GVDS Best of the Best: Sally Rowe & Katy Plant
Last month, over 300+ practitioners across the globe came together for the first ever Global Virtual Design Sprint. The event brought together design sprint facilitators, designers, developers, researchers, subject matter experts, advisors, strategists and thought leaders from San Francisco, California to Auckland, New Zealand. Together, they explored various challenges and ideas to throughout the month of April, using the design sprint process in a virtual environment to explore possible solutions and products.
Recently, we featured a number of these practitioners with Spotlight Awards. These awards were peer-based, with various sprint team members nominating each other for their facilitation, collaboration, design, development and advising contributions.
In this series of articles, I’ll be featuring a group of professionals who received the most Spotlight Award nominations from their peers. I’ll outline their notable contributions to their virtual design sprint teams, as well as their thoughts on how the event went.
Enjoy!
Sally Rowe (Senior Consultant) & Katy Plant (Director of Service Innovation) at Canary Health (San Francisco, California)
Sally Rowe is a Senior Consultant who has had more than 20 years of experience in the Healthcare sector. Through her experience in the Healthcare industry and through her own business ventures, Sally is an experienced and successful manager and business woman. She is a sprint master and is experienced in facilitating both Google Venture and Minimum Viable Service model sprints. She enjoys tackling problems head on and finding creative solutions.
Katy Plant is the Director of Service Innovation at Canary Health, a digital therapeutics company based in Los Angeles. She has spent over a decade creating evidence-based digital health programs. She has a deep knowledge and expertise in behavior change service design and has built meaningful products and services that impact the health and wellbeing of people’s lives. She has also co-authored numerous peer-reviewed articles. Katy’s current interests are in service blueprinting, design sprint methodologies and facilitation, and user engagement.
In the Global Virtual Design Sprint, Sally and Katy were recognized as a team for exploring the optimum way to kick off a project with a new client. They coordinated on user research, advising, recruiting and prototype testing.
The following is Katy Plant’s summarization of the events’ activities.
I participated in my first design sprint 3 years ago and have been integrating design thinking methods into my work ever since.
I work with a distributed team across several time zones, and we’ve been talking about “how might we” create a remote design sprint.
The first time we attempted one, a few joined remotely into a traditional “in person” 5 day sprint. We’d use Google Hangouts to connect with remote teammates, and physically carried them around the room on our laptops like they were an extra appendage. This allowed them to participate in lightning demos, crazy eights, and other various design sprint activities.
It worked… “kind of”.
By the end of the day, those laptops got a little heavy to carry. :)
Fast forward 2 years, and I’m looking at a message about the Global Virtual Design Sprint.
I jumped at the chance.
This time around, I wanted to observe the facilitation process instead of leading the facilitation as I’ve done before.
So, I took on the role of the team’s lead researcher. My co-researcher and I interviewed participants ahead of the sprint to better understand the challenge the team was designing for. I also contributed to the testing script, user interviews, and synthesizing user feedback.
“Katy & Sally were very hands on as they took on research roles for the team. Initial expert interviews were key to the success of our sprint.”
“In such a short amount of time, Katy and Sally managed to recruit and talk to relevant people before we even started our sprint week. They set the team up very well.”
“Later on, even with time zone differences, they created user test scripts that primed other team members to have a go with user testing our prototype. Katy’s user tests were exquisitely done and it was a pleasure learning from her example.”
With my facilitation hat off, I tried to imagine what the process would look like to someone who was new to design sprints. I would challenge our facilitators to provide examples when they could and think about facilitation from a slightly different perspective. One where everyone didn’t already know the rules or know how to do each activity.
“Katy and Sally were really fast in performing user research… including finding participants, conducting interviews and sharing recordings with the team… all virtually! They helped others with less experience gauge how actions and decisions might play out.”
I was really proud of the team and what we created, and learned a lot along the way. I look forward to participating in future GVDS sessions.
If you’d like to experience the next Global Virtual Design Sprint later this year, feel free to join our Facebook group anytime you’d like:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/virtualdesignsprints/
You can also sign up for the GVDS Newsletter (via Tinyletter) for updates every 2–3 weeks on what’s going on with the Global Virtual Design Sprint:
https://tinyletter.com/virtualsprint
