Doing Design Sprint — Day 1

Published in

Meatball IO

5 min readMay 23, 2016

This is a part 2/6 series in my experience running a design sprint, if you are interested please find the rest of the sprint here

Day 0 — The week before
Day 1 — Monday (this blog)
Day 2 — Tuesday
Day 3 — Wednesday
Day 4 — Thursday (coming soon)
Day 5 — Friday (coming soon)

Friday Afternoon — Introduction

It is mentioned here at the google venture site that we should set the stage for what we will be doing the rest of the week on Monday morning.

In my experience, I found that giving people head up ahead of time — usually before the weekend is a good thing. So given the luxury of an extra time, we did just that.

We got all the 7 participants and the experts in the room and I go over the overview deck here with everyone. There were some questions here and there. It is mostly around some the workshops.

We also allow some people with tight schedule to join just 3 days, until the storyboard is completed. The prototype and the interview can be completed with the rest of the team. It is not ideal, but it is the first thing we could cut — if we have to. Thursday will tell us how right and wrong we are on that topic.

Our CEO agreed to make a cameo appearance. We agreed that he will be coming in Monday afternoon to choose the which event and for which actor we will spend the rest of the week solving for.

9.00 am — prep the room

I got up before my usual hour, got breakfast in. With morning coffee in my hand, I walked in the office as one of the first guy there.

The messed from last week was still there, all the papers, post-it and writings on the board. I put on some slow jazz and start freshen up the room.

10.00 am — Start at the end

We started on the dot. A light story about Apollo 13 and how Tom Hank almost didn’t make it back if the NASA had not come together with a single objective in mind — to get them home.

This lead in to our first workshop — begin with the end in mind.

Surprisingly even with the rough objective already been set ahead of time. We do find a healthy discussion around clarifying framing and re-framing the questions.

Optimist question was then set for a long term goal. We then turn to the pessimistic ones. Those became our sprint questions.

12.00 pm — make the map

Net, my co-facilitator validating the map with the team

In map, we started with actors on the left, sprint goal on the right. Then we started naming the activities that the first actor would do with arrow pointing to the next.

If we found that the activity cannot move forward with this actor, we created another actor with a new event which would cause the original to move forward. Validating with the team constantly is ideal.

2.00 pm — ask the experts

Here is our director of business development — sharing her insights with the team

We aimed for 5 experts with 30 minutes each. We send our appointments in advanced.

What happened was that we took longer than expected for each experts. After each one arrived, we explained the sprint from the beginning, the long term goal, short team goal, the map and over all idea of the sprint.

The focus of these session should be around validating things that we might have missed in our sessions earlier. But we ended up jumping/pitching solutions to the experts which then sparked a new set of discussions. Good thing we realized it early.

But the damaged was done — when we slipped in our timebox. The next expert started coming in while our earlier expert was not finished.

At the end we got 3 instead of 5.

Even with that we still managed to learn a ton of stuffs and gain lot of insights from the expert. The team member also injected their expertise in to the discussion.

One of the thing we also find is that people find it challenging to listen to the experts , asked the questions and also captured it into the “How Might We” form.

4.30 pm — target

The team gathered their “How Might We” notes

This part, we gathered our notes and start grouping them on the board. With a team of 7, I am surprised to see how many notes we managed.

The grouping was quit a challenge because the idea on each note is complex. The 5pm deadline did not help.

Our CEO makes a cameo appearance to choose which actor and which event we will solved for in this sprint. We go over the overview of our findings today. Our CEO was able to quickly pick out what is not important right now. And with those things ruled out — we found out target for the sprint.

After hours

After we hand out our homework for the day, finding the demo for the solution we are aiming for.

There were also some people that are interested in the design sprint but didn’t get to join the first sprint. They were invited to come in at the end of the day for the progress update and summaries of today’s output.

At the end of day one -it was fun with lots of learning both as a facilitator and also as an audience in the journey.

Lots more to come in the rest of the week.

-Pondd-