Pre-Sprint Guide: Set yourself and your team up to succeed
I started running Design Sprints two years before the Sprint book came out, and even when it did, there’s not much covering how to prepare a team of people for their sprint.
All the difficult Design Sprints I’ve run could have been prevented through better preparation. Here’s four things
1. Ownership

One of the most important ingredients in the Design Sprint recipe is for a team of people to clear their calendar and take ownership of a challenge — for 5 days.
In some cases, I was made responsible not just for introducing this new way of working, but also delivering something at the end of the 5 days. When the team didn’t take ownership all the time pressure of a sprint landed on me.
You can be responsible for facilitating the process, but it is the team — which you are part of — that is responsible for creating something worth testing on Friday. Make sure that is clear to everyone.
2. Training

Everyone’s first sprint is always difficult. It’s a very different way of working. Often though, the first sprint for a team is focused on something important. People aren’t going to clear their calendars for something simple.
Rather than spend your time on the sprint constantly covering off how the process works, and what is happening today… and tomorrow… and how it all fits together. Try running a training sprint before the real one.
I started running a one-day training sprint where we would run through each of the five days in one. Here’s the agenda for the day…
0900–0915 Welcome and Why We’re Here
0915–0945 GV Sprint Overview
0945–1000 Pre-Sprint: Setting the Stage
1000–1130 Monday: Map & Target
1130–1230 Tuesday: Sketch
1230–1300 Lunch
1300–1400 Wednesday: Decide
1400–1500 Thursday: Prototype
1500–1515 Break
1515–1615 Friday: Test
1630–1700 Reflect, Questions, and Wrap-up
Every sprint I ran after a training session like this went a lot smoother.
3. One on Ones

To make sure you have the right people in the right mindset for the sprint try and catch up with all the team members individually the week beforehand. In these one-on-ones here’s what I would cover:
- Get to know them… you know… be a human being
- Transition to asking them questions about their experience working at the company. What works? What doesn’t? Investigate some of the problems. When have projects been frustrating… explore why.
- Talk them through the sprint process, going into detail in places where it will combat the issues they have been frustrated by e.g. endless debate
- Ask them if they feel it’s worth experimenting with the process and get them to opt-in to taking part in the sprint. They may have just been told to take part by their boss.
- Ask their permission to facilitate them for the week… but not in those words exactly, as it would be a bit weird. I usually ask whether I can boss them around for a week.
- The last thing I cover is what they’re likely to feel…
“Monday is the hardest day in the process and you’re going to feel like we’re moving too fast and you’ll find it a bit frustrating. But we don’t have to explore every detail and every edge case.”
“Tuesday is always the most fun.”
“Wednesday you’re going to see good ideas left by the wayside. That’s okay. We never throw anything away.”
“Thursday you’re going to start feeling quite tired, and assembling the prototype will be a bit frantic. But things will come together by the end of the day.”
“And on Friday… you’ll be surprised where the users struggle and where they don’t. And you’ll definitely learn something.”
I cover this because when they then feel frustrated, when they have fun, when they see their ideas not get picked, that they think: “Oh, he said this would happen. It’s okay.”
This is all about building the authority you need to be able to facilitate the team for the week.
4. Resilience

Sprints are a pressure cooker. The time pressure created throughout the sprint is by design. It propels everyone forward and naturally everyone tends to focus on what’s important, without prompting. But it can also exacerbate any people problems.
It can exhaust the people on the sprint which makes them harder to facilitate »»» the harder they are to facilitate the more it’s going to exhaust you »»» when you’re exhausted, you’ll make the wrong facilitation decisions e.g. becoming stern »»» when you make the wrong decisions you lose your authority »»» when you lose authority it becomes impossible to facilitate and the sprint can fail.
To avoid this…
- Have a co-facilitator on the sprint and alternate which activities you facilitate
- Train up team members to facilitate activities themselves
- Don’t run design sprints week after week (let yourself recover)
- Don’t run late… finish your days at 5pm
- Make sure you’re not doing too much outside of work during a sprint week
- Make sure you’re extra vigilant to protect the quality of your sleep
- Ask permission throughout the sprint to move people on
- Tackle people problems when they arise. Don’t be afraid to ask people to step outside the room and have your co-facilitator step out to have a chat to bring them back onside
- If a team starts to get tired and grumpy, let the whole team take a break even if it means going off schedule. You’ll find a way to get back on track. And you likely need one too
If you feel that this preparation sounds like overkill… what’s the worst thing that’s going to happen? Are you worried your sprint might be too easy?

And if you’re keen to run the one day training course, follow me here on Medium, as I am working on releasing all my training material out into the wild.
