We had a wonderful evening last week with Aseel Hamarneh’s talk & workshop where we broke into groups and helped plan some folks’ upcoming sessions where they needed to navigate through the trickiness of facilitating humans.
With a background in engineering, marketing and product, through her career, Aseel kept noticing each group in a cross-functional team speaks its own dialect, and getting them into a room together only works if someone actually knows how to run that room. That’s what pulled her toward facilitation and coaching on top of the usual PM toolkit.
Product Managers are already running a ton of sessions – retros, brainstorms, alignment sessions – and those can feel like we’re just checking things off a list instead of really getting into the heart of the problem or what we’re trying to achieve.
Aseel reminded everyone that 90% of facilitation happens before you enter the room of the session – and that once inside, your job is to hold space, step back, and listen with genuine curiosity.
With that in mind, she covered 3 topics:
- How do you set a goal for the meeting/workshop?
- How do you design the session?
- How do you actually run the room?
Understanding the Goal
Figure out what you actually want before you design the session. If the real goal is “get buy-in on a decision that’s already made,” design for that honestly — give context, then workshop the solution — rather than faking an open brainstorm you have no intention of actually following.
Designing the Session
Aseel brought a simple framework for us to work with: Feel, Think, Do.
Before building any workshop, ask what you want people to feel, think, and do once it’s over. For this ProdAnon session, she wanted us to feel excited and curious (hence the warm-up asking what people wanted to personally get out of the session), think that she knows her stuff (hence sharing her background up front), and do — everyone having their own learning by actually trying the tools in groups rather than just listening.
The practical tricks she shared under each bucket were helpful. To build connection, have people introduce each other rather than themselves, sharing how they first met. To make people feel heard in something like a post-incident review, deliberately give every person or representative from each group a turn describing the impact on their own team, so nobody’s experience gets steamrolled by whoever’s loudest. To get creative thinking flowing, she likes oddball prompts: “If Beyoncé were launching this product, what would she do?” or “What does your press release look like two years from now?” And for actually driving action afterward: break tasks down to the smallest thing someone could do tomorrow, and capture action items as they come up throughout the session rather than scrambling for them in the last five minutes.
Running the Room
Aseel shared several tips & tricks like don’t be afraid of that awkward silence and feel like you need to fill the void. Make sure you’re asking to hear from those who haven’t spoken yet or use a method like sticky notes to make sure the quiet folks have more ‘air time’. If there’s conflict, listen for what’s really underneath the conversation and what emotion is driving it so you can name it and help the group move forward. AND don’t feel like you need to stick to your plan. If something comes up, the conversation is great in 1 space, don’t rush or divert just to get through your agenda.
Lastly, she highlighted something that doesn’t get spoken about much is how much energy it takes to facilitate well. It can be very draining and you may need time to decompress afterwards so protect your calendar right before & right after a session.
Resources – Slide Deck
Our speaker
Aseel Hamarneh is a Product lead with over 15 years’ experience in tech, working multiple organisations and countries. Over that time, she has seen a consistent pattern: teams collaborate constantly and run regular workshops and retros, yet often leave potential on the table because facilitation is treated as a format rather than a leadership skill.
She has designed and led organisation-wide workshops, large-scale training programs, and numerous strategy and ideation sessions. Her focus is not on running meetings, but on using facilitation to drive alignment, generate stronger ideas, and support meaningful decisions during change and complexity.
Drawing on formal facilitation training and executive coaching accreditation, Aseel approaches facilitation as a capability that shapes how teams think and collaborate. Across diverse organisational contexts, she has seen the same principle hold: strong facilitation unlocks the full potential of collective thinking.
Our sponsor: Pendo
Pendo’s mission is to elevate the world’s experience with software. Built on trillions of behavioural data points, Pendo’s product intelligence platform helps companies understand how people and agents use their products and ensure every digital experience delivers real value. And through our Mind the Product and customer communities, we provide education, events, and training to support product and digital leaders everywhere. Pendo is headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, with 10 global offices. Learn more at pendo.io.
Our hosts: NV AI Learning Centre
Natural Velocity solves the Ai supply chain problem. We make it simple to discovery trusted solutions, engage the right delivery partners, and build capability so Ai moves from experimentation to real=world outcomes, responsibly.
