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€549^.00 Excl. 21% VAT Register for this workshop → Get a single workshop, or bundle with a conference.

Maybe your team values research, but decisions are made before anyone talks to customers. Maybe you’re working to improve consistency, but every product team wants to do things their own way. Or maybe you’ve put a lot of energy into a thoughtful design process, only to find that nobody wants to follow it.

It’s easy to assume these are problems with people, processes, or priorities. But there’s another force at work that we don’t talk about nearly enough: culture.

Every organization has a culture. So does every team within it. These cultures influence how decisions get made, how people collaborate, how change happens, and what kind of work gets valued. When the way we approach our work doesn’t align with the culture around us, even our best ideas can struggle to gain traction.

What if we could learn to recognize those cultural dynamics and use that understanding to change how we work?

In this full-day workshop, we’ll explore how organizational culture shapes the success of product building efforts. We’ll learn to identify cultural signals, assess the environments we work in, and find practical ways to reduce friction and build momentum.

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What will we do?

Throughout the workshop, we’ll engage in conversation, reflection, and practical activities designed to build skills you can use immediately.

• Spot the Signs: Learn to recognize cultural signals in the behaviors, language, and decisions of the people around you.
• See It in Action: Watch Ben conduct a live cultural assessment to uncover how culture influences the way a team works.
• Practice the Process: Use a structured framework to assess your own cultural tendencies, your team’s culture, and the broader organization.
• Find a Way Forward: Explore how you might adapt your approach to whatever work you do and change based on what you’ve learned.

What will we learn?

We’ll explore:

• What we actually mean when we talk about organizational culture,
• Different types of organizational culture and how they influence design, engineering, and product work,
• Why some teams embrace new ideas while others resist them,
• How cultural differences between teams create friction,
• Why there isn’t a single best process for every organization,
• How to adapt your ways of working without compromising the quality of your work.

What will you take away?

By the end of the workshop, you’ll be able to:

• Recognize the cultural signals that influence how product design and development work happens in your organization,
• Assess your own cultural preferences and those of your team,
• Better understand the relationship between your team’s culture and the broader organization,
• Identify opportunities to reduce friction and improve collaboration,
• Make more intentional decisions about how to introduce new ideas, processes, and ways of working,
• Use a lightweight Google Sheets-based tool to run future cultural assessments.

The goal isn’t to change your organization’s culture overnight. It’s to better understand the environment you’re working in so you can make more thoughtful decisions about how to move forward.

We spend so much of our time learning how to design better experiences, build better products, and improve our processes. But the success of that work depends on the people and cultures surrounding it. Learning to understand those cultures may be one of the most valuable skills we can develop.

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Who is this workshop for?

This workshop is intended for designers, UX practitioners, engineers, leaders, and anyone trying to improve the way their organization creates products and experiences.

It’s especially useful if you:

• Feel like you’re constantly running into resistance when trying to improve how your team works,
• Struggle to get buy-in for research, design decisions, or new ways of working,
• Want to improve collaboration between design, product, and engineering,
• Are navigating complex organizational dynamics or leading change,
• Want to understand why approaches that work well in one team fail in another.

You don’t need to be a director or executive in order to use this knowledge to your advantage. You just need to be curious about why people work the way they do.

What hardware/software do you need?

We won’t be designing in a canvas. We won’t be writing code. We will be using spreadsheets. We will be learning from each other. And we will have fun doing it.

Bring a laptop with access to Google Sheets.

About Ben Callahan

Ben Callahan is a researcher, educator, and consultant focused on design systems and the organizations that create them. He is the founder of Sparkbox, a digital studio; Redwoods, a community for design system practitioners; and The Question, a collaborative research show exploring the challenges shaping the design system space.

Time & Location

This full-day workshop will take place the day after SmashingConf. The workshop will be running from 09:30 to 17:00 on Friday, May 21, 2027.

The workshop is happening at Theo Thijssenhuis (HvA), Wibautstraat 2-4, 1091 RZ Amsterdam.

Schedule for Friday, May 21, 2027

09:00 – Doors open, Registration
09:30 – Introduction & Kick-off
11:00 – Coffee Break
13:00 – Lunch
14:00 – Afternoon Session
15:30 – Coffee Break
17:00 – The End

Save 100 EUR when signing up for the conference and a workshop!