Inviting the right people

Before anything else it's critical to find and get buy-in from a diverse set of domain experts from across your organization. A domain expert is anyone with knowledge of the business domain that you'll be EventStorming. Domain experts can reside anywhere in your organization and are independent from job role and title.

To run a successful workshop, you'll need to have the right people on board: a mix of knowledge and curiosity, but most of all you'll need people that care about the problem.

- Alberto Brandolini, EventStorming creator

• Bringing people together from various departments (sales, marketing, product, engineering, customer support, etc) helps you to capture the entire end-to-end flow. Rarely does a single person know everything across a workflow. Different people may know the start, middle, or end of a business process. Together, the team will arrive at a shared understanding using their collective knowledge.
• Different people will spot different potential issues or opportunities. Someone from engineering may focus on technical constraints, while someone from UX may see usability issues. A broad set of eyes helps identify more areas for improvement.
• Getting buy-in across the organization is crucial for driving change after EventStorming workshops. Having representatives from various teams participate makes them feel ownership in the process and outcome. They can become advocates for implementing improvements.
• You want a balance of senior stakeholders who have authority and experience, as well as on-the-ground staff who know low-level details. EventStorming helps to make connections between your business and engineering.

EventStorming should not be run by a single team or individual. An engineering or product team running EventStorming by themselves will miss the key benefits. Cross-team communication and understanding are the main benefits of EventStorming.

The right mix of people leads to a richer picture of the current state, alignment on future vision, and shared commitment to executing on the ideas generated. Cross-functional collaboration is critical.