Design Sprint as a problem-solver: a successful partnership between ONOVOLAB and Ambev
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Do you know the Design Sprint methodology, but don’t know if it really works? Is it only used to develop digital products?
Read more about the work developed by ONOVOLAB in partnership with Ambev and discover how Design Sprint can also be used as a tool for solving strategic problems of companies.
Note: This is the English version of an article originally published in Portuguese at ONOVOLAB’s blog on January 27, 2020. I chose to publish the English version of this article just like the original one.
Cervejaria Ambev
Created in 1996, Ambev arose from the merger of Companhia Antarctica Paulista and Companhia de Bebidas das Américas, becoming the first Brazilian multinational, the third largest beer industry and the fifth largest beverage producer in the world.
In 2004, Ambev bought the Belgian Interbrew and together, they became InBev, a group that has operations in more than 30 countries and sales in more than 130 countries, being the largest beer manufacturer in the world, including in its portfolio brands like Brahma, Budweiser and Stella Artois.
Cervejaria Ambev, the Brazilian branch of the group, is a publicly held corporation, headquartered in São Paulo, with operations in 16 countries in the Americas.
According to the company’s website, Ambev has 30 units spread throughout the Brazilian territory, in addition to 100 distribution centers and more than 30 thousand employees.
In addition to beer, the company is also prominent in the production of soft drinks, isotonics, juice, tea, energy drinks and water, owning brands such as Pepsi, Lipton, Guaraná Antarctica, Do Bem, Fusion and Ama.
The Challenge
In order to achieve its mission of excellency in beer and beverage production in general, Ambev’s main focus is to offer an experience that has a significant impact on the consumer’s life.
Thus, the company believes that in order to provide quality goods, it is necessary to invest in those that are considered its most valuable assets: the people who are involved in all stages of its production and distribution.
Why Design Sprint?
With the purpose of valuing the company’s employees, Ambev has been looking for ways to generate autonomy and increase engagement, focusing on those who are connected to all phases of brewery production.
For this, the biggest challenge is to integrate areas that work together more efficiently.
Since the company has also turned its attention to innovation, Design Sprint was identified as a promising tool to generate solutions in a short period of time, with the active participation of people who are directly linked to the challenge.
And, to get the ideas off the ground, ONOVOLAB was seen as the ideal partner on this journey, as we understand that the main goal of a Design Sprint is not to develop a product, but to generate actions of greater impact and less effort that can be quickly implemented.
So Design Sprint can play a fundamental fundamental role in the development of strategies and in the optimisation of companies’ internal processes.
What did we do together?
Once we were dealing with a complex production process that happens simultaneously in several units, the challenge was divided into three phases.
Thus, we decided to run three Design Sprints in three different units of the brewery — the largest in Brazil — focusing on different parts of the beer production process.
The first Design Sprint happened at the Rio de Janeiro unit on September 3rd-9th, 2019, with a team of 10 people.
The second Design Sprint took place in Jaguariúna-SP from September 30th to October 4th, 2019, with a team of 10 participants.
Finally, the third Design Sprint took place at Cervejaria do Vale, in Jacareí-SP on November 4th-8th, 2019, with 13 participants.
We chose to run the Design Sprints inside Ambev’s units, so that the user testing phase could take place inside the production lines, with the company’s actual employees.
Monday: understanding
The first day of Design Sprint is focused on defining the main challenge and the long-term goal.
For this, the first activity of the day is dedicated to understanding the multiple points of view about the challenge from the perspectives of the participants.
In the three Design Sprints, the teams had experts from different stages of production and areas such as people management, innovation, technological development, sales and distribution.
The experts’s information raised different categories of issues involving the central challenge and, with the help of the Deciders, long-term goals were chosen.
The Decider is the one who gives the final vote on the most important decisions of the Design Sprint. At Cervejaria Ambev, we had Deciders from People Innovation, Logistics and People Management.
Once the long term goals of each Design Sprint were defined, the teams mapped the complete beer production journey. With this, the team could identified the main points of contact between the raised challenge-related issues and the production activities, for which ideas of possible solutions would be later developed.
Since we had a larger team in Jacareí, it was possible to identify two main points on the map and, with that, the team was divided so that two different challenges could be worked out, which would lead us to build and test two different prototypes.
At the end of the day, each participant had already developed their first individual ideas of how to solve the challenges, in accordance with the long term golas previously defined.
Tuesday: defining
On the second day, the team voted on the individual sketches and one of them was chosen by the Decider, including part of other sketches that could contribute to the development of the main idea.
It is important to highlight that all the most voted ideas involved the development of some type of digital solution that could ‘solved all problems’ in communication and decision making.
At this point in Design Sprint, the teams still saw the methodology as a tool to develop a complex product, which would need months of development and testing before it could be implemented.
Throughout the day, the four chosen ideas were developed by the teams until they became detailed storyboards of what the prototype would be like.
Wednesday: building
In all three Design Sprints, Wednesday was dedicated to the building of prototypes and writing the test script.
The prototypes were built by the participants themselves using the Marvel App tool, which allows anyone to build a high-fidelity interface for both smartphone, tablet and desktop in an intuitive and fast way.
The interview scripts were written following guidelines given by the ONOVOLAB team, such as not presenting the prototype to the user as a solution, since the user is the one who would say if that solves their problem or not.
Another tip is to always try to go deeper into the answers given by the user, asking ‘why’ or ‘how’.
In addition, each team should think about one or two simple tasks for the user to perform while testing the prototype, but without explaining to them how to do it.
The idea is that the users find their own way through the prototype so the team can analyze how intuitive it is. It is also important to make it clear to the user that there are no right or wrong answers in the test.
Finally, the team should always remind the user to narrate their actions and thoughts out loud so that it is possible for the interviewers to write down their feedback and possible usability difficulties.
At Design Sprint in Rio de Janeiro, the ONOVOLAB team run an experimental interview with one of Ambev’s employees who was aware of the Design Sprint, but was not familiar with the prototype.
The participants watched the interview and it was recorded, so that later it could be sent to the teams from Jaguariúna and Jacareí. This way, the teams could be prepared in advance to run the interviews themselves the next day.
Thursday: testing
Thursday is a day dedicated to testing prototypes with real users. In the three Design Sprints, we had the opportunity to present the ideas to the professionals who would use them within the production line.
Each of the four prototypes were tested by at least five people. Each interview lasted about 40 minutes, in order to collect as much feedback as possible about the developed solution hypothesis.
In Rio de Janeiro and Jaguariúna, the teams also performed remote tests so that professionals from other units of Cervejaria Ambev also had access to the prototype and could contribute with their points of view.
Friday: Learning
The last day of the Design Sprint is different from the original methodology and was created by the ONOVOLAB team to meet the team’s needs concerning what to do after the Design Sprint is over.
In the original methodology developed by GV, Friday is dedicated to testing and there are not many referrals on the collected feedbacks.
In ONOVOLAB’s Design Sprint, on the other hand, Friday is used to work on the collected data from the interviews and to turn them into new experiments that can start in the following weeks, so that the acquired knowledge can be increasingly actionable.
Thus, the feedbacks from the interviews were organized into statistical facts. The 10 most relevant facts regarding the challenge’s long term goal were then interpreted and connected by the teams, generating insights into the hypotheses of the causes of these problems.
Finally, the teams developed a set of opportunities of actions in order to achieve the long-term goal. These actions were then classified according to their impact concerning the main challenge and the effort required to carry it out.
With that, the teams were able to understand which actions had a high impact and did not imply great technological development efforts or high execution costs.
Many of the developed opportunity actions involved only workflow changes or even surveys to validate changes.
As a last activity, the three main opportunity actions of each team were transformed into experiments to be run after the Design Sprint.
For each experiment, the teams listed viable steps for its performance, ways to measure the results and the deadline for its completion.
Finally, at the end of each week, the teams were able to present the work and results to managers and directors of Cervejaria Ambev.
Conclusions
You may be asking yourself ‘can actions as simple as those mentioned above be considered innovation?’
The participants of the three Design Sprints held at the Cervejaria Ambev units understood that the first step towards innovation is not the development of a digital solution that will solve all problems at once.
The teams were able to understand that they had full capacity to improve their own work routine with actions that demand low effort and high impact. In addition, they learned that the developed prototypes served only as a means to test ideas and to reveal what needed to be changed immediately.
They learned that innovation is about focusing on people and generating quick information so that their needs are met and incredible experiences are created for both employees and customers.
At the end of each Design Sprint, we could see the participants become advocates of the methodology and agents of change in their work environment. No one ended the week the way they started it, and everyone felt part of building something new within the company.
The successful partnership between Ambev and ONOVOLAB fills us with pride and we hope that many good outcomes will come from the work we have done with all these incredible and innovative people.
