What is the Design Sprint method and why do I think it’s interesting?

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Google Developer Experts

4 min readFeb 14, 2016

What is the Design Sprint method?

It can be summarized very shortly in this paragraph: Design Sprint is a methodology created by Google that helps teams to resolve and test design problems in 2–5 days merging two concepts: sprints from the agile world and Design Thinking by IDEO.

In broad strokes, the process is comprised of three parts:

Before the sprint, the sprint master (the team leader)
Defines the challenge establishing in how time it has to be development
Prepares everything for the sprint
Invites the interdisciplinary team
During the sprint:
Works with the interdisciplinary team for a whole week, based on the design thinking paradigm
After the sprint:
Does everything so that the devised solution can be implemented

Why do we need an interdisciplinary team to reach the challenge in one week?

This allows to move forward — more effectively — than if only people from specific areas participated, as these may forget or be ignorant of important barriers, details or realities they should take into account
The paradigm implies sharing the ideation moment — in a democratic way — in order to move all together toward a concrete and feasible solution

What are the steps of the Sprint?

Step 1: Understanding

It implies understanding the problematic deeply [of the business, of the users and of the technology we have] and getting our hands dirty to understand the human beings problematic
Just as an overview, the most common techniques that we use are:
User interviews — at our offices or in their own use scenarios — to understand their contexts and their pains deeply
Focus groups with customers where we try to understand their needs and frustrations at each user journey step
Focus groups with the poor victims that receive calls in the contact center. It’s them who best know the users that call because the platform were not understandable to them
Surveys to understand the people’s technological context, their needs and frustrations
Benchmark of sites that tackle similar problematics
Analysis of all the site’s metrics and other things to understand both qualitatively and quantitatively what the problem is

Step 2: Defining

Besides understanding, the team is invited to distill and conceptualize those findings and define the design principles, in order to achieve that users end up incredibly happy
In this way, the interdisciplinary team will be choosing — everyone agreeing — the foundation of the design solution

Step 3: Diverging with ideas

In this step, the team has to diverge and to go in different directions
The ideation step forces the team participants’ brains to fly and find out new solution possibilities
This isn’t the time for everybody to think the same
And this isn’t the time when some people think and other people can’t say what they are thinking
This reminds me of Sigmund Freud’s phrase, “If two people think the same about everything, I can assure that one of them is thinking for both”
The most common technique that we use is Crazy 8, where each participant splits their sheet of paper in eight and writes or draws an idea on each part: in silence and individually
So, everybody has the possibility of expressing their ideas writing or drawing

Step 4: Decide which idea we’re going to move on with

In this step, we don’t continue diverging or creating individual ideas tending to infinity
Instead, we use techniques to converge and arrive all together to a single idea
And “converge” — according to the dictionary — means “to move toward one point and join together” and “to come together and have one goal”
We use, for example, the Zen Vote, where each participant has 3 votes and gives them to the best ideas, in order to create a big idea with the most voted micro-ideas.

Step 5: Prototyping

In this step, the team prepares the prototypes to validate the ideas very quickly and very cheap

Step 6: Validating

In this step, the team validates with users if they can interact with the prototypes and if the prototype works to reach our goal
This methodology conceptually splits up Understanding (User Research) and Validating
In the understanding step, the team will arrive at the problem’s root — the users needs and pains — in order to ideate a creative solution to a real problem
And in the validating step, the subject of study will be the prototypesafter they have been ideated

Why do I think this paradigm is interesting? Because:

The strategic plan is anchored in the reality and in the human beings problematic
It allows everyone to express themselves and lays everyone’s ideas on the table.
The shiest people don’t need to strive in order to be heard. The most talkative ones won’t have more chances to win. Each of them will have a space to ideate and be heard
It compels everyone to agree
And the power will be in the horizontal and democratic vote

In conclusion, this framework allows us to think up a solution to solve almost any problem, together and being focused.

Written by Verónica Traynor