Involving Non-Designers in Design Sprints
Lessons learned from conducting design sprints at 1stdibs
There is a pretty good chance that you have heard of design sprints, a 5-day process to tackle critical business questions with the aid of rapid prototyping and user testing with customers. (If you haven’t, get the book! It’s a highly recommended, easy weekend read). It involves working through a problem with a cross-functional team in the same room for 5 days. One of the key benefits of a design sprint is the collaboration it fosters so it’s super important to make sure that you use your teams’ time effectively. In this post, I’d like to share some strategies that can help you increase the effectiveness of your next design sprint based on our experiences at 1stdibs, where we’ve run two successful design sprints this year.
A little about 1stdibs
1stdibs is the world’s largest luxury marketplace for the most beautiful things on earth. We partner with an incredible network of dealers to bring their inventory online and help them be successful selling to discerning collectors, designers and curators.
Design sprints at 1stdibs
At 1stdibs, our product design team has conducted two 5-day design sprints last year in collaboration with our counterparts from product management. Each sprint required significant planning and coordination since we had to involve senior leadership (our Chief Product Officer was a co-decider in both of our sprints). Our first sprint focused on the demand-side of the marketplace, while our second sprint focused on the supply-side. This gave us the opportunity to bring in colleagues from across the organization in each sprint, which we quickly realized was one of the key gains of the sprint process. Ensuring that a diverse group fully engages for 5 days in design sprints requires a lot more planning.
Having completed a couple sprints, reflected on those sprints (we refer to it as a post-mortem), and iterated heavily, I am excited to share some strategies to effectively involve your non-design partners in your next design sprint.
1. Lower the barrier to sketching
Reduce friction with the use of templates
This might be obvious to some, but the fear of a blank page is real. In the case of design sprints, even having a blank post-it can also be daunting. Sketching is typically a high friction activity for non-designers but sketches act as a vessel for bringing out critical ideas regardless of the level of craft.
From our first sprint we realized that participants needed a lot more guidance around the sketching activities than we had anticipated.
As you can see, sketches varied quite considerably in how they were presented. This made it harder to understand ideas across concepts, especially if you were coming into the room cold.
So, for our second sprint, we made a few changes. We handed out sheets of paper with 3 post-its already placed on it, with lines for annotations next to each of them. This gave participants a better sense of expectations and also a way of structuring their thoughts. Because we had a standardized template for all concepts, it allowed deciders to come into the room and quickly grasp each concept.
Show examples of real sketches
Additionally, we showed examples from the previous sprint. Once participants saw the range of fidelities of the sketches from past participants within the organization, it lowered the barrier to start sketching.
2. Pre-work, pre-work, pre-work
Bring in research you’ve already done
While the sprint process is great at sussing out information from a panel of experts on the first day, if you have existing quantitative or qualitative data (think analytics, user research) that you think is pertinent to the sprint topic and goal, account for that in your schedule. For our second sprint we made sure we had presentations on both quantitative data that we had collected as well as some user research findings from interviews. This allowed everyone in the sprint to have the same baseline understanding of the problem space.
Run a Pre-Sprint Orientation
Teams not familiar with the design sprint process are usually surprised by the time commitment required. For both of our sprints, we held a 30–60 minute orientation the week before the sprint.
Going over a high-level agenda for 5 days helped clarify their roles and expectations for the week. This was yet another reminder to participants to clear out their calendars and delegate responsibilities to other team members while they were away. It was crucial to emphasize that it was a very focused period of time with laptops and phones prohibited during the sessions.
Create a detailed daily agenda
If you’re the facilitator for your sprint, for your sanity, create a detailed agenda for each day of the sprint. This will help you deal with any change to plans (btw, this will happen).
This also allowed us to make sure we had blocked off times from experts, deciders and the sprint team members for the appropriate days and times a week or two before the actual sprint. If you’ve ever played calendar Tetris, the agenda will be your ally.
3. Set expectations before and after
Prior to the sprint, it is crucial to set expectations with the team on the goal and the reason for conducting the sprint. Here, writing up a design sprint brief with the project owners can really help. At 1stdibs, we’ve shopped our design sprint brief amongst our deciders to make sure goals and expectations are clearly aligned before asking participants for such a large time commitment.
When will this be ready? — every stakeholder
This was a common question we received after our design sprints. While this was a sign of a productive sprint, we wanted to make sure participants had a more realistic view of our product development process. A simple prototype can give the illusion that the design and development process is much shorter than it actually is. As part of the process, we’d send a follow up email to all participants thanking them for their time, invite them to post-mortem sessions, communicate research findings and what to expect down the road.
4. Be flexible
Finally, things change so be flexible. We had to accommodate schedules of participants last minute and also had to figure out ways participants could productively contribute. The daily agenda comes in handy at moments like this.
At 1stdibs, we’ve recognized the time commitment and have tried to reduce involvement to critical moments. For example, deciders would come in whenever there were key decisions to be made. This meant deciders would be present for the first and last parts of Day 1, Day 3 and Day 5. As a result, it was crucial that the team was able to get the deciders up to speed and equip them with enough information to make decisions.
For other participants it made the most sense for them to take part in the first 3 days of the sprint as they would be most valuable to the core sprint team. Since Day 4 is a prototyping day we let the core sprint team tackle that task while opening up the room again for anyone to join in on user testing sessions on Day 5.
Iterate and repeat
As designers we strive to apply a human-centered mindset when approaching problems and its that same mindset that we should apply when working with our collaborators from other teams. At the end of your design sprint, run a post-mortem with everyone that participated in your design sprint. Figure out what things you should start, continue and stop doing. Design is messy in the real world with real constraints. Use the activities outlined in the sprint book and understand what makes sense for your team and organization. Happy sprinting!
How have your teams involved partners from other teams in your design sprints? What strategies have worked? We’d like to hear from you!
Some freebies!
Here are a couple of templates that you can use to to run a more effective sprint.
- Template of a detailed agenda. Edit it to match your specific schedule.
- Sketch template
Shout-out to my fellow conspirators Daniel Klainbaum and Katy Lin from the Product Design team who helped initiate, facilitate and iterate on design sprints at 1stdibs.
