I want to know your struggles, that is why I started this post with a poll.
Many teams struggle with the above topics and when there is a product development that bounds the team, usually a Design Sprint is a fast & valuable solution for this.
What is a Design Sprint?
A Design Sprint is a structured step-by-step system for solving big problems as a team in one week.
There are 3 stages:
🎲 Align on a problem worth solving
🎲🎲 Decide on a solution to try
🎲🎲🎲 Build a simple test to validate if this solution will solve this problem
It was invented 11 years ago at Google Ventures by Jake Knapp and his team and since then used in companies like Lego, Facebook, Google, Ikea, etc.
Design Sprints are not bound to any specific industry or set of challenges.
They can be used in almost any business context to launch a new product, improve a process or service, test a new business idea or leap into the future, and create a vision of what that might be.
What is the value you can bring to your organization with a design sprint in just a few days?
It depends on your company size, project size, and so on.
Most probably you can answer by yourself to this by reflecting on questions like:
What is the value of a happy & high-performance team that is doing meaningful work and is aligned?
What is the value of replacing months of work (and the equivalent money spent by the whole project team) to validate if what they develop is worth it for the real users with one week where they find this out?
What is the value in finding out in one week that product development is going in the wrong direction, and not useful for the real users instead of spending months to find this out and then close the project?
What is the value in aligning a clear direction with the whole product team in one day instead of spending days and months in endless discussions and repeating topics without looking at all perspectives?
There were researchers that found out that on average, participants reported that design sprints yielded a 7x savings in time.
What are the other benefits of design sprints?
It is simple, so it's easy to apply;
It is fast, so it brings immediate and tangible results;
It is collaborative, so it breaks organizational silos;
It is versatile so that it can tackle many challenges (product, service, strategy, culture);
It is human-centric, so the customers are at the core of the solutions.
If you want to check out the “why” behind the fact design sprints work for good, check out the article I wrote about the neuroscience perspective behind it.
My first design sprint in 2020 - real case story
Back in 2020, I experienced a lot of frustration from the project team we were working with because the product that we were trying to build was good but somehow we were not able to reach the same vision, understanding of what the real users needed, and how to have a better feeling about what to build.
I hated it.
We were losing a lot of time in alignments and it was hard to arrive at a tangible outcome so we were all the time frustrated about this. Because nobody had time one week to take for a Design Sprint.
As a facilitator, getting tangible and valuable outcomes fast is my #1 priority.
So I proposed they try the Design Sprint and book 4 days for the whole team in order to solve the situation.
It was not easy because everyone had full calendars.
But I still remember one Friday when we were all tired of circular discussions and no outcomes so I proposed to make immediately the next week a Design Sprint. They all said YES.
And in 4 days we were able to do what we would have done normally in a few months.
We saved so much time, unlocked the product to build, got feedback from real users, and were able to move forward with the project in a very innovative, fun, and creative way and with high speed towards the wanted clear vision.
It was a success and since then we tried more and more Design Sprints, prototyping, and experimenting.
Even more - other teams started reaching out to me to help them get so fast results as well.
I have been part of several teams dealing with the same pain points and problems and Design Sprints were helping them to find solutions to challenges they were not able in another way to deal with. And getting 7 times faster work done and making it valuable versus doing the work in the normal way was immediately appreciated by these teams. They saw the real added value and used this again and again depending on their challenges.
One-phrase summary:
Design Sprint is a structured step-by-step system for solving big problems as a team in one week. Value added? What is the value of replacing months of work (and the equivalent money spent by the whole project team) to validate if what they develop is worth it for the real users with one week where they find this out?
Resources:
Research made by Amr Khalifeh about Design Sprint ROI
Design Sprint book by J.Knapp
Design Sprint masterclass from Aj&Smart
How can I help you here?
I love the power of Design Sprints. When doing a back-to-back Design Sprint (2 weeks) the outcome is even stronger and I saw prototypes that arrived at 95% in production afterward. It was amazing to tackle different versions of Design Sprints - in person, online, summer edition ( 3 months and workshops spread around the holidays season with an amazing outcome), and so on. It depends on the team and product needs.
If you have challenges around your product and want to try something new, to replace months of work with valuable teamwork, send me inquiries at: contact@asinnovativeminds.com
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