Why should you conduct a Design Sprint for your product?

Published in

17Seven

4 min readMar 17, 2020

Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution?

Design Sprints can help answer critical business questions, for teams of any size, for small startups to Fortune 100s, from teachers to non-profits.

It’s for anyone with a big opportunity, problem or idea who needs to get answers today.

What is a Design Sprint?

A Design Sprint is a problem-solving framework for product design teams to maximize the chances of creating something that people actually care for. This exercise is embedded into a unique 4-day process designed for validating the riskiest assumptions of your product ideas, sketching solutions, prototyping and testing the ideas with customers.

We, at 17Seven, follow design sprints to reduce the risk of downstream mistakes and generate vision-led goals which can be used by our clients to measure the product’s success.

It’s like fast-forwarding into the future, so you can see how customers react before you spend all the time and expense of building a real product.
– Jake Knapp, Creator of Design Sprint

Why Design Sprints?

Every business or product team strives hard and has a goal to get the quality product out. However, it’s no longer enough. What we really need is the right product out. Design Sprints are the fastest way to find out if your product ideas are worth developing, if a feature is worth the effort or if your value proposition is really valid.

We have learnt that the traditional processes take months and months of effort and time to collect data that helps to define the next set of steps in your key product development, ideas, features or decisions. With Design Sprints, you only invest a week or two to receive that data and move forward making the right decision.

When to do a Design Sprint?

A Design Sprint is an exercise that works best in the scenarios when your ideas are not very broad or narrow in nature. Here are some of the scenarios -

When you are starting out on a big product idea and have no clue about how people are going to react to it
When designing and developing a product involves months of effort and budget
When the stakes are high
When you are deciding to add a major feature within the product
When the hierarchy become a hurdle in your organization

And many more…

How does a Design Sprint look like?

A Design Sprint is a 4-day intense, time-boxed session emphasizing collaborative ideations, solution sketching, prototype building and user testing. The four innovation days are divided into -

Day 1

We work in collaboration with you, understanding the goals and defining the scope of the Sprint week.

Day 2

Here we sketch out multiple solutions based upon the challenge we are finding answers for and decide on which one to prototype

Day 3

This is when team builds up the quick prototype that looks and feels like the real product.

Day 4

Our final day when we test the prototype with real users from our TG and collect the feedback.

Finally, what do I see after Design Sprint?

An outcome of the Design Sprint is a user-tested hi-fidelity interactive prototype with insights that you can use to take your product decision forward and define the next steps.