Virtual Sprint Week Diary, Day 5
Friday, November 9:
It was a rather easy day today. Not what I was expecting at all.
I started everything off with two really interesting SME interviews. One with Julie Silverman for the Readmo App (dealing with social media awareness and influencing better behaviors towards reading) and Jonas Superka for “Design the Workday”. Jonas’s interview in particular was extremely interesting with its perspective and depth on the topics of innovation and maximizing productivity (both personally and in the workplace).
Coming from a background in user research, I made good use of the time we had in our session… covering the questions our team wanted to ask, and coming around with plenty of follow-up questions to explore underlying rationale and intent. I hope it gives both of our Sprint Teams working on these challenges a lot of material to work with.
Other sprint teams are arranging interviews for the “Design Sprint Referral Network’ teams this weekend, myself included. I’ll be doing a SME interview of one, staring into a camera and rambling off answers to a lot of questions that were generated by our talented practitioners. I’m looking forward to answering every one of them. :)
Did I do that right?
The seemingly arduous task of having to schedule 8 cumulative hours of online activity for each Design Sprint team ended up being rather… easy?
I wasn’t able to slot everyone at the exact same time for the most part. There were some teams that were way too spread apart to even get half of the team together at a particular time to go through a large part of Tuesday’s activities, for example. Hell, I don’t even know if the times that our volunteers weren’t available were periods where they could work offline on activities!
I imagine that when the teams start coming together in a couple of days, they’ll want to re-arrange things to suit their own schedules and preferences. I’ll be constructing some starter templates for Monday and Tuesday’s activities for each team’s facilitators, but I expect them to be more of a reference than anything else.
Another factor in building the instructional decks for the week is being able to leverage older materials. Since I’ve done so many sprints in the past (with a few of them being virtual), I can literally create both decks in a fraction of the time (though I still imagine it being 5–6 hours cumulative). Plus, the order will differ from team to team, so I’ll have to factor into the personalization aspect of things.
Dreaming of Asia & Australia
Since we’re doing a *global* virtual design sprint effort, I have to be cognizant of time zones and regions. Which means, Teams E and F will be ready to go come Sunday afternoon… and I have to be ready for that. I started on both their decks and their companion Mural boards, which I should have done by Saturday night. The rest of the teams in Europe would be next.
My worry is that I won’t be able to give overseas teams proper guidance and help at 3:00 AM in the morning. Granted the teams are only going to meet 3 hours on Monday and 3.5 hours on Tuesday, there’s still going to be a lot of course correcting and clarification about process, activity or execution. I’m hoping the facilitators for each teams can make a judgement call, but I have to be at the ready in case I’m needed.
Speaking of which, it’s 1:30 AM again… and I have to get some sleep before my son wakes me up to play at 5:00 AM. :) . Hope you enjoy the weekend, and we’ll see you tomorrow.
