Design Sprints

A design sprint is a time-constrained, five-phase process that uses design thinking with the aim of reducing the risk when bringing a new product, service or a feature to the market. It has been developed by Jake Knapp at GV (formerly, Google Ventures). The process aims to help teams to clearly define goals, validating assumptions and deciding on a product roadmap before starting development. It seeks to address strategic issues, using interdisciplinary teams, rapid prototyping and usability testing. (1)

Claimed uses of the approach include :

  • Designing a new product or a service.
  • Extending an existing experience to a new platform.
  • Adding new features and functionality to a product.
  • Opportunities for improvement of a product .
  • Opportunities for improvement of a service.
  • Supporting organisations in their transformation towards new technologies.

Phases

The creators of the design sprint approach, recommend preparation by picking the proper team, environment, materials and tools working with six key ‘ingredients’.

  1. Understand: Discover the business opportunity, the audience, the competition, the value proposition, and define metrics of success.
  2. Diverge: Explore, develop and iterate creative ways of solving the problem, regardless of feasibility.
  3. Converge: Identify ideas that fit the next product cycle and explore them in further detail through storyboarding.
  4. Prototype: Design and prepare prototype(s) that can be tested with people.
  5. Test: Conduct 1:1 usability testswith 5-6 people from the product’s primary target audience.

Deliverables

The main deliverables after the Design sprint:

  • Answers to a set of vital questions
  • Findings from the sprint (notes, consumer journey maps, storyboards, information architecture diagrams, etc.)
  • Prototypes
  • Report from the usability testing with the findings (backed by testing videos)
  • A plan for next steps
  • Validate or invalidate hypotheses before committing resources to build the solution

Team

The suggested ideal number of people involved in the sprint is 4-7 people and they include the facilitator, designer, a decision maker, product manager, engineer, and someone from companies core business departments (Marketing, Content, Operations, etc.). (1)

Facilitator

If you are looking for a facilitator (or Design Sprint Master) to lead you through this process, feel free to contact me for more information.

(1) Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_sprint