How a Design Sprint Helped a Startup’s Design Team Build Empathy and Unify Goals

In 2022, I landed my first-ever full-time job as a Product Designer at a startup called Carputty. As a recent graduate, I was excited to apply the technical skills I learned in my Master’s program in a real-world setting. However, I quickly found that a startup’s working environment moves too fast to apply the rigid design methods taught in school.

Our small design team of two struggled to convey the purpose and potential of UX design to the rest of the company while juggling multiple ongoing projects. We needed to break a hole in the ice to breathe, take a step back, align everyone on the same page, and set clear, measurable goals. Through research and conversations with my design manager, I discovered that many small design teams at startups face similar challenges when it comes to building a design process and gaining buy-in from their team.

Fortunately, we recently led a successful design sprint at Carputty that helped us create a more cohesive vision and increase trust in UX among our team. In this article, I’ll walk you through the process we used and share some tips for how you can implement it at your own startup.

The Problem: Divided Efforts and a Lack of Consistency

We had a goal in mind — to enhance application decision speed and volume — but we lacked progress metrics and project focus. Our design team’s involvement in other exciting projects diverted our attention, and we needed to work together to tackle the problem and find our stride.

To address this, we needed a way to get everyone on the same page and create digestible milestones to help us move toward our objective. That’s where the design sprint came in.

We referenced Jake Knapp’s excellent Medium article “The product design sprint: A five-day recipe for startups“, and tweaked the techniques subtly to better fit our team’s workflow, schedule, and structure.

The Approach: A Design Sprint to Unify Goals and Build Empathy

We chose a design sprint because it allowed us to get engineers, designers, and product leadership in the same room to share ideas and collaborate on a cohesive vision in a limited timeframe. We started with a structured brainstorming session on Figjam to get everyone’s ideas on the table and then held a democratic discussion to determine the highest priority goal.

With leadership’s input, we ended up with a clear, objective, and actionable goal: to increase the number of car financing applications we can decision.

But the design sprint was about more than just setting a goal. It was an opportunity to build empathy across different departments and get insight into the experiences of employees who work every day to process applications. We learned about their daily tasks, the impact of our software on their work, and the challenges they faced in achieving our shared goal. This helped us to identify potential roadblocks and develop a clearer understanding of what changes could realistically be accomplished.

The Results: Deriving Clear Design Steps and Moving Forward

With a clarified understanding of the problem space and limitations in our current software and processes, we were able to create steps to improve efficiency. We worked together to analyze the weaknesses in both our internal and external application software and developed small, incremental steps focused on achieving our goals.

After the design sprint wrapped, the product design team worked together to mark up our existing design flows with proposed changes and worked with product managers to designate design and development timelines. While these tweaks and sketches weren’t finalized, they provided a visual representation of the work we had done and a clear pathway for moving forward.

With the fundamentals laid out, we were now in a better position to strategically plan our next steps: user testing and validation of our proposed changes, and researching the vendors we would need to accomplish our business goals.

Drumroll — What did we learn?

So, what can you take away from our experience? If you’re struggling to build a design process and gain buy-in from your team, a design sprint may be just what you need. It’s a great way to create structure in a fast-moving and high-intensity work environment and help demystify the UX process by inviting others ‘behind the curtain’ for a day. By unifying goals, building empathy, and deriving clear design steps, you can make progress toward your objectives and ultimately create a more cohesive and productive team.