Innovate and validate in 5 days

Faddy Finch
Aug 27, 2017 · 2 min read

Design sprints are a five day process to innovate and validate ideas. You’ll need a small team with the right mix of responsibilities and perspectives in the room throughout the week.

Day 1. Understand

We discover the human truth, play back interviews and observations. We identify unmet needs, pain points and open up the opportunity.

We develop personas which demonstrate empathy with audience groups. Customers, employees, stakeholders, opinion formers or citizens. We attempt to understand people’s everyday lives, their needs, motivation and feelings.

We’ll agree the job to be done and list requirements. Setting goals and how to measure success. We’ll map existing brand models, the purpose, personality and promise. Checking future states, R&D and market trends.

Day 2. Diverge

Together we’ll co-create, asking what if? A day of open discussion, interactive and inventive activities to explore the possibilities.

We’ll look at scenarios, new features, different territories. What does success look like? We might look at other brands from different markets to see what we can learn.

Day 3. Decide

We can’t do it all straight away, we need to decide where to start and specifically what to prototype in order to validate our ideas with users.

This is an exercise in prioritising activity and understanding short and long term investment.

Making sure tactics are aligned to the strategy, planning around capability and culture. Defining the key moments and touch points.

The project owner will need to sign-off the ambition at this point in the process.

Day 4. Prototype

We use our experience and instinct to crack on and make a basic prototype. It won’t be perfect but it will be good enough to test with users without spending weeks of design development. A better prototype can be developed later when we know that we have something worth developing. Instead we’ll explore the concept, test content and demonstrate how it might be delivered.

Day 5. Validate

Failing fast is an efficient way of working, we’re testing the hypothesis not a finished product. Put it in front of our target audience and gather feedback. Map out what’s working, what’s not and what we might have missed.

Next steps

We share what we’ve learnt, with stakeholders, other teams or external suppliers. Creating guides, a template or a recipe card.

We figure out if there is a case to develop further? Can we chunk up the opportunity into other tasks? Have we unraveled a new direction to explore?

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