What the đŠ is a Design Sprint?
Product Design Sprints â an invention of Google Venturesâ design team â are 5-phase exercises intended to improve the chances of making something people want. At the end, youâll wind up with a validated prototype (a testable first-pass of a key product feature), a clearer direction, and a bunch of neat ideas for the future.
The sprint gives teams a shortcut to learning without building and launching. â gv.com/sprint
Why Design Sprints?
Uncertainty is the silent killer of productivity. So, we want to turn false confidence into validated confidence before beginning a potentially expensive build. That way we can move forward at speed and be sure weâre building the right thing.
Design Sprints are great for (but not limited to):
- Unblocking an existing product design process.
- Kicking off a new product design process by getting the right people in the room and building a testable first-pass of a key product feature.
- Kicking off a new feature build by rapidly designing, prototyping, and validating the feature before spending weeks on traditional design and build.
What outcomes can a client expect from a Design Sprint?
By the end of a Product Design Sprint, the client will have a validated prototype of a new or improved idea, product or feature. Weâll also end with a clear set of learnings and a plan for next steps.
As a bonus byproduct of the Sprint, your client gets a rich set of new ideas, some of which are partially-validated and ready to move into another Sprint.
Introducing the client(s)
We technically had two clients, MedicalDirector and LifeLetters (now known as Florey, but Iâll refer to them as LifeLetters).
MedicalDirectorâs hero product is practice management software. If youâve visited a doctor recently you might have noticed them tapping away on their laptop â chances are theyâre using MedicalDirector software.
You probably also noticed that your typical visit to a doctorâs surgery goes a little something like this:
- You show up for your 15-minute check-up.
- You wait 20 minutes or longer in the waiting room.
- Your consult with the GP winds up taking longer than expected.
- The GP might seem to be in a hurry (probably because theyâre running behind).
- You might get a prescription.
- You go back to the reception, and wait a bit more while the service person takes care of your payment, paperwork or a phone call. Or all three.
- You leave (roughly an hour later).
This is where LifeLetters comes in. Their goal is to make the whole process of going to the doctor smoother through the use of service design and technology.
What was the big question?
How can MedicalDirector and LifeLetters share knowledge and expertise to re-imagine the GP consult?
MedicalDirector had a powerful new product called Helix, and Life Letters (now known as Florey) were re-imagining the typical GP consult through technology.
This situation was a little more âmetaâ than your average Design Sprint. Rather than solving a very specific problem, we were to bring both businesses together and take them through a Design Sprint to form an initial working relationship.
Whatâs involved?
Youâll need people
We had these people:
- 6 MedicalDirector Staff
- 3 LifeLetters staff
- 2 MF Facilitators (we actually had 3 at the beginning to kick things off) Typically you only need one facilitator, however this was a far larger group than is typical.
We also apppointed the CEOs of each organisation as Deciders. Deciders help maintain the Sprintâs momentum by being available to make a final call on any sticky decisions that are slowing us down, as well as make the final decision about which ideas make it into the prototype.
Process
Five days, with five key goals.
- Monday â Map the flow, identify the weekâs goal, capture hypotheses and assumptions
- Tuesday â Sketch all the ideas in response to the above
- Wednesday â Decide which ideas make it into the prototype, and storyboard the process
- Thursday â Prototype the prototype
- Friday â Test the prototype
Monday: Map
Create a map of the problem. This is usually in the form of a simple flowchart. We decided to map the doctor / patient consult, from the moment a patient walks in to reception to the moment they leave.

We had a large group (10 people). Rather than having one large group doing the map, which would be very difficult, we split into two groups to map out the experience. Both groups then presented their maps and we merged the two.
Whatâs the juiceđ?
- The co-created map provides a framework for all the exercises to follow, and describes the context for the problem to be solved.
- Common understanding empowers the teamâs decision making and contributions to the project. People will be aligned around the goals and invested in the outcomes.
- Understanding that risks exist and devising tests to measure their impact allows us to move forward with confidence. We also save time and money because weâre not creating things based entirely unknowns and assumptions.
Tuesday: Sketch
Sketch your heart out. Explore as many ways of solving the problems as possible, regardless of how realistic, feasible, or viable they may or may not be. Of course, make sure the ideas youâre creating are in response to the identified needs from Monday đ
Whatâs the juiceđ?
- You donât need to be an artist. When we say âsketchâ, itâs really just another way of saying âtell a storyâ. If youâre more comfortable with drawing boxes and using words, thatâs absolutely fine. If thatâs what it takes for you to effectively describe your idea, no problemo.
- Everyone is a creative problem solver in some way. Those that donât feel they have permission to think big or broad are now given permission to go with their hearts and dream as big as theyâd like, without feeling the pressure of their colleagues.


Wednesday: Decide & storyboard
Focus on ideas we were the most confident in and inevitably eliminate the ones we were least confident in.



Whatâs the juiceđ?
- The group decides, and the Deciders super-decide. Everyone gets a chance to talk though their idea in front of the whole group, and the group votes. The Deciders (the CEOs) can see where the groupâs thinking is headed and take that into account when they make their own decision.
Thursday: Prototype
Build a prototype that can be tested with existing or potential customers. If you want true insights about what youâve made, it makes sense to test it with the people youâre making it for.


The medium you choose should be determined by time constraints and learning goals. Paper, Keynote, and simple HTML/CSS are all good prototyping media if you want to keep things simple. That said, if you want to code some amazing Artificial Intelligence thingy in Python, then go for it! Just make sure it can be done convincingly within four days đ
- The prototype should be designed to learn about specific unknowns and assumptions.
- The prototype should be real enough to test. This means it just needs to be convincing enough to seem like a real thing.
Whatâs the juiceđ?
The Prototype Mindset
We used a Keynote presentation for the doctorâs âtouchscreenâ interface, as well as a choreographed consultation. The screen we used was just a TV â the doctor âtouchingâ the screen was actually a cue for me to move to the next slide.
Just ask yourself, is it real enough to test? If your test user has never seen what youâve made and itâs convincing enough, theyâll never know the difference. This means you only need to make a convincing façade to test a pile of your biggest assumptions. Thereâs no need to spend weeks in production to validate something you could test in a week.
Friday: Test
This is the big day! Test the prototype with existing or potential customers.

What was our key learning?
Patients yearned for 1:1 connections with their GPs, not with touch-screens
We helped the group design a whole process around a touchscreen, yet it was the human interaction that test participants most desired. Prior to the Sprint, LifeLettersâ initial consult revolved largely around the touchscreen being the focus.
What LifeLetters learned in testing was that patients were far less interested in the touchscreen and more interested in the great service that the GP was providing.

Juicy stuff you can use outside a 5-day Sprint
Time-boxing: Itâs your new best friend. Seriously.
Have you ever noticed that you often make your best decisions under the most ridiculous time pressures?
A limited time frame can focus mental energy and effort to bear on a decision more quickly and efficiently than otherwise might have been the case
The timer allowed us to time-box effectively. Everything was split into small timed chunks, which allowed us to keep each slice specific to a goal. This allowed us to establish a pace that would have been impossible otherwise.
- The use of the timer maintained an external pressure on the group. This takes pressure off the facilitators as they donât have to constantly remind the group to keep moving.
- The timer allowed us to establish and maintain a fast-paced rhythm. People eventually became used to working in 3/6/12/24 minute chunks, so even when the time pressure was less, the perceived time pressure was still high due to momentum.
- The time pressure forces you to ideate quickly and not âself-censorâ. Your ideas flow freely and unhindered.
- Time pressure lessens the need to make big decisions. Constantly filtering your ideas and making decisions drains your battery, so instead of making decisions while you ideate, defer the decision-making until after the ideation phase.
The Jedi mind-trick of âHow Might Weâ
Prefacing a problem with âHow Might WeâŠâ shifts the perspective of the problem and turns it into an opportunity.

âThe âhowâ part assumes there are solutions out there â it provides creative confidence. âMightâ says we can put ideas out there that might work or might not â either way, itâs OK. And the âweâ part says weâre going to do it together and build on each otherâs ideas.â â Tim Brown, IDEO
- Everything leading up to this point is about developing a workable scope for the âHow Might Weâ exercise.
- If your âHow Might Weâsâ are too general to be useful (or are ambiguous), your scope is likely too broad.
- If your âHow Might Weâsâ are just descriptions of very specific solutions, youâve gone too narrow.
- Finding the âsweet spotâ is about developing a scope that is ambitious, but achievable.
Work together, alone
Throw away top-down methodologies, and give your staff permission to be creative problem solvers.
- Working together, alone, is magical; by working together, alone, to solve the problem, we wind up with many more potential ideas than if weâd simply brainstormed by ourselves.
- In doing this, we wind up with a heap of unfiltered goodness from the entire group rather than a few voices dominating the conversation.
Real enough to test, and not a bit more
Just remember that everything is a prototype. That new dish you tried at that restaurant you like? That was a prototype. The new software update for your phone? Yep, itâs a prototype. Thereâll be another release before you know it.
What Iâd do differently in future
- Go in with a much more specific problem. Work a bit harder to define that before we walk into the room on Monday.
- Take time-lapses of process! Document each day a bit better.
- Hand the marker to a participant during storyboarding. People got a bit frustrated and had a hard time expressing themselves.
- On the prototype day, you really only need 3â4 people. A maker, a writer for the script, and a couple of helpers. Define which participants are needed each day and what their roles are to prevent having too many people in the room.
- Make sure daily checklists are written up in a visible place, and publicly check things off. This gives a sense of progress. Get a participant to do it and make it an event.
- Better end-of-day wrap-ups. We fizzled on a couple of days and failed to end on a high note (probably because we were exhausted).
- Encourage people to be specific with HMWs. We had a lot of overly-general ones that needed to be thrown out.
- Encourage everyone to draw. (Again, may be easier to facilitate with a much smaller group)
Resources
This piece was written by Marcel Jacobs, Lead Designer.
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