The 2 most important things to get right before running your first design sprint (with VIDEO)!
1) Choose a problem worth solving
2) Make sure you have a de facto decider in the team
Running a design sprint for the first time can feel overwhelming!
Getting the right people on-board, booking the right location and sprint room, finding compatible schedules for all participants, making sure all the sprint supplies are readily available, etc., All this involves a lot of coordination and energy.
Although all these tasks are important to make sure the Design Sprint runs smoothly and successfully, I believe that there are two fundamental tasks you need to make sure to get right before anything else:
1) Choose a problem worth solving
The first thing you can do to ensure that your first design sprint is going to be a success is to choose a problem worth solving, or an opportunity worth pursuing.
Because the design sprint is a process that demands a lot of energy and effort compressed in a very short period of time, it’s very important to choose a challenge or an opportunity to explore within the sprint that is relevant strategically for the company.
How to find a challenge worth solving?
A good way is to start at the top and look at the strategy for the company and its objectives, and then find a challenge that taps directly into that strategy.
For example, let’s say that the strategy of growth for the company is about up selling new offers to the current customer base. A design sprint can be a great way to explore what these new offers could be and test out their future acceptance and desirability with a set of existing customers. Not only is the sprint process ideal for bringing cross-functional teams together (product, engineering, marketing, etc.) for generating novel product proposals, it also allows the team to preview customer responses before actually investing further in product development and go-to-market.
To illustrate how important we think this is, when we run a 2 days Design Sprint training at Pracademy we do a lot of pre-work to make sure that the challenges used on the training are connected to the company’s strategy. Even though the main goal of the training is to teach how to run through the process (and not running an actual sprint), we still strive to train based on real and relevant challenges.
2) Make sure you have a de facto decider in the team
The second most important thing you need to focus on first, is to make sure that you have a de facto decider in the sprint team.
The decider role is core in the sprint process. This role ensures that the sprint process never stalls, that it keeps moving forward at the right pace so that the team is able to execute on the entire sprint and get a valuable assessment of the desirability of its proposals in a short period of time.
How to find a de facto decider?
A de facto decider is someone from the company that actually has effective decision-making power. This might be the CEO directly or a product manager, line manager, department head, etc. The key criteria here is that this is someone that can actually decide when the sprint ends if the results are to be built, iterated on, or abandoned.
The last thing you want to do is to run a sprint with a team and get that team through a very intense and demanding process, only to get the sprint results ignored in the end by a non participating de facto decider.
To illustrate how important this is also for us as trainers, there was one time when we were running a 2 days sprint bootcamp when a really high-growth startup that was going to join the training got an overlapping visit from a high profile investor. After discussing this schedule overlap with them we ended up inviting them to just let go of the sprint training with us and completely focus on the investor visit (which was of course a high priority for them). We realized that if the CEO’s mind as a decider was not completely in the training, it would be a frustrating experience for him and the entire team.
Wrapping it up
If you nail these two first:
1) Choose a problem worth solving
2) Make sure you have a de facto decider in the team
all the other tasks should fall into place more naturally :)
Let me know what you think and please share your own tips and comments on this!
Happy sprinting,
Joao
