Design Sprint: The What, How and Why
Alvin Hermanto
High-impact, low-risk MVP acceleration partner for non-technical founders ?? Fractional CXO – Specialist in SaaS, Ecommerce and transactional B2B & DTC
What is a Design Sprint?
Design sprint is a 5-day structured process to solve a complex problem. And you have a user-validated prototype, or something close enough, by the end of day 5.
Sounds lofty?
Well, not really. It is possible when you put all relevant stakeholders in a room with a set of detailed agenda on how you’re going to tackle the issue, build a prototype and test it with your users.
This method was created by Jake Knapp, a former Google employee, in 2010. He described it as a medley of the “greatest hits” of design thinking, human psychology, business strategies and techniques.
His book called “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in 5 Days” went on to become a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller.
What is the difference between Design Thinking and Design Sprint?
Design thinking is a set of principles to help solve a complex problem.
Design sprint takes these principles and condenses them into a 5-day step-by-step process to produce a working, user-validated prototype. A sprint gives you tangible solutions within a short timeframe.
To use an analogy, design thinking is the rules, and design sprint is a game created based on the rules.
Some people like to use the analogy of design thinking as a set of guidelines to make a dish, such as pizzas, while a design sprint is a detailed recipe on how to make a margherita pizza.
When should you use Design Sprints?
1. When you have a complex or nagging problem
If there is a business problem that keeps popping up, or an intricate one, then it’s ripe for a design sprint. This happens often in large companies with cross-functional teams, or with products that cater to a variety of users.
2. When you may have a risky and expensive project
If the solution is likely looking like an excessive, resource-hungry, and costly affair, then you should run a design sprint for it.
Design sprints help clarify the problem and produce realistic solutions with customer validation. Getting early feedback before spending money and resources gives you some form of guarantee to the risk you’re about to take.
3. When you take too long from idea to launch
This happens even in the best of companies. Sometimes an idea sits in cold storage for years, or an issue remains unresolved for months. Things get discussed, put on hold, and then end up sitting in a vortex of oblivion until something breaks and you get a feeling of déjà vu that you’ve talked about it before.
Design sprints force you to act because the output is a prototype and recommendations for the next steps. Furthermore, one of the biggest benefits is you’re discarding conventional processes for bringing an idea to life. You can resolve an issue or build on an idea within a week.
Is one Design Sprint enough?
When a problem is huge or extraordinarily complex, one design sprint will not be enough. You must run more sprints, or what I call follow-up sprints. These sprints could be about refining an idea or attacking the issue section by section based on a framework you’ve designed in the first sprint.
It’s like running a marathon, broken up into many short sprints.
Design sprints are great. But it’s unrealistic to expect it to resolve all your business issues because problems will always arise, and solutions are never perfect.
How long is a Design Sprint?
A standard design sprint takes 5 consecutive days, typically running from Monday to Friday, where everyone is fully committed throughout.
But it’s up to you how you want to run it. It can be 5 non-consecutive days due to your internal processes and schedule. You can also cut it short to 3 or 4 days based on your needs, problems, products, and users.
Who should be in a Design Sprint?
My design sprints are usually made up of a core team and expert members.
A core team is composed of people who are fully involved throughout the sprint. From my experience, a design sprint works best when you have between 5 and 7 people in the core team.
They are:
Meanwhile, expert members are usually senior executives, and specialists from operations, marketing, sales, finance, and research teams. There is no limit to the number of experts who can attend the sprint. But they don’t stay for the full duration of the sprint, and come and go as needed to share their insight and opinions.
Ideally, you want everyone to bring a different set of skills or expertise to deliver a wholesome solution.
Also, too many cooks do spoil the broth. Inviting too many people would defeat the purpose of the design sprint, which is to innovate as fast as possible. It also means finishing within 5 days is next to impossible.
What tools do you need to run a Design Sprint?
You need a room that is large enough for everyone to work comfortably over 5 days. The basic room setup includes tables, chairs, a whiteboard, and a large amount of wall space to display all your work.
Everything you need to run a design sprint can be bought at Officeworks, or your local stationery store. Things you should prepare:
What is the Design Sprint process?
领英推荐
The process is straightforward. Gather all relevant stakeholders in a room from Monday to Friday, follow a structured agenda, and you will end up with a path forward for your problem – complete with user feedback, metrics of success and actionable items.
However, there is something I like to do before a design sprint starts. I call it “Preflight.”
What is preflight?
This is phase that takes place before a sprint, where we do a customer or user research. We gather relevant existing data, research, and feedback from users to set the scene for our design sprint.
A preflight should:
These 3 items make up what I call the “Customer Journey Artefact”. This is the starting point of your design sprint and will be referenced throughout the 5 days.
If you fail to prepare this, your sprint may drag on unnecessarily and may never reach its target. A preflight gets everyone on the same starting point from Day 1.
Day 1: Mapping
Objective: Plot the problem and identify the most important goal
Activity:
With the preflight information on the wall, you start tackling the problem by:
Output: A primary goal, or the goal that will give the biggest impact, to solve your problem.
Day 2: Brainstorming
Objective: Generate a selection of ideas to achieve your primary goal identified in Day 1.
Activity:
Output: 3 or more big ideas to achieve your primary goal and address the problem.
Day 3: Deciding
Objective: Vote on the best idea to pursue
Activity:
Output: A high-level plan to build a prototype
Day 4: Prototyping
Objective: Build a low or high-fidelity prototype for user testing.
Activity:
Output: A working prototype and a set plan for user testing
Day 5: Testing
Objective: Test the prototype to get user feedback
Activity:
Output: A summary of your problem, ideas, prototype, and user feedback with a set of strong recommendations for the next course of action.
What is Design Sprint 2.0?
Design sprint 2.0 is a shorter version of the original design sprint. Instead of spending 5 days on it, you can condense it to 3 or 4 days.
You tend to do this when it’s not possible to clear everyone’s schedule for 5 days straight. Busy executives need not attend the prototyping and testing days but are kept in the loop of the progress.
If it is a simpler problem, processes can also be condensed to cut the sprint time.
In my agency, we adapt our design sprints according to each client’s needs and issues. But the basic premise remains the same – to quickly find answers, build, test and get user feedback.