One year ago I had the opportunity to participate in a Design Sprint workshop held by Ross Chapman - the founder of Etch Sprints. That workshop was a perfect chance to learn how to speed up the process of product and service development and how to identify crucial business and product questions in order to make fast critical decisions.
As you may already know, Design Sprint is a unique five-day process for answering crucial questions through prototyping and testing ideas with customers. This one-week method was invented by Google Ventures with a goal of boosting development process and innovation strategy that would lead to success.
Someone who had never tried to run a Design Sprint within their organisation or never been a part of this kind of workshop may consider it to be a buzzword or even a mainstream cliche in a hipster oriented startup environment, but - it isn’t. Nonetheless, you should definitely know when to choose a Design Sprint as your go to method and when to stick to your usual flow.
- You have a big project or big problem to solve
- You have a failing product and features
- You are just starting out
- You don’t have the answers
- It’s going to cost a lot of time and/or money
- You already know the solution or what to build
- You are trying to cover all aspects of a very complex product/service at once - You want to explore multiple use cases and hypothesis
- You don’t understand or can’t articulate the problem you are trying to solve - You are looking for just small improvements to your product or service
Even though it is a five-day process which is a lot less than a usual product development path, the whole point of it is to be successful and completely worth of your time, money and efort. Before you dive into the whole process of brainstorming sessions, fun whiteboard doodles and unpredictable user journeys, there is a “Successful Design Sprint Checklist” that you should check first.
Never go unprepared on this journey, especially if you find yourself in a role of a facilitator or a decider. Design Sprint is a method meant to be used by a wide variety of teams - from designers and developers to product managers, marketers and even company founders. That is why is really important to learn what you are dealing with and to be able to educate people that are going to be a part of that Sprint. You need to understand the core, the process and the expected outcome so you don’t find yourself wasting your time while trying to figure out the next step in the middle of the process.
As I already mentioned, almost everyone is more than welcome in this kind of a workshop and that is why you have to be careful while choosing the right people for your team(s). You need to combine diferent roles into one multidisciplinary team that has a good balance of diverse skills, expertise and creativity. It is also important that your team members are open for sharing ideas, collaboration and are purpose-driven. Do not mix and match people that can get ofended easily, are afraid of sharing their opinion in front of others or get easily distracted from the end goal - those are not your Design Sprint people. Overall, it is important to put aside all the fancy titles and hierarchy while running a Design Sprint and work together towards a shared goal.
If you want to run a successful workshop full of happy productive people with some crazy innovative ideas and solutions, you need to set up the right environment for them to work in, which means more than just snacks. Find a room that is cozy, has enough light, comfortable chairs, maybe even a sofa. You’ll also need some big spacious tables, a lot of whiteboards or a glass surfaces to draw and write on, and of course, you’ll need snacks. It is really important to make people feel comfortable in order to encourage their productivity and commitment to work.
You need to be sure that all of your team members fully understand what the Sprint is about. Everyone has to know on which project you will be working and what is your problem statement - loud and clear. It is crucial that everyone is focused towards the same goal and that everyone knows what their roles are and in which team they belong because if you fail at this point, it can cause a large mess during the process.
Since this is a five-day process, it is really important to be able follow the exact steps in order to achieve a goal in a given time. It means that you need to be ready to think fast, iterate more than you usually do and to follow given time frames to finish your tasks. You will be given enough time in each step of the process to develop and work on your ideas, but you don’t want to hang onto something and let it distract you from the remaining steps.
Since this is a fast, iterative process, some of the ideas will be constantly taken on and of of the whiteboard so it is really important to be prepared to capture everything and archive it even if it doesn’t seem that important at the moment. There will be a lot of good ideas that are coming from diferent team members and it is important to be able to capture them all the time during the process. That way, you can always retrieve them if you find them necessary in some point of the time.
Don’t forget to take a break. Although it doesn’t seem like that at first, but this can be a really exhausting process where you’ll do a lot of brainstorming and iterations in a small amount of time. That is why is really important to take a break and clear your head so you can think straight the whole time. Don’t forget to eat and drink during the break, but make sure you are eating light and healthy food so you don’t feel tired. Try not to think of the Sprint while you are on your break because it can help you relax and have a fresh view of things when you come back.
After you are finished with your five-day session, it is important to continue developing your product by moving towards the same goal. Document all the insights and results from the Design sprint and have them written down in a master document you can use and update at any time. In order to know how successful your Design Sprint was, you’ll need to measure the success by testing your prototypes and collecting insight along the way. That way, you can significantly improve your product in the smaller amount of time since you’ve already kicked-of a project so well!
You are now ready to begin with your Design Sprint session! Always remember that Design Sprint can help you find a clear direction in just five days where you can get a better outcome and spend way less money on a project development. This process is a serious time saver where everyone gets heard and appreciated. It can help you get a clear prioritised roadmap while learning some useful productivity exercises along the way. If you are aiming to create new product, enter new market, develop new features or answer critical business problems - Design Sprint is definitely a great way to start.
- Jake Knapp
