Sprinting Together. Alone. — Week 3
Wow, this week has been a great achievement. Many frictions, some collisions and a couple of WOW moments.
Week 3 was focused on our first design sprint together as a new team.
Design Sprinting in 4 days, not 5
In the past, I’ve run some design sprints (Thanks Jake Knapp from Google Ventures) and they are a great way to also see how you collaborate, understand how people deal with decision making and how everyone performs with pressure and disagreement.
A little bit less process nerd, a little bit more space for magic.
The main challenge with a design sprint is that they take up 5 full-days of an entire team. Luckily AJ&Smart made a 2.0 version, that they (THANK GOD) put in useful YouTube videos of how to cut it from 5 days into 4 days 😃. They did a great job in breaking down the exercises and simplifying them. A little bit less process nerd, a little bit more space for magic.
The main sprint questions that we wanted to answer, is how do we balance fun & meaningful, how do we create a shared experience that creates a WOW moment, and how do we make the perspectives of others actionable. Where our main goal was to make giving and receiving feedback a fun and rewarding habit.
The first challenge with a smaller team is that assigning a dedicated facilitator that isn’t involved in the exercises is difficult. We addressed the issue of conflicting interest, but we said that as soon as someone notices that the facilitator was influencing the decision in their desired direction people would call it out instantly.
Together. Alone.
As we went from 2 weeks of intense team exercises to understand each other better and build the foundation of our culture, we already embraced this notion from Together. Alone. Where we do team exercises, but everyone gets time to first think and create something alone, and then we go through it together. In Design Sprints, much of it works in the same way. You do a design sprint together, but most of the exercises will require thinking and working alone and deciding together. Often in concentrated silence.
There were two moments where we fell off the wagon a bit and ended up in the meaningless discussion going in circles. We quickly recognized it that it had to do with two factors. First, around noon people get hungry and thus have less patience and concentration. Secondly, if we didn’t time-box an exercise, including the discussion, it meandered without coming to a conclusion. This is of course where the Decider comes in, which in smaller teams is the CEO and in larger teams can be the Product Owner or Product Manager. They have some extra voting powers in some situation.
Design Sprint 2.0
- Monday we created our Map and Sketched potential solutions. 🖼️
- Tuesday it was to Decide on the key solution + feature of another one we wanted to test 🤔
- Wednesday — Prototyping (where the work felt on the shoulders of Liam, as the product designer 🔨
- Thursday — Testing! 🧐
- Friday — Reflect on learnings and Celebrate 🎉
I won’t really go in every exercise now, I think AJ&Smart does a better job at explaining them. Check out their Youtube channel here.
We did make a slight iteration (Design Sprint 3.0 🤷) as we noticed that as we were doing the story-boarding, and in particular writing down the 6 key-action steps, which you do first individually, that when we put them together to vote on, all 4 storyboards for the actions were so different, that not one of them stood out clearly. Hence we decided to make a collective intelligent version, where we took some pieces out of each journey that actually made the whole storyboard work just better.
At Prototyping day everyone worked super focused on their part. Alongside coding our Alpha, Liam went on to build a new prototype to test and Anna did the content to fill the prototype with. It was a long, intense day, but everyone stayed until it was ready for testing the next day.
Discovering a wow where we didn’t expect it
Luckily we did find a really interesting insight. Our main sprint question wasn’t answered (yet), but we did discover a gem that could help us with getting to a WOW moment quick, and that will help with creating core value more often. We’ll be putting it into our production version in the next two weeks to see how that changes the user behavior.
What I’ve learned this week
We went a bit off-track as the prototype became quite big for just 3 sprint questions. Personally, I can do better next time as the facilitator (and decision maker) should have suggested doing one of the earlier exercises again. As there we diverged too much away from the sprint questions when we sketched potential solutions individually. The confirmation bias, every one of us deals with, led us to get attached too much to the original thought that each individual started with, hence having to make a curated version for the storyboard of multiple solutions, not one main solution with 1 extra feature/step.
Yours truly,
{
“name” : “Björn Bakker”,
“role” : “Founder & CEO @ Blindfeed.com”,
“mission” : “Bring Perspective and Understanding to Every Team”,
“location” : “Berlin Valley”,
}
P.S. The perspectives of other Blindfeed members
- Liam’s perspective as our product designer
- Anna’s perspective as our marketing and engagement manager
- Abdelilah’s perspective as a developer and CTO (Typing…)
P.P.S. For the curious ones
If you believe our work matters, and you are an engineer, data whisperer, or a people scientist. Send me a message [bjorn [at] blindfeed . com] or have a look at Blindfeed.com. We’re always looking to expand our team with individuals that dare to leap into the unknown.
