GVDS Journal #2: Birthday Grind
It’s 2:43 AM… the day after my birthday.
I’m working on the first part of the virtual facilitator / training module for the Global Virtual Design Sprint.
From the beginning of today’s work session, I didn’t want to try and draft out the entire educational experience from the very beginning. I know that as the details start getting hammered out for each section, I’m going to go back and change something.
So, I started with defining the different levels of learning engagement that each participant would have, based on their experience and current body of knowledge. From there, I would refer to specific types of information to inform the work. It ended up looking like this:
- For a complete beginner to Design Sprints:
Jake Knapp’s Sprint Book, Richard Banfield’s “Design Sprint’, the Design Sprint Kit by Google - For an experienced design sprinter (GVDS Standard):
AJ&Smart’s 2.0 materials, Design Sprint Academy’s work, Just Mad and their brilliant foray into remote design sprints. - For an advanced design sprinter (GVDS Hybrids):
My own take on the process and how I would do a virtual sprint, along with examples from others like Rakesh Kasturi, Benno Löwenberg, Lisa Weinsberger and others. - Experts that are experimenting with design sprints:
Full custom builds of the design sprint process, including but not limited to — pretotyping, strategy, marketing, brand and other dimensions. Both this and the previously outlined ‘Advanced’ level would have ‘Featured Facilitators’ to showcase their own take on the methodology.
I’d think you’d have to start with this sort of framework. It would be foolish to assume that everyone coming to something like the GVDS is up to a certain experience level. Previous events have shown me that newcomers are more abundant than I had assumed. 😁
So, the above framework should do the trick. It’ll just be a matter of defining which materials are more suitable for a beginner versus a design sprint guru who’s freestyling their engagements with ease.
A quick look into the proposed learning structure
When cross-referencing all of the materials above, the sections are starting to take shape.
- Introduction
- What is a design sprint?
- Why do you need it?
- When to use one
- How much time do you need?
- Learn more (catch-all link farm with guided exploration into topics) - Before the Sprint
- Explore the challenge (with options like problem framing, challenge mapping, digital ethnography, and discovery interviews)
- Determine the scope of the effort
- Build the team
- Establish team norms
- Scheduling (team, users and SME’s)
- Daily Agendas (w/built-in retrospectives)
- Tools and Logistics
- Research deep-dive (Jobs To Be Done, Competitive landscape, Who/Do)
- Experiments (pretotyping)
- Design Brief (incl. vision, mission and success criteria)
From there, I’ll get into each day of the Sprint, making distinctions between a beginner’s proposed agenda versus an advanced or hybrid model. I’ll get into that later on.
See you tomorrow! ☺️
