Design Sprint. Day 1.
Monday is “Map” day. This day allows you to clearly define the vision for the rest of the week, and it allows all your team members to understand the scope of the project. On Monday you’ll outline end goals, ask the subject-matter experts what they know and gather potential ideas on how to solve some problems. It is a very exciting day because, how can you solve a problem if you don’t know what you are solving for?
You can’t design a product or a process if you don’t understand the goals, the users and other variables. Throughout the day, keep an open mind. Listen, understand, take notes and get ready for an amazing week of discovery, design, and validation.
What to expect?
It’s OK if you don’t have a clear goal on Monday, you’ll get an opportunity to clarify your teams' vision by starting at the end!
Where is this product going? What is the vision for the next year? What is the vision in six months?
It’s important to create your map in order to align the information that’ll be gathered at the end of the day. For a recent Design Sprint, I was involved with a team that had an initial idea of where to start. However, as we explored the overall map showcasing the problem we were considering, we had to make some adjustments that directed the rest of the Sprint.
Okay. We have a map, now what?
Personally, Monday is probably my favorite day in the Sprint process.
Depending on the time that you’ve allocated, your team should be able to conduct several Subject Matter Expert (SME)interviews. On average on a Design Sprint, we can conduct around 5 back to back sessions. Let me tell you how we’ve done it.
We usually set up 30-minute interviews with at least five SMEs on Monday afternoon. If you have more people lined up, that’s good. Just add them to the lineup. These interviews are important to help close the knowledge gaps our team may have, and they allow us to explore possibilities by using How Might We (HMW) questions. If you don’t know what HMW questions are and how they are framed, you can read all about it in the guidelines to conduct a Sprint and gather some examples from the Google’s Design Sprint Kit.
If you tailor the questions to the problem you are trying to solve your team can get very specific in the HMW questions. This will help you gather data for future opportunities that might not be implemented in your current design sprint.
At the end of day one, you should have a clear map of the project, what the goals are and various key insights from your SME interviews. All of these should be applied to certain areas in your journey map and /or workflows.
Once your team has aligned on the areas that’ll be worked on during the rest of the week, make time to reference your map from time to time. This will help maintain alignment within your Sprint team on the goals and objectives established during day one.
It’s Target Time
Now that you’ve got the entire problem you’re attempting to take on, your Sprint Team has to decide what their focus will be for the rest of the week. It’s time to pick a target.
The target is a very important decision. If your team isn’t sure what direction they want to go, I would recommend waiting until Tuesday morning. Otherwise, let your decider make the call.
During a recent Design Sprint our team decided to delay our decision until we could conduct additional research. The next day we realigned and came together on a direction before moving on with our Tuesday activities.
Get ready for Tuesday!
Now that your team has booted all of this information in their heads, you’ll take Tuesday to sketch, discuss and perform some Lighting Demos.
Worried about how to carry on with Tuesday? No problem! I’ll explain what the demos are and how to conduct them in my next post (Tuesday’s activities in a Design Sprint).
Thanks for reading and I hope you are learning these series of articles on how to conduct and enjoy Design Sprints. Please leave some comments as to what you would like to see in specific future articles!
