Design Sprint as a part of your Agile transformation

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.” – Albert Einstein

As agile organizations, teams and team members, we must constantly question what could be better in order to continually improve.

 What is Agility?

“Agility is the ability of an organization to delight its customers and employees, while adapting - in time – to its environment changes. “  Grosjean, 2016

This definition highlights 3 pillars of an Agile Organization:

1-     Change adaptation: The environment is changing an uncertain and the Agile organizations should accept this and be able to respond to these uncertainties and changes.

2-     Customer focus: The customer should be an active part in building product with the organization. the Agile organization should give a big value to this source of learning and involve the customer in the process of product development, hear his opinion and try to understand his needs not only what he wants. Delight the customer is an imperative in our ever changing environment.

3-      The employee: these are the engine of building products , without them we have no products. We should keep in mind that "good motivated employee" = good products".

Empowering employee, giving them the good environment to learn and be creative, invest on them , hear them and interpret them as humans is needed to build good products that your customer love.

Retain them with the good support in all aspects, let them inspired by the vision of the company and its purpose and try to build with them a long term relation.

We should keep in mind in the future that "The employee will choose the company and not the company will choose the employee"

Agile evolution

Phase 1: The starting point of the Agility concept:

The agility concept of today isn't the same of yesterday and he will not be the same for the future. It evolves and enriches itself over the years.

Agility is born to respond to the changes in businesses and environments, Change is the starting point of the Agile movement.

Agile frameworks and methods are designed to respond the these changes since the old methods have a limited abilities to handle the new constraints that we live.

the Agile movement is Born in the 1990s in the IT sector, formalized in 2001 by the 17 signatures of the Agile Manifesto (link to the manifesto)

so starting from 1990s Agile = Changes

Phase 2 : The second pillar of Agility

The concept of the Agility was enriched between the 1990 and 2010 and another dimension is added to it which is the customer focus.

The agile organization seeks to reduce the distance with its customers and to permanently delight them, as Stephen Denning (2010) summarizes it: "The purpose of work is to delight clients, not merely to produce goods or services or make money for shareholders".

it is a question of finding ways to produce something new, remarkable, different or unexpected, responding to real needs of the customer

Today, it is necessary to innovate, delight and take care of your customer to stand out from omnipresent competition and thus ensure the survival of your company and business.

this is why a lot of companies invest in new digital skills like User Experience , design thinking, design sprint (we will dive in the next section, stay tuned :) ) and linked them to other practices like User story Mapping and Impact mapping.

So 1990 - 2010 : Agility = Changes + Customer focus

Phase 3: Employee: the engine of delivering good products is the 3 rd pillar of Agility

 Researches have proven that the performance is directly linked to the well-being in the work.

A lot of companies now invest on people and their intrinsic motivation and try to build a long-term relation with them to build on the commitment, trust and transparency which are the key of the success of both the company and the employee . they think win-win relationship.

Collaboration is one of the most important concept that the agility brought.

The used framework like Scrum, Kanban, XP and so on trigger and reinforce collaboration. Working toward the same goal (Sprint goal for example), help each other to remove impediments, learn from each other, collaborate on the same software (CI / CD) and so on...

"Take care about your employee and they will take care about your products"

Especially in this part coming the Leadership approach in play and leader should believe that they work for their team and being in service of them.

So today : Agility = Changes + Customer focus + Satisfied Employee

Design Sprint as a system that go across all the pillars of Agility:

For those who don’t know what is a design sprint and why we use it , they could check my last article about design sprint : Design sprint & Learnings 

Question 1 : How design sprint embraces change?

After 4 days we meet the customer for user testing and learn from him by getting his feedback based on the tangible prototype. Then we iterate and we add the needed change to the prototype and adapt what's needed.

By driving these interview we embrace the uncertainty and we accept that we are only human able only to guess what the customer need (we are not the customer). by testing we pass from guess to check based on real data from real customer.

So the adaptation to change is manifested in the design sprint.

Question 2 : How design sprint focus on the customer?

From the beginning the design sprint is initiated to solve a pain point of the customer or to improve his experience using a product. Keeping that in mind we come after 4 days with a prototype that the customer touch, see and use. Getting feedback from him directly and involving him early in the process of the development of the product is a big push to increase the likelihood to the success of the product. Customers and users like to be heard and involved in the product development process.

So the design sprint bring the second pillar of agility (focus on customer) as a center point for its success.

Question 3 : How design sprint increase Employee satisfaction?

3 quotes that I like about this subject:

Dale Carnegie "The desire for a feeling of importance is one of the chief distinguishing differences between mankind and the animals."

Lincoln once began a letter saying: "Everybody likes a compliment."

William James said: "The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

In the design sprint we invite different Employee with different backgrounds without taking into consideration the hierarchy, the position. The role and the responsibilities.

Design sprint give the same level of playing for all participants by letting them give their opinions and bring their ideas on table and defend them.

When people take this opportunity they feel important, they feel heard and they feel that they are contributing in build products for customers and that they are an active part in their company contributing to its success.

By testing the prototype and the idea , all involved members will hear feedback and compliment from the customer, from the Design sprint Team and from all other stakeholders.

Automatically , the participant will feel appreciated by the results on which they played an active part to build it.

In the other hand , design sprint reinforce collaboration and break the silos in a company. We work together in order to achieve the same goal as a team.

“Design sprint helps in installing the culture of failure which is the foundation of the success.” – Thabet Mabrouk -

This is my experience that I would like to share with you about how Design sprint could help companies understand more the concept of Agility and move toward Agile organization.

So happy to hear your feedback about that and waiting for your comments about the topic.