Virtual Sprint Week Diary, Day 10

Wednesday, November 14

When you’re helping someone with the design sprint process, when do you decide to disengage?

When is it appropriate to see if a newly certified design sprint facilitator can take the proverbial reins and start leading the charge come prototyping day? Is it something they self-affirm? Do you keep the help line open while slowly encouraging the concept of ownership of the process?

It’s one of those questions I kept coming back to. I was conflicted between a few different options:

• I could provide assistance and guidance every step of the way.
• I could provide some assistance, but reinforce the notion that participants needed to prove their worth.
• I could wait for someone to collapse like a dying star.

In the end, I made the conscious choice to drift away from ‘leading’ any particular design sprint team after Tuesday’s activities. Given the first two days of any design sprint process were highly structured and scripted, it wasn’t too hard of a choice.

Prototyping day, however, is where things can easily go astray.

Typically, prototyping with a sprint team requires knowing your role and responsibility to the team. While most may assume that only the developer or designer roles need to be active, the entire team can contribute in a meaningful way. You just need the right process (i.e art direction by the lead designer in the morning, followed by the stitcher controlling the Kanban board, etc.) and you can flawlessly execute your game plan.

If you don’t have that structure in place, you have 1 or 2 professionals on your team doing all the heavy lifting.

Do I institute a proper process to maximize prototyping production and direction as the organizer of the event, or do I let it go and see what happens?

Given the rapid drop-off of talent occurring each day of the virtual sprint, I wanted to give each group the chance to not only own the prototyping process as they saw fit, but to enjoy the experience of their prototype being tested by their target audience.

So I didn’t interfere.

As I type, both Teams E and Fare in the middle of their user tests. I even participated in one for the Design Sprint Referral Network myself. It was really interesting to see how the team aligned a mentoring network within the broader definition of a ‘referral’.

Mind you, I had no hand in building either prototype, nor was I involved with the challenging task of screening candidates and scheduling them for interviews. They’ve been getting everything done and ready, and it’s been wonderful to watch.

It’s Ryan!

Speaking of wonderful, we had the unexpected pleasure of AJ&Smart’s own Ryan de Metz volunteer his time to help test prototypes and provide some general guidance for our sprint teams. He’s already jumped into Team F’s prototype for the Referral Network, and I’m sure that folks like David Holl from Team A will reach out him on short notice. :)

I’d be interested in finding out what he thinks of the final prototypes our teams are putting together this week. They do encompass a wide range of perspectives and approach to the challenges they were charged with, but I’ve been too close to the event to really gauge an outsiders view. I’m looking forward to talking with him next week. :)

That’s it for now! Be sure and check in for Thursday’s update, where we’ll be going through our initial findings from our prototypes to see how they did.

Hope you enjoy your day!