A prototype in a week: The Design Sprint
Imagine you have a great idea, maybe you don’t have to imagine because you actually have a great idea. How to get the ball rolling? All these months and months of research, development, and testing just to come up with an MVP are holding you back. Even with an MVP it’s probably going to take months of design and development before you have anything to show for it. This can feel very disheartening, and might even cause you to quit your beloved project, although it all seemed so promising in the beginning. Whenever you have an idea that you’re passionate about, it would be foolish not to see it through, or at least discover its potential.
Luckily the kind fellas over at Google Ventures (GV) have devised a way to jam all of these months of work into one week. ‘One week?’ you say, ‘is that even possible?’. Yes it is! No you’re not going to be able to build your product from start to finish, but you will get a very good idea of what your product is capable of, and how the users would perceive it.
Please note that the ‘product’ I’m talking about doesn’t necessarily mean a physical product, it can be anything. I’ve read stories about people designing websites, brands, target audiences, meditation apps. Basically anything you can think of has the potential to be design-sprinted (just made up a verb).
The design sprint is defined by its authors as the following →
The sprint is GV’s unique five-day process for answering crucial questions through prototyping and testing ideas with customers. It’s a ‘greatest hits’ of business strategy, innovation, behavioural science, design, and more- packaged into a step-by-step process that any team can use.
So let’s get crackin’!
Why should you consider doing a design sprint?
First of all, it’s fun to do! This might seem arbitrary, but I wonder how many design processes get stuck because people don’t have the motivation to see it through.
Secondly, and I believe this is the big one, time constraints boost creativity. Get rid of the static. When doing a design sprint you’re so caught up in the process that there’s no possibility and opportunity for overthinking the possible outcomes. There’s no time for converging too many ideas into one idea. Which, in my experience, leads to undesirable results because the stakeholders are trying to look for a middle-ground (maybe to please everyone). Nobody likes the middle-ground, be exceptional.
During a sprint you do include stakeholders. This sense of inclusion is going to be very important after the sprint. Since they have been included they will be advocates of the idea, and seeing as there’s always a decision maker present during a sprint (more on this later) you can be pretty sure that your idea is backed by the right people. A team goes through this process together, so after, there will be alignment among the team.
It would be great if after the sprint you discover that the idea you had turns out to have massive potential. However, this isn’t always the case. It could very well turn out that you’re idea gets invalidated: there’s absolutely no interest in your product, or it might be impossible to use. Of course this is a bummer, but don’t be discouraged, you have just saved yourself and year team months of work that would eventually turn out to be time and resources wasted.
What is a design sprint exactly?
I bet that all of this sounds great to you, and you can’t wait to get started on your first design sprint. But what is a design sprint exactly?
You and your dedicated team will be working together closely for 5 days. Please note that there are many examples of teams successfully completing 3- or 4- day sprints, with impressive results. So even though the standard is a 5-day sprint, there are ways to make shorter sprints work.
It’s important to include people from various types of specialties. Not just developers, not just designers, not just management, but a healthy mix of the aforementioned.
With this team you wil be working through each of the 5 phases →
At the end of these phases you will have a validated (or invalidated) prototype on which you can start building towards a V1.0 product.
The design sprint is an extremely effective way to cram months of research and development into one week
