5 Proven Benefits of Design Sprints

A Product Design Sprint is a highly structured, time-boxed approach to finding the right solution to a business problem. It is an immersive and highly collaborative process that incorporates ideation, simple prototyping, and rapid user testing—all crammed into the span of one exciting week.

Innovative companies use Design Sprints to define new products, improve existing products, and test ideas in a low cost / low-risk environment.

The Design Sprint method was the brainchild of Jake Knapp at Google Ventures. Based on Jake’s experiences at GV, he created the process to incorporate theories and practices from design thinking, gamification, and rapid software prototyping. Google Ventures has fully embraced the process and regularly conducts Design Sprints on their own portfolio companies.

5 Benefits of Using Product Design Sprint in Your Enterprise Business

Discovering and embracing customer empathy

â—‹     Including your users in the discussion of a problem forces stakeholders to acknowledge the customer viewpoint and makes the problem more “real.”

â—‹     By interviewing and testing the proposed solution with actual customers early, you can uncover usability flaws and develop a better understanding of what the user needs the product to do.

Aligning your team around a product or vision

â—‹     When all your stakeholders are in agreement about the desired outcomes and how the solution will behave, you can eliminate the impact of product conflicts down the road.

â—‹     The process uncovers gaps in your organization’s understanding of the problem and of potential risks or impacts of the solution.

Validating your Assumptions

â—‹     If you are using psychographic data to make data-driven decisions, you can validate that the real-life users behave the way the data predicted.

â—‹     Rapid Prototyping eliminates the cost and time impacts that come with building a full product before testing for usability and market fit with customers.

Making Rapid Decisions

â—‹     Enforced timeboxing and decision making will boost your team’s creativity and focus. The first goal of any sprint is to make decisions about assumptions to test, so your team will be forced to come to agreements rapidly or let the decider make the call.

â—‹     Without all the regular distractions and demands on your team that happen in a typical workday, the team can focus on the solution.

â—‹     Going from concept to testing, a prototype in a week is about as time and cost efficient as it gets. We have seen enterprise clients complete the equivalent of 4-5 months of discovery and product design in just 1 week’s work.

Team Building

â—‹     The process is purposefully immersive and collaborative. When a cross-organizational team is locked in a room for a week and told to solve a difficult problem, it is intensely unifying.

â—‹     When everyone on a team feels like their voices and ideas are valued, everyone brings their passion to find the best solution.

Summary

●    Running a design sprint isn’t a silver bullet, but it is a powerful tool that allows enterprise companies and startups to innovate around ideas and create validated product prototypes in less than a week, with minimal capital.

This article first appeared on the SolutionStream blog at solutionstream.com