Getting Design Sprints Right
Design Sprints are taking the corporate world by storm, and we’ve seen many different types attempted recently, some worked really well, and others failed. Following the design process within a corporate is hard — if not impossible — to get right during a high-pressure Sprint, especially with the level of senior stakeholder involvement that Design Sprints attract.
What is a Design Sprint? It’s a time-boxed activity that uses design thinking and the design process to validate the desirability, feasibility, and viability of an idea. Google Ventures have popularised them recently, read more here… http://www.gv.com/sprint/ or here… ‘Design Sprints, So Hot Right Now!’
We’ve been running our version of Design Sprints for about a year now, with huge success, and we believe we’ve got the formula right. We use them to solve business problems across the entire corporate ecosystem.
They’re fun, powerful, and incredibly valuable to organisations. But they can go wrong.
To achieve success with a sprint, there are a lot of do’s and don’t’s, here’s a snippet of ours…
DO:
- Pick the right team; you’ll need people that know what’s new in the world of tech, digital, data, design, and anything else that’s relevant to your business. If you don’t have inspiration from outside of your business, you’ll just come up with the same old answers to the same old problems.
- Get the right room and materials; you’ll need tonnes of post-its, whiteboard space, wall space, and you won’t want cleaners or building management asking you to take things off the walls every night, sort this out pre-sprint.
- Line up your customers before you start, you’re not going to have a good time if you try and do it mid-sprint. Think about wide segmentation for the first round of testing, and then narrow as your concepts become more founded in customer behaviour or needs.
- Prototype on the whiteboard first, whatever you’re planning to test. Too often we try and jump straight into solution mode; this includes when we’re prototyping. Try and think of the idea as a high-level concept, behaviour, or principle, and then draw it out to explain it to an outsider, if they get it, you’re on the right track. Gradually move to higher levels of fidelity with each round of testing and refinement.
- Prep for the tech, data and research that you might need during the sprint. There’s nothing worse than needing something half way through and then realising it will take a couple of weeks to produce, trust me, this happens a lot in large companies, information doesn’t just fall from the sky, the bigger you are, the longer it takes to get anything.
DON’T:
- Take on a big problem by yourself if you haven’t run a design sprint before. We’ve seen this go terribly wrong when teams try to run a design sprint by themselves, where no-one has the design mindset or the desire to stay ambiguous. The main reason it’ll fail is when you try to plan too much, allowing process to take over exploration. Design Sprints require exploration, and when you’re exploring, there’s no map, you need someone who know’s how to explore and have a small idea of what you’re trying to achieve. Bring an expert in for the first one, or get your team some Design for Business education so they understand what it takes.
- Bring a hierarchical or forced leadership mindset into the room, let the team self-organise. If you run the sprint right, they’ll know what they need to do and have an idea of how they can get there. If you stifle the process with hierarchy, you’ll lose creativity and have a lot of people too scared to say anything crazy.
Crazy = good. If you have enough crazy, eventually you’ll come to something outstanding.
Getting sprints right the first time is incredibly important, the process is ambiguous, different, and scares some people. If your company invests in it, and you do it wrong, you’ll likely never get to attempt one again. Start small, or start with an expert.
Design Sprints are far too valuable to organisations to be done poorly, do them right and do them often. You’ll never look back.
As always, reach out if you want to chat.
