5 tips for running a remote Google Ventures Design Sprint for a B2B company
Intro: Starting from Monday 5th October, Koodoo’s product team ran a Google Ventures Design Sprint, focusing on a new product we’ve been looking to test and launch for a while, but haven’t had the bandwidth to give the time and effort that it deserves. It was our first ever Google Ventures Design Sprint, and we learned loads.
What’s a Google Ventures Design Sprint?
Great video, thanks Jake Knapp! If videos aren’t your thing, here’s a quick overview of the 5 day process and what it aims to achieve:
Tip 1: Expert interviewees don’t need to be members of your team/company
The problem area that we were addressing was one that our team was very familiar with, so we decided to look further abroad and ask if other people in the industry would help be our experts. That way we could validate or invalidate our assumptions, and hopefully learn something new. For example, we had:
- Head of Mortgages from a Top 10 UK lender
- Head of Mortgages Products and Pricing at a leading UK specialist lender
- Head of Product from a leading software provider to a large proportion of the UK mortgage market
- CEO from a leading open banking FinTech
Honestly, at first I was a bit sheepish about asking people if they’d be experts in our process. Fortunately, people love being asked for their expert opinion, and we only asked for 30 minutes each. We got great insights and thoughts from all of our experts, who were really happy to help.
Tip 2: In B2B companies, involving your business customers in the design sprint is incredibly powerful if you can manage it
We are a bit unique in that we work incredibly closely with all of our partners, to the point that they often view us as an extension of their own team. Nevertheless, some of our expert interviewers were actually customers, and some of our Friday user tests were also potential customers.
On reflection, it was the quickest consultative sales cycle we’ve ever done, starting with “understand your customers pain points and needs” on Monday, and ending with “present them with a prototype of a product that addresses them” by Friday, with a clear idea on whether they want to buy it or not.
Tip 3: Choose your sprint medium carefully, and in advance
Ok, this is more practical, but it’s an important one. My team pointed out that there were already some great remote design sprint templates out there that we could utilise, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.
We used the ‘official’ template on Mural. (https://design-sprint.com/remote-design-sprint-template/) — which was awesome because it had the entire process, instructions and resources already set up for you, and the collaboration settings like timers, voting, and ‘following users’ were perfect for the design sprint. Arguably, it was easier to run remotely than in person!
Tip 4: Be realistic — allow for ‘business’ time with clear boundaries and breaks
As much as you’re meant to be 100% focused on the design sprint for a week between 10–5pm, when you’re a small product team in a scaling startup in the middle of two major launches, having a no-distraction week just isn’t possible.
We accepted this from the start, and carefully planned the design sprint around the commitments in the diary that we couldn’t miss. We also accepted that not everybody would be needed for every part of the design sprint, and the flexibility worked out pretty well, and we managed to deliver on our launch. Boy it was a tough week though.
Tip 5: The design sprint week is just the beginning — have a plan for how the outputs feed into your wider strategy
This is the most important one for me. Ask yourself: What’s next after the design sprint? How will we take the learnings and the outputs and progress them to the next stage of sales or development?
Rightly or wrongly, before we even started the design sprint, we had agreed to unveil a new product at an industry webinar a few weeks after the sprint. We just needed to work out what that product was and how it looked, which is what the design sprint was for.
Having a clear ‘next stage’ after the design sprint gave us even more focus, and was really helpful in deciding scope. When considering whether to include features in our prototype, we could make sensible decisions such as ‘we don’t need that as a feature to test our sprint hypotheses this week, but we’ll want to put that in the prototype before the big reveal in a few weeks’ time’.
In summary, a design sprint can be a powerful tool for a B2B business, providing you frame it correctly. Before you launch one, you’ll want to make sure that you:
- Have a clear vision for how the design sprint feeds into your wider product strategy
- Know who your business customers are and how you can involve them in the design sprint process (arguably this takes more planning and effort than the B2C flavour)
- Frame the output of the design sprint to customers as something that can be ‘bought’— as well as learning what works and what doesn’t, you’ll want to get that magical early product validation that it is something that your customers find valuable enough to pay for, before you spend precious time and money building it.
