The Situation
VentureSpring Institute, a nonprofit business education and economic development organization, provides training programs that help aspiring entrepreneurs design, launch, and grow small businesses. As part of their Design Your Business curriculum, fellows needed training on using design thinking principles — specifically customer empathy and business model validation — to ensure their ventures address real human needs, not just assumed ones.
The Challenge
The Learning Experience Lead needed a 90-minute virtual instructor-led workshop that would transform how fellows approach customer understanding. The training needed to move beyond theory into practical application.
The training needed to help fellows:
- Analyze the relationship between customer empathy and business model feasibility.
- Execute empathy mapping exercises to synthesize user behaviors, pains, and goals.
- Formulate human-centered problem statements that address core user needs.
- Select effective investigative questions that challenge business assumptions.
The Process
- Discovery & Analysis - I began by identifying the core performance gap: fellows understood customer empathy conceptually but struggled to apply it when validating their own business ideas. This "knowing-doing gap" became the central focus — moving from passive understanding to active application.
- Deep-End-First Pedagogy - Rather than teaching frameworks upfront, I designed the workshop to throw learners into the deep end first. Fellows encounter a realistic customer persona ("Alex") and must make sense of her behaviors before learning formal tools. This productive struggle creates genuine curiosity and primes them for the framework reveal.
- Case Study Integration - I wove in the Airbnb case study as a powerful real-world example. Founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia didn't look at more data — they left their computers and visited hosts in person. This story makes abstract empathy concepts concrete and memorable.
- Facilitator-Led Interactivity - Designed for VILT delivery, I incorporated: zoom polls, breakout rooms, chat activities and whiteboard collaboration.
- Practical Skill Frameworks - I embedded actionable frameworks throughout: Empathy Map quadrants — Says, Thinks, Does, Feels; 4-Whys technique — digging from surface complaints to root needs and Human-centered problem statements — [USER] needs to [NEED] because [INSIGHT]
The Result
The final workshop provided VentureSpring with a streamlined, engaging VILT experience that transforms how fellows approach customer understanding. Fellows leave the session able to conduct empathy mapping exercises, formulate human-centered problem statements, and ask investigative questions that challenge their own business assumptions — skills they immediately apply to their ventures.
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