: Think of events that matter in the business process and log them on the board with the orange sticky note.

We didn’t want to inundate them with instructions and this is why just focusing on one thing, events, and reflecting on the events around it was sufficient to uncover the complexities. We had a thought of some well-known events to kick-off and once they were on the board, everyone got started.

As the day progressed, we introduced new types of stickies based on the level of detail we were able to dive into for specific areas of the business. This was particularly helpful as it avoided delving into details where the business context still had a lot of open questions or hotspots. And this approach also helped us discover the level of clarity in the business processes. For instance, towards the end, the board was full of clusters of red stickies indicating areas that needed further research sprinkled with somewhere we were able to define the read model and commands and hence were relatively clearer.

The dark green stickies or indicators of pockets of value were the gems. At regular intervals, we asked stakeholders to identify what value would the events deliver either as monetary or non-monetary. It uncovered both unnecessary complexities and new opportunities in the business processes.

However, this is also where the process started to diverge from the offline workshop in both good and not so good ways.

Good parts:

Not so good:

In the end:

We concluded the 6-hour session with arrow voting. Each participant was allowed 3 votes and was asked to mark the 3 most pressing concerns or hotspots for them. This helped us focus on the most important questions we needed answers to.

2 weeks since that day, the event storm has emerged as a baseline for the business to think further on gaps and hotspots gaining visibility across the entire organization. Research initiatives have been aligned alongside the most voted questions. We as the software engineering team are immersed in the business and are using the same language as the stakeholders. We have planned our next event storming after we have some insights from the research activities with a larger group. I will update this post when we make some progress. But so far I can confidently say it was 6 hours well spent!

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