Design Thinking or Design Sprint. When to use one of these?
I have been using both design methodologies in the last couple of months. What I have found is that is easier to use Design Thinking in bigger teams where you don’t have the personal resources from development, marketing, and product business team for a Design Sprint.
When you don’t have those members inside the sprint is better to use Design Thinking because the idea to use Design Sprint is that everyone can create a solution together. You will need to have the point of view of every member of the product or at least from each department related to product creation. If you can’t have a meeting with all these people together it will be pretty difficult to have a clear and good solution at the end of the sprint.
The difference with Design Thinking you don’t need to have all these members together in a meeting at the same time. So you can have small meetings with each team, that way you can have a process more flexible and practical to run sprints.
When you are running on Design Sprint it’s pretty straightforward and strict, it’s a hard process step by step. It’s everything defined. It’s a hard week where you will do a lot of things in a day or two days, basically all the basement for the design solution.
So, if you are short of these human resources or you need more flexibility for your process and work, probably it’s better that you choose Design Thinking as the design methodology. Especially if in your team are a lot of designers and there is a lack of other areas.
Right now I’m working with a team of designers, and we are using Design Thinking, it’s better. We had run Design Sprint with these lack of human resources and the result isn’t very good, at the end will need iterations and certifications from executives, same with other areas if it’s aligned with the marketing goals, if there is a 100% development feasibility, you get the point.
So with the Design Thinking process, you will have more time and a flexible workflow. You will create a user-centered solution, that is equal to a better solution.
The major benefit of Design Sprint is that you can create the right solution with the participation of everyone involved in the product, so if you cannot do that then why are you going to use a process like that? It will be wrong.
You need all the points of view of the product to run a successful Design Sprint. I talk from my experience. I really like it because I think it solves the problem from every angle and quickly. But if you lack these personal resources there is no point to use this workflow. And I think this is key to decide when to use which one.
Before I decide to use Design Sprint in a project I look if I can have all the team together and if they agreed to use this process. Because they must know the time that it will take for them and that they need to create solutions. Remember most of the time all the members are busy and have their work to do, so if you want to go with Design Sprint they need to know that. This is something that you need to discuss with your team before using this process.
Let me know in the comments what do you think of these methodologies and what do you prefer to use 🙇🏻♂️
Thanks for reading! ❤️
