Real Sprints #1. What happens when your company publishes a book called Sprint?
Well you have to try out the process of course!
Each week, we’re publishing real Sprint stories, from people in the field who tell us their story how they applied Design Sprints and their challenges and successes.
Turgay Oktem UX Designer Lead from Penguin Random House Publishing talks about his experience with Design Sprints and their adoption by stakeholder.
“Penguin Random House Published the book Sprint by Jake Knapp , at the time I wasn’t aware of the publication process of it, Imola Unger one of our Design Consultants together with her manager initiated the first Design Sprint.
Innovation within the publishing world is challenging, that is where the publication of Sprint really enabled me to help influence the process. Once we convinced stakeholders to participate it really helped them to understand the business value of Design Sprints. Our first Sprint was 4 days as the stakeholders were only available for those days, we did the user testing and they watched the video afterwards
The first project was a tool called Flipper, it is a book recommendation website to help people to find gifts for friends and family.
When you go through the Design Sprint Process and everybody agrees to everything before you start building a prototype you become much faster, because you don’t worry if something should be included or not. We adapted the tools for prototyping, in the book it suggests using Keynote and Google Slides, which I don’t think you can make a realistic prototype with, we used Flinto, it amazed the stakeholders, even I wasn’t really aware that I could produce such a polished prototype in just one day!
The stakeholders were really in love with the product we came up with but also the way that we brought it to life, we made a really good start. When others saw how successful our first project was, getting stakeholder buy-in became much easier. Now whenever we have a new product we kicking it off with a Design Sprint. The nature of the sprint will vary depending on the availability of the stakeholders and the product we are producing.
One challenge with Design Sprints has been that Stakeholders have seen how much can be achieved in such a short space of time and the expectation became that the idea was ready for production straight away. With a sprint however, you are only working on a small part of a digital product you are not fleshing out the whole product in the DS. You need to run more Design Sprints to work out the rest of the product. After the main sprint you need many more smaller sprints, not with all of the stakeholders but you need to work on your own to flesh out the rest of the product.
Design Sprints inspire the stakeholders, so more and more as they see how fast they get results they have built a really good reputation within our business.”
One of the biggest challenges when implementing Design Sprints is getting stakeholder buy-in, it is amazing, however, what starts to happen once it occurs!
If you have a success story about how you managed to get your stakeholders engaged, please do share it with us, I am sure everyone would love to hear about it!
If you need some tips on getting buy-in with Stakeholders just drop me a line.
Looking to learn more about Design Sprints?
Get in touch with other Design Sprint practitioners by joining our Design Sprint Masters Facebook group or the Design Sprint Group on Linkedin.
Learn more about Design Sprint 3.0 by joining one of our workshops offered worldwide by Design Sprint Academy and our global network of partners in Europe, North America, India, and Australia.
