Design Sprints: Helping Everyone Develop Customer Empathy and Insights

When ReadyTalk established its new dedicated innovation team in April 2016, we knew we wanted to try new approaches to product design and development. When the Google Ventures Sprint book came out, the process seemed a good fit: customer-focused, time-limited, and (best of all!) very detailed!

The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. — http://www.gv.com/sprint/

For our first Sprint, we decided to explore a challenge faced by our existing customer base. Deciding on the challenge was actually one of the most difficult aspects of the process! As an innovation team, we have a lot of areas we can explore, but we decided to stay ‘close to home’ with this one as we wanted to be able to leverage our internal experts and have more likelihood for success.

The team for the week was the DART Innovation team and our Engineering R&D team, with Beth Toeniskoetter (the Manager for the Webinar Line of Business) as our Decider. She wasn’t an active team member for the majority of the week, we would just check in with her at critical steps.

We aspired to follow the GV Design Sprint process as best we could:

How did each day go? Well, I could tell you, or I could leave it to the team to share their perspective…

Monday

Matt Weaver implores us to Start at the end

By asking the experts, you’re afforded the opportunity to role play a bit. Perhaps it’s just my wont to pursue science, but I actually really enjoy this part of the process. I want to see your problems from your point of view, not my own.

Tuesday

Danny Ramos wants us to sketch our hearts out

I’m really excited to introduce the rest of the organization to some of these brainstorming techniques. We have done a lot of traditional brainstorming at ReadyTalk (Read: The loudest, not necessarily always the best, idea wins), but I think the different sketching ideas in the Sprint book can work without the rest of the Sprint.

Wednesday

Joshua Warner shares the challenges of Wednesday: decision-making

We had sketches. But what then? Which of those parts was most critical? What could we leave out? How should we figure out what the Minimum Viable Star Ship (MVSS) was?

Thursday

Casey Vick tries to help us all overcome our perfectionist tendencies on prototype day

Putting a lot of time and resources into the wrong thing stinks , and second, the more time you spend on something, the more attached to it you become (and the harder it is to hear and internalize constructive feedback).

Friday

Two perspectives!
Dan Behr helps draw out customer insights as the interviewer

The real pleasure of a successful interview was not getting the response I wanted to hear, but the responses I did not expect to hear. That’s where the real value lay.

Daniel Chao reflects on gaining feedback as the observer

At first, this journey based interview style was lethargic and perhaps a little bulky — I wanted to see the user actually use the prototype, not talk about it. Yet retroactively, I understand how this approach aligns with the core design thinking principle of human empathy. It is a fallacy to assume that true understanding of one’s thoughts and perspectives can be garnered through explicit commands and absolute direction.

Would we do it again?

We would, and we will! With a few refinements, our team has already queued up a few more design sprints over the next few weeks.

Things We’ll Do Differently Next Time

• Ensure the decider is in the room as much as possible
• Start recruiting for Friday right away
• Have more makers and fewer ‘support people’ on Thursday

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