If you’re not using Design Sprints yet, we need to talk.
Consider the following scenarios:
- Your team of designers is pigeonholed between business and development, where you feel like an order taker to churn out prototypes, flows and redlines for developers to work against.
- You struggle to deliver new products on time and on budget. Distractions, design churn, shifting deadlines, bloated meeting schedules and daily morning check-in meetings are the norm.
- There’s a dogmatic obsession with your existing product lifecycle, where needed change is slow to happen or never does.
Over the course of my career, I haven’t worked for a single corporation that hasn’t struggled with at least one of the issues above.
It’s really no one’s fault. The status quo of most companies ensures that these inefficient, resilient and self-defeating process dynamics stay alive for years, if not decades.
Unfortunately, a lot of pain has to be dealt (layoffs, stock price drops, lost contracts, shrinking market share) before those in leadership positions are willing to change the way they do business, much less change their processes for producing products and services.
However, I’ve found an alternative that seems to provide a remedy.
It’s not a silver bullet or even a short term cure, but a real step towards recognizing and repairing a foundational problem caused by inefficient or outdated project processes whose time has passed.
It’s called a Design Sprint.
It’s roughly a 4–5 day process for answering critical business questions and testing ideas with customers. The Sprint’s core foundational aspects incorporate business strategy, interdisciplinary collaboration, rapid prototyping, and user testing.
Why should I care about Design Sprints in the first place?
Why? I’ll tell you why!
- You can execute your ideas faster doing Design Sprints.
Just 5 days or less produces something tangible for users and customers to play with. - You can experiment with different hypothesis early and often.
Feel free to fail. The cost of doing so is negligible compared to discovering something doesn’t work after 2–3 months (or years). - You’ll be sharing your designs with customers early and often.
Not only will they appreciate the engagement, they’ll come to expect it. - Your competitors are likely doing their own Design Sprints…
… and plan on doing a lot more of them in the near future.
Most importantly, your ability to find gainful employment as a product designer or user experience professional will eventually be dependent on a familiarity with the design sprint process.
Once you understand the advantages of playing in this space, companies and startups that incorporate design sprints will likely be ones you’ll want to work for someday. It’s just that simple.
Would you like to know more?
No problem. Here’s a brief overview.
All You Need to Know
The Design Sprint process was based on the design thinking structure championed by Ideo and Stanford’s d.school.
In 2010, Jake Knapp experimented and tweaked the process, creating the original Design Sprint framework while working at Google.
Knapp started blogging about his process while working at Google Ventures, outlining five core phases:
- Understand: Discover the business opportunity, the audience, the competition, the value proposition, and define metrics of success.
- Diverge: Explore, develop and iterate creative ways of solving the problem, regardless of feasibility.
- Decide: Identify ideas that fit the next product cycle and explore them in further detail through storyboarding.
- Prototype: Design and prepare prototype(s) that can be tested with people.
- Validate: Conduct 1:1 user testing with (5–6) people from the product’s primary target audience.
In late 2015, “Design Sprint” by Richard Banfield and C. Todd Lombardo offered a broad spectrum of techniques to use within the method’s five core phases. These techniques were a blend of design thinking exercises and approaches from Knapp’s original work on the process.
Then, in early 2016, Knapp, John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz from Google Ventures released the ‘Sprint’ book, showcasing how their optimized process allowed startups to “fast-forward into the future to see your finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitments.”
My favorite summary of the Design Sprint process comes from AJ&Smart out of Berlin:
It’s no longer enough to have a “good quality product”, you need to have the right product. Design Sprints are the fastest way to find out if a product is worth developing, if a feature is worth the effort, or if your value proposition is really valid. Don’t invest months of time, invest a week.
Our clients love Design Sprints because they replace guesswork and busy-making with real, tangible progress.
What’s the difference between Design Sprints and Design Thinking?
I’m glad you asked!
The best metaphor I’ve come across is thinking of them as two necessary components of a cooking class.
Design thinking represents the ingredients and techniques you would use to make a pizza. A Design Sprint is the recipe (a structured process for how to combine those ingredients and techniques) to make a pizza.
But, you can’t just make one pizza and wash your hands of the whole thing. To truly make some amazing pizza that your customers will buy, you’ll have to continue to experiment with your ingredients, techniques and recipes.
The good news is that it gets easier with every go, and you might just innovate your way to a pizza no one has every experienced before. Pizza cakes anyone?
Did I mention it’s evolving?
More companies and academic institutions are finding ways of integrating the Design Sprint process into their development streams and core offerings.
Take Academy UX for example. They recently introduced Product Relays, bringing together the best tools from Design Sprints and Agile Development Sprints into one fluid process.
New Haircut does something similar with Code Sprints, a 5 day process to determine the best technology stack, application architecture, and infrastructure for building a product derived from a Design Sprint.
The aforementioned AJ&Smart are iterating on the method directly, hacking the process to drive even more efficiency and ideation into a typical sprint.
It’s built to scale
Social proof on Sprint Stories and Google’s Design Sprint Kit Case Studies showcase the versatility of the method and how it continues to evolve against various types of constraints and challenges.
For example, you can opt to run remote Design Sprints with completely distributed teams. You could also go full ham and run multiple sprints with an insane amount of participants, or multiple design challenges in just three days.
The most over-the-top example I’ve read is the team behind Facebook’s News Feed, combining multiple design sprints with showing prototype work to customers on *multiple* occasions to get their designs right.
Design Sprints+
Even better, there are complementary methods that super-charge Design Sprints with context and relevance. I’m talking about:
Okay, okay… fine… it could work... I just don’t see it happening here because of “X” and “Y” and “Z”.
Okay look…
I can’t force anyone to try out this methodology if they don’t want to. You might be risk-adverse, want more details, or lack available time.
For others, you’re simply stuck and don’t have either the resources, bandwidth or political capital to make it happen.
Plus, there are many variations of this methodology that come from IBM, IDEO and other design thinking oriented organizations. I’m not so dogmatic as to not appreciate the diversity of thinking in this space, nor the contributions and ongoing work these institutions and individuals do.
But now that I’ve given due respect to various situations, difficulties and alternatives, it’s time to dispense with some real.
Practice what you preach
One of the best ways to show you mean serious business is to lead by example. Here’s what I’ve done this year alone:
- I’ve helped run and/or facilitate six different design sprints.
Half were driven by business, and the other half were interesting or intriguing ideas by my colleagues. Two in particular are aimed at generating new business for my employer. - I’ve spoken about Design Sprints at UXPA, partnering with Adrienne Guillory in Toronto this year to showcase how we’ve made Design Sprints work in the enterprise.
- I’m actively teaching and coaching others on how to apply the Design Sprint method for their own use.
Do, or do not. There is no try.
How do I get started?
If you’re interested in trying out a Design Sprint of your own for the first time, here are a few tips I’d recommend:
- Do your homework
There are a myriad of resources available online about Design Sprints. I’d recommend GV’s introductory videos for each day of the Sprint, AJ&Smart’s videos on preparation, principles and facilitation, and the always updated case studies featured on Sprint Stories. - Don’t get caught in a consensus trap
One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen people do is make a gallant attempt at gaining alignment and buy-in with numerous stakeholders, teams and random strangers to make your Design Sprint a reality. You’re better off planning, organizing and doing the Design Sprint you’ve always wanted to. Prove it can be done. - Find balance
You have to balance your time appropriately between your proposed Design Sprint and getting your main project work done. Don’t let the former consume the latter. Otherwise, your efforts will likely get shut down before they even begin. - Find a partner (or two)
Don’t go it alone on your first Sprint. Find a few (ideally, three) people you can not only trust to come through, but bring skills or talents to compliment your own. Seek out those Sprint-mates that can truly make your combined efforts sing. - Don’t end without a plan
After 4–5 days of solid effort, your Sprint team is likely spent, feeling accomplished and thinking about the weekend. It’s these situations where even the best Design Sprint dies in committee. Don’t let anyone out of the room until everyone has agreed *and* taken ownership of concrete, specific next steps in the coming months. Getting commitment on actions and activities (i.e. having a plan) is absolutely vital in determining the fate of your Sprint. - Try a Lightning Design Jam
If you don’t have a week to try this out, how about an hour? AJ&Smart leverage some activities common to Design Sprints via their Lightning Decision Jam approach, where they replace all open, unstructured discussion with clear process. You can schedule an hour of time with your team and come away with a game-plan to tackle a problem that’s been bothering everyone (too many meetings, not enough beer, etc.)
Brace yourself
I believe the Design Sprint methodology is poised for permanent integration into our modern UX lexicon. It’ll be as common as Agile and it’s variants are today to developers and businesses. It’s just a question of when.
I encourage you to try this method in the hopes that you’ll discover what I did… a more efficient and comprehensive process to validate your designs and ideas with real customers.
Then again, no one can really be … told what a Design Sprint is.
You have to see it for yourself.
Seriously, you have to go see it:
Jake Knapp is currently on a workshop tour. There’s still tickets left for his Design Sprint workshop in Austin on November 20, and his December 4th workshop in Denver, Colorado.
