The First GV Type Design Sprint @ Allianz Lanka

"Jake Knapp is THE GOD"

This is the first sentence that came to my mind after reading The Sprint book for the first time. Might not be a spiritual God, but the God of Design Sprints, that's for sure. The Design Sprint is an effective framework for making your creativity work. And the best is to watch it at work. Even that! through productive collaboration and teamwork. The cherry on top.

So as Allianz BAs from inspiration we got by reading Jake's famous Sprint book, we tried our very first Design Sprint on 14th November. We used the framework in one of the most mission-critical projects in the company. Before getting there into more details, I will slow down a little. And give a short intro into what Design Sprint really is, for those who are new to the term.

Design Sprint is a five-day framework of using design thinking developed at Google by Jake Knapp and the team. This was way back in 2010. And when Jake joined the Google Ventures team he started taking this famous 5-day design sprint framework to Startups that Google works with. With his famous "Sprint" book, now most teams around the world are using Sprints at the design stage. At Google now the 5-day sprints had evolved into different 1-day and 2-day sprints according to the needs of different product teams there.

What Design Sprints does is far beyond just fancy names and brands that follow this. There's a science behind sprints that is very human. If deriving from Jake's book, I will go to the following example to let you understand the depth of the concept.

J.K Rowling was turned down by 8 publishers before getting her book published for the first time. It was an evening after work, a publisher in London, Nigel Newton head home with the sample pages of an already rejected children's storybook, rejected by story experts in 8 different famous publication places. That evening Nigel gave the sample to his 8-year-old daughter Alice to read.

The response from his little daughter is so impressive that Nigel was forced to publish copies of the book. Which became the Harry Potter we all know today. So same as your software project business users, these storybook experts were not able to identify the potential at verification. It was the end user. The girl, who understood the product. So that's how the billion-dollar story of Harry Potter began. With Alice, or the end user. This is the capability that's being harvested in Design Sprints. A short 5-day design thinking activity where on 5th-day validation is done with real users.

The 5-day Sprint goes as follows,

So Allianz Insurance Lanka Limited had its first Sprint with a proper plan going forward for the largest project currently at its initial stages. There is a lot to be identified and a lot to be understood. Where still the full path is not clear to the participating stakeholders. But with a Design Sprint coming up all of us are confident and were looking forward to it.

Day 1 Monday - Map

Everyone gathered on time at the Sprint room and started deciding a goal for the product. Then after being so optimistic team became pessimistic and wrote down every single way that the goal will fail. Then came mapping the solution with a flow chart on the whiteboard.

Then the experts were interviewed from departments to check if we missed anything in the map we drew. Notes were taken as How-Might-We's and a final grouping was done. The decider in the room (In our case the AGM) at the end of the day by checking the evidence collected, HMWs, Map, and Product Goal, circling on the whiteboard the items we need to focus on in this Sprint. It was an initial step in the long journey of the software product we are planning for the company. But a very important step as the evidence of the day suggested. We called this the Target for Sprint.

Day 2 Tuesday - Sketch

Tuesday is the ideation day. First, we started with 3-minute Lightning demos where each person will demo a solution from around the world that we can use to design our sprints work as selected on Monday, the Sprint's solution. After that it was for each person to open Laptops, walk around the room and find inspiration. To collect data. Then to note down. After that, individually everyone worked on a solution. Then it's time for Crazy 8s to find variations of the most propelling idea each one came up with.

You can read more on how to do Crazy 8s (And many more) on the below page.

Then The final sketches were drawn individually, and the facilitator collected them for Wednesday's voting.

Day 3 Wednesday - Vote

This is the selection day for the solution sketches that the team is going to prototype on Thursday. So the morning was dedicated to the voting procedure and to deciding the solution. When the Decider selected a solution, later in the morning session team remixed the solution with features in other sketched solutions which are also having a high amount of votes.

End of the day a storyboard was created on the whiteboard for the solution. A note, if you are willing to become a facilitator in a Design sprint, at this stage do not try to come up with new solutions. Use the decider to handle the ideas that pop up here and there because the team is time bound to end the storyboard within the day. You will need a full day tomorrow for Prototyping.

Day 4 Thursday - Prototype

The full Thursday was spent on Prototyping and designing the experience for the users who will be interviewed on Friday. For this, we used Figma as the prototyping tool.

Day 5 Friday - Validate

On the final day, we unraveled our prototypes to 5 end users and got their opinions. Interviewer connected with the user in a video meeting while the rest of the team view the live footage from the video conference room and took notes on the user's reactions. End of the day with successful inputs we were able to end the 1st Design Sprint of Allianz on a high note.

Now by looking back at the mental state at the very beginning of the Design Sprint, and fast forwarding to the end. The sprint unraveled a lot about the software that we are about to build for the company little by little. this even in ways that no one imagined on their very first day.

So what's next?

More Design Sprints?

The answer is OH YES!

So with the experience with our first design sprint now we are innovating in ways of shortening the time period and molding the sprint according to our environment. Going forward I'm pretty sure Design Sprints will take a major role in the Design of solutions for Allianz Lanka as same as it had done for many others around the world. Well for the BA Team, exciting times are ahead!

For further reading on Sprints, check the below site: