How to customize your next Design Sprint
These days, Design Sprints come in all shapes and sizes.
The process has evolved to include a variety of activities and variations to accommodate nearly every scenario you may come up with… especially with regards to product development.
In fact, customizing a Design Sprint process is now the prevailing standard with most companies and organizations who practice the methodology on a regular basis. You’ll run into plenty of variations for brainstorming, branding, growth and strategy that have been published for others to use.
Some enterprise companies like the Home Depot and Lego have organically integrated aspects of the design sprint methodology into their internal design practices, customizing it for their environments and desired outcomes.
Most customizations available to the general public come in the form of recipes, templates and toolkits.
Google’s Sprint Kit, in particular, just released an entire library of them. These are perfect for mixing and matching different types of techniques and activities to produce a broad range of solutions for any particular challenge.
Another example is Voltage Control, based out of Austin, TX. They’ve published their own design sprint toolkit, full of techniques to better assess user interviews, construct your prototype in a more intuitive fashion or plan out your next sprint. These are also available on the aforementioned Design Sprint Kit.
So how do you get started with crafting your own design sprint customization? Is it just a matter of taking some of these resources and smacking them together, and the magic happens?
Kind of + sort of.
You’ll need to ‘set the stage’ for your customization first by giving it some boundaries, defining your outcomes, arranging your activities and putting everything in a single time space.
Here’s how to do it.
- Define your sandbox
Everything in a Sprint process revolves around available time and resources. It’s no good to plan for an expansive engagement when you’re only given two hours and three people to turn something around. With sandboxing, you establish exactly what your Design Sprint needs (total time and committed resources) to meet expectations and expected outcomes.
With Sandboxing, you accomplish three things:
First, you establish the overall start and end to your Design Sprint, irregardless of the amount of actual days or time periods you spend to hit your success targets.
Second, you set a boundary to protect your resources from outside influence and the “we need Dave for a last minute thing”… which happens quite a bit. You’re reserving your time with important people.
Third, you’re communicate to your stakeholders (and anyone else concerned) that the Sprint you’re doing requires both committed time and resources to be non-negotiable. Ideally, this should come from those who are sponsoring your Sprint.
At this point, your Design Sprint should be perceived as an official event. - Concentrate on your outcomes first
If you run with the assumption that any design sprint process can be modified and constructed for context and challenge, you should frame what success looks like first and foremost.
You’ll want to concentrate on both the outcomes of the design sprint, and the results your stakeholders (and by extension, the business) want with their investment of time and resources. The more clarity you have on the latter, the more the former will be easier to adopt and socialize amongst the Sprint team.
If your Sprint doesn’t need external validation from an executive body, then most of Monday’s activities around long term goals should be enough to project a desired outcome within any stated hypothesis. - Write your recipe for success
What mixture of activities and events will make for a tasty and glorious Sprint week? How do you craft the ideal mix of ingredients to create that amazing outcome you’re looking to achieve?
I usually recommend writing your initial recipe down on a piece of note paper. It’s super simple to write up, modify, share and start a conversation about how a particular Design Sprint should be constructed. You can also craft some custom activities you’d like to experiment with.
Once you have that initial recipe written up, refer to the various online design sprint toolkits that available to you. Feel free to incorporate particular activities that would drive your Sprint Team towards its success criteria.
For example, if there’s a strong desire to ‘understand the problem and why everyone is there’, schedule an ‘Elevator Pitch’ to start your daily sessions and align the team. If the research team insists on incorporating and building proto-personas before going into a prototyping phase, you can pencil that in.
Just make sure you’re aligning with your intended outcomes in Step 2. Try not to fill your Design Sprint up with ‘nice to know but non-critical’ exercises that sidetrack your Sprint Team.
4. Map your recipe to a timelane
A timelane is a single lane of time. It visually represents the total amount of allotted time for a Design Sprint, and showcasing it in a single row.
You can use timelanes to get a complete visual representation of the time allotted for a design sprint. While you can always use something like Google Docs, Sheets or Trello to work out an activity plan, a timelane eliminates the need to immediately consider the days or the any particular hour that activities will occur.
Timelanes are also the perfect tool for calling audibles and changing things up when circumstances change.
For example, let’s say your Sprint Team’s conversations about the problem space on Monday and Tuesday could extend well beyond their allotted time, pushing the entire schedule back by 1–2 hours or more. A timelane can quickly help you quickly determine what can be shortened, added or eliminated from the agenda to accommodate for this new reality.
The prevailing trend for the design sprint process in 2019 will be continued customization and experimentation. The ongoing demands for speed, efficiency and results will continue to drive the methodology into new territory and acceptance.
How do you hack the design sprint process? How have you changed or modified it for your situation?
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