Sprint Modifications
#2 in the Series of Making Stuff Up
If you’ve read my piece on not being afraid to make something up, you’ll know that I’m really into bending frameworks, templates, etc. Quoting myself,
“[…] those templates, processes, cool diagrams, they were made by another human, just like you — there’s not some Design God making the holy grail of diagrams that everyone must use — it’s another human that made something up because it helped them.
So if you’re finding yourself where what you’re using just isn’t communicating what you’re trying to say, make something up.”
That applies to documentation and deliverables, but also to processes, like Google’s Design Sprints.
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to participate in a Design Sprint run by another organization that was to the letter, and I realized how much I have changed the Sprint framework. I hope it’s helpful for you to see where I have deviated and consider what changes could be helpful for your own design sprints.
If you’re unfamiliar with Google Design Sprints, I do highly recommend you check out the book.
Schedule
Despite my repeated assurances that the time is well spent, our organization is simply not set up to work in huge 4–5 day blocks, unless I’m willing to wait a few months to get a project going. Some individual teams are starting to work that way, but until then it’s either nothing, or I get 1–2 days. With the modifications I’ve made, I’ve found that the whole group really only needs to be present for 1–2 days, and the core product team (and sometimes that’s just me!) can work the full 5 days.
Whole Team Sessions
User Research & Opportunity Framing
Surprisingly, the Google Design Sprint doesn’t have much to say about user research before going through a sprint, which is one of the first modifications I have made; one of the “Meet the Experts” is a session about all the user research that has been done prior and participants are given time to absorb and talk about user.
Then, we establish the opportunity and make sure everyone is clear on it.
Get it out on the table
I work in-house — which oftentimes means the opportunity we are working through we have tried to tackle before and there is a lot of historic knowledge and ideas in the room. The very first exercise is allowing people to get out what they came in with. Only then can we get some fresh creativity in the room.
In this space, I also encourage anyone to get out ideas in general related to the user, maybe it’s not something we can activate, but other departments can, and we want to share creativity across the organization.
Ideation
Given what we now know about the user, and the opportunity, we’ll see if any ideas that came out prior still hold and bring them back to the table.
I haven’t found any better way to do ideation, the gold standard of sharpies and stickers still win, so this exercise proceeds as usual. I give 15–20 minutes to play with ideas.
Theming
Once ideas are on the table, I have found that we can accelerate a little bit more quickly if the facilitator and product owner can do the theming while everyone else takes a break.
Seeing a theme will often spark other ideas, and seeing others’ ideas will spark even more, so I run a second ideation session of 10 minutes to see what else comes up.
Decision Making
InterVarsity is a very diverse organization — not only across ethnicity, but also spiritual backgrounds, experience, and more cultural factors. After running a few sprints and debriefing how the experience in general went, it came out that having a ‘Decider’ wasn’t working well in some cultural contexts. While we didn’t want to fall into design by committee, we wanted to find alternative ways to make decisions and move forward.
Our solution was to let the decider make a choice, and then have an explicit discussion time. Most of the time the group is in agreement, but occasionally there’s a little bit more discussion. It is often helpful to remind a team that we are just testing and we’ll iterate!
Fleshing out an idea
I have begun refraining from calling it a wireframing or prototyping session. Those activities feel intimidating and I hear, “Oh, I’m not a designer.” Instead, this is a session to just put a little bit of legs on the idea so that the designers have more to work with later.
To further build confidence, I show really blocky and simple example wireframes and storyboards, or if they have another way to help flesh out the idea, they can do that. I have also found that there is more confidence when I pair people together rather than having them work on it individually. Before, I would have people check out at this stage, but it’s much harder to do that when you have a partner!
Core Team Work
Higher-fidelity prototyping
As wonderful as it would be to do the user testing right afterwards, only once have I ever had schedules work out that way, so what I really love about the schedule modification is giving designers a little more time to breathe and design. Despite having the idea and some legs on it, some opportunities still need more than a few hours of thinking and working together to solve it.
User Research
We don’t let design go on indefinitely, and I try to have user testing scheduled within the next 2 weeks, depending on participant availability. The core team conducts the research and puts together final summary of what the user research showed and next steps to the whole team.
Make it work for you
You may disagree with some of the changes I’ve made, and that’s alright; I’d love to dialogue about this, and I expect to keep making changes! Every project is different, every group of people in the room has been different. I love that we’re coming to a place where not only are we iterating our products, but we’re iterating our process.
I simply want to encourage you to explore the boundaries of frameworks and methodologies and find out how you can really make it work!
Did this help you?
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Ashley Crutcher is the Director of Experience Strategy at InterVarsity located in Madison, WI. She tweets at @ashleyspixels and enjoys cuddling with her furkiddos, crocheting/knitting, ringing handbells, and thinking too much about everything.
