The Ladder, the GV Design Sprint community

Virginia R.
Sep 2, 2018 · 9 min read

I have to admit this meetup consumed my weekly life.Three months ago, I took part in a meetup in Dublin: The Ladder, a meetup about the Design Sprint.

If like me, you are an evangelist of the Design Thinking approach, passionate about problem-solving, innovative process and love to facilitate workshop… your search ends here, you are absolutely going to want to be part of The Ladder community!

Before I tell you about this meetup, let me first tell you what Design Sprint is all about.

Haven’t read the book? Here’s a quick synopsis

The Google Design Sprint was initiated by Google Ventures teams in 2014 and theorised by Jake Knapp in his book Design Sprint: How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days. The Design Sprint draws its methodology largely from Design Thinking. Remember the Design Thinking is based on 5 steps: Empathy, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and test.

Where Google Venture differs is that instead of taking several months to apply the 5 steps of Design Thinking, Google Venture have condensed these steps to be completed in just 5 days!

The main focus of this process is to get the user feedback quickly, without losing resources in the lengthy process of layering, developing, and launching a product.

It’s like the DeLorean time machine, this process will allow you to project yourself into the future to see how your customers are reacting before you even build your product.

This process has been used on hundreds of projects within Google as well as startups financed by Google.

When to apply the Design Sprint?

The Design Thinking approach is suitable for long-term research or continuously created idea. On the other hand, the Agile process is more geared towards concrete project management and effective interaction between teams, clients, and service.

The Design Sprint is more appropriate in the context of initiating a startup, designing a product, solving a problem, making a significant advancement or allowing a company to evolve its model that would not work in its current state.

This is not a long-term approach, but rather an effective way to make significant progress in a very short time.

How a Design Sprint works

The Design Sprint follows a predefined pattern, each day has a specific objective:

  • Day 1: Understand — Ask the problem to solve.
  • Day 2: Diverging — Finding as many solutions as possible to the problem.
  • Day 3: Decide — Select a solution.
  • Day 4: Prototyping — Creating the prototype of the solution.
  • Day 5: Test — Validate the solution by submitting it to users.

The Design Sprint process rehashed by The Ladder.

I was excited to discover the magic recipe that will solve problems or test new ideas in moving directly from the ideation phase to user testing in just 5 days. When I went to my first Ladder meetup, I hadn’t read the book yet, so it was a good opportunity to have an introduction to this trendy subject.

Much to my surprise, The Ladder meetup was a practical workshop on a real problem. Needless to say, I was highly interested in how it could work in a 2 hours workshop?

While Jake Knapp’s advice is to hold a complete sprint session on 5 full days in a row, The Ladder repurposed and re-released this idea to encompass each sprint day into a 2-hour workshop format and to spread the sprint session over 5 weeks.

The Ladder community for good causes

The original idea was Colm Byrne’s brain-child, which has since been lovingly developed by the community. His vision was to establish a volunteer Design Sprint community to help local non-profits, charities, or early-stage startups solve their problems quickly, and for free.

It was in April 2018 that Colm launched its first meeting in Dublin. Using the Meetup platform, he called upon all those interested in Design Sprint to participate in the workshops while learning and contributing at the same time. Those participating in the workshops can eventually go on to become co-facilitators and facilitator in their turn.

The typical Ladder workshop

In order to foster and enhance creativity, setting up a “war room” for a Design Sprint is recommended. However, for The Ladder community finding a workplace is often a challenge, which is mitigated, thanks to the generosity of the venues.

Since the venue of our sprint is in a state of flux, the facilitators and co-facilitators meet an hour before the meetup to set up the area. We are lucky that sometimes over 50 participants attend the event, which poses its own challenges However, several sprints of different projects take place at the same time which allows us to members into separate groups and let them join a project of their choice.

The Ladder facilitator: a key role

The advantage of the Design Sprint is that it is suitable for all types of profiles because the tools used are very simple: post-it, felt pens, and simple sketching. Its strength lies in bringing together people from different professions to draw on the diversity of thoughts and experiences.

A good team is composed of a maximum of 7 people. It doesn’t matter if members come from several disciplines if at least the product owner and some key contributors remain the same through the process.

In the case of The Ladder’s sprint, we need to take into account two additional complexities that make all the difference. Due to the nature of the weekly meetups, the participants are not required to attend all phases of a sprint and a new member can drop in at any stage.

As such, the facilitators definitely plays a the key role in the sprint. They must not only lead the sprint, synthesise the exchanges and guarantee the progress of the sprint, but the participants’ turnover also requires a Ladder facilitator be twice as prepared and patient as another facilitator.

Timeboxing

At each stage, the Design Sprint imposes to the team a very precise timing and set of deliverables. The facilitator must maintain a very sustained pace, by alternating the time of group creativity and individual production while offering a unique experience to the participant: it must be creative and fun.

Mobilising several people who don’t know each other and asking them to work together for two hours is ambitious, and to keep the discussions from getting out of hand, the facilitator must perfectly orchestrate the session.

My first Design Sprint with The Ladder

My first project in The Ladder Design Sprint was to be a participant in testing the partnerships opportunities of The Ladder itself. At that time the workshops were at their beginning and experimental phase. It was facilitated by the first generation of facilitators, the ones who had to learn on the job.

During the session, I contributed my UX researcher skills to help facilitators organise and set-up properly the workshops of the day 4 and 5 which is the prototype and user testing phase. This is how I became a facilitator despite myself…and so much the better.

Study case: The Ladder itself

The question was to ask The Ladder itself how to promote the community and its expertise.

And how to help the future partner better understand what is happening behind this workshop whose purpose is to test & prototype new ideas in 5 days.

Design Sprint Day 1: Understand

Sympathy for the users

The idea of Design Sprint is not to go directly on the search for a solution but more the search for the right question. This day involves the team to empathise and map the user journey.

Team Outcomes

  • Long-Term Goal
  • Sprint Questions
  • User Journey Map
  • Experts Interviews
  • Target — Sprint Focus

Design Sprint Day 2: Diverge

Think out the box

As the problem was defined on day 1, the day 2 is to go into solution mode.

The workshop is devoted to the creative elaboration. It starts by gathering inspiration from brainstormings and each member of the team will comes up with their own solution followed by sketching.

Team Outcomes

  • Lightning Demos.
  • Solution Sketches.

Design Sprint Day 3: Decide

Do the right thing

This day is about voting and deciding which solution gets prototyped. It can be one of the solutions, but more often than not it’s a combination of the best parts of multiple ideas. It is this solution that the team will then consolidate and stage through a scenario that can be illustrated in a storyboard.

Team Outcomes

  • Storyboard.
  • Voted Solutions.

Day 4: Prototype

Do it yourself

Thursday is an intense day. The team is devoted to the production of a realistic prototype based on whatever was decided on Day 3. These may include graphical models, interactive prototypes or any form of representation of the solution.

Team Outcomes

  • Prototype.

Here the link of the prototype: https://kz7w55.axshare.com/landing_page.html

Design Sprint Day 5: Validate

Just test it

Finally, it is a question of testing the prototype with 5 users that will help validate or invalidate the solution. At the end of the day, the teams know how to move forward.

Team Outcomes

  • User Interviews Results.

Design Sprint Day 5+1: Debrief

Communicate sprint results to participants.

Ok, I lied to you a bit… If the sprint does last 5 days, the debriefing day is as important as the sprint itself (or almost…) we must have in mind that a sprint does not end at the end of the last test, at least not for us facilitators.

This last workshop is the restitution of the user tests in order to transmit the lessons and to take stock on the 5 weeks spent together. It is also an opportunity to share the experience with participants and decision-makers who will not have had the chance to follow the full sprint.

Team Outcomes

  • User Interviews Results.

Conclusion

To sum up this very interesting experience in terms of the work process and collaboration process, I would say that for me the main virtue of Design Sprint is that it promotes collective intelligence and creativity.

Design Sprint is a methodology that makes a lot of sense when it comes to finding a quick solution to a clearly identified product problem. It is also a great way to better manage investments, a sprint ending on a “no-go” will help save resources.

Since the first sprint, a lot has changed. I have now integrated into the The Ladder community as a volunteer facilitator to continue this beautiful collective adventure.

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Learn more about The Ladder : https://www.linkedin.com/company/theladderio/

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