Startups: Solve your biggest problem in 4 days.
- Time and Resources?
- Money!
- Solving HUGE problems?
- Identifying what the problem is?
- Validating ideas?
- Uh, duh, all of the above!
If asked by a magical genie what two wishes they would like most for their startup, most would first choose more time…
The second would, invariably, be more money. Cash is king.
Then there’s the whole “finding a problem and creating a solution” thing… Every investor’s first question, “what problem are you solving?”
So maybe you’ve found THE problem and created a solution… Is it viable? And how much does it cost to get to this point? Some startups never make it this far or spend thousands or even millions trying to find out.
The good news is that you don’t need Will Smith and a magic lamp to get these two wishes… You just need to incorporate Design Sprints into your operations. How
Innovative ideas are the key to success… And Design Sprints are the fastest and most efficient way to get there!
You carried out extensive market research and competitor analysis to get your startup off the ground. You know your target market and you know what your competitors are doing right (and wrong) for them. You know that innovative ideas, and more importantly, innovative products, are the key to standing out from the herd and ensuring that your brand resonates with your target market.
Of course, if it were that easy, everyone would be doing it. But by harnessing Design Sprints you can ensure that your startup has every chance of strong market penetration without wasting unnecessary time, effort and capital into research and development… and risk dying on the vine.
Design sprint: What it is and what it isn’t
Before we get into what Design Sprint is, it’s important to ascertain what Design Sprint isn’t. Many use the term “Design Sprint” interchangeably with “design thinking” and this is completely understandable. But while the two share a strand of DNA, they are fundamentally different parts of the same process.
Okay, so what’s design thinking?
The best definition of design thinking comes from the president and CEO of IDEO, Tim Brown;
“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”
It’s is both the raw material from which innovation is generated and a toolkit for perpetuating a mindset that’s conducive to innovation. It’s both the gas and the car. Design thinking helps your team to adopt a certain perspective and utilizes a vast toolkit that’s full of numerous exercises which can be implemented at any part of the design process.
How is that different than the Design Sprint?
If design thinking is both the gas and the car, the Design Sprint is an actual methodology of driving. It’s the directions which get you to your destination. It’s the structured application of design thinking. It is, quite simply, how you get there!
It is a very specific, step-by-step system for generating new ideas and testing them. It is commonly applied to products but needn’t exclusively be used for this purpose. It can be used to generate and test new operational procedures or new services. The applications of Design Sprint are as limitless as your imagination. At Toi, we run the Design Sprint 2.0…
What’s Design Sprint 2.0?
The Design Sprint has evolved! Design sprint 2.0 is the latest iteration of Design Sprint.
It has been refined and optimized to ensure the efficiency of time and cost, as well as being retrofitted to particularly suit startups and large organizations who can NOT afford to block off an entire week. The Design sprint 2.0 is further optimized to drive efficiency and eliminate waste of time, capital and resources, compressing what takes most businesses months of hard work into just a few days.
How does the Design Sprint help my startup save time?
The original iteration of Design Sprint is designed to take an innovative idea from concept to prototype in just 5 days. How does that compare to your usual concept prototype phase… Much quicker, right? What’s more, the Design Sprint 2.0 has been refined to reduce wasted time and resources so that it only needs 4 days instead of 5. What’s more, it only requires the exec team sprint team for two days instead of 5. After the 3rd day, a prototype is designed… In many startups I’ve been involved in, we don’t even start designing something for weeks; the first 3 days are all talk and meetings. On the 4th day, we test a visual prototype with real users and get validation or invalidation.
How does the Design Sprint help my startup save money?
The 4 biggest benefits of a Design Sprint:
- Solve big problems and create new ideas.
- Move at lightening speed — months of work compressed into one week.
- Test new products or ideas without having to develop something.
- Get alignment with your team or enterprise.
Because of the limited human resource requirements needed for the Design Sprint 2.0, your operation faces significantly less profit-sapping downtime. Plus, the fast and refined design process helps you to validate ideas before resources and capital are spent on them.
How we can help?
Of course, knowing how the Design Sprint 2.0 can benefit your business is not the same as being able to implement it effectively. That’s where Toi comes in! We run Design Sprint facilitation workshops for startups, non-profits, and enterprises. We even offer Design Sprint training to that your startup or business can integrate into to your own processes. We’ve run sprints with companies like WeWork, Sennheiser, and Glide — to help them enter new test new business models, enter new markets and gain alignment while saving hundreds of thousands of dollars.
