Design Sprints in Practice
Summary of our second event at Berlin’s new Product Monday Series
We’ve most probably all read it. The New York Times and Wall Street bestseller book Sprint. THE guideline on how to design great products in 5 days outlined in 257 glorious pages.
All you need to know to get started, right?
Well not really. Especially as Product Managers we all know too well that the devil is usually in the details. Execution matters, not the theory. Theory is great, but design sprints are not only about the method, but also mindset and focus, and needs commitment and planning — so it’s no surprise this topic was highly voted in our first meetup to be the headline for our 2nd event.
We’ve invited two speakers to discuss this relevant topic with our producteer community:
Venla Hakunti, from AJ & Smart, an agency who developed their own 4-day design sprint version for their clients, provided deeper insights into running and moderating sprints and also held a short workshop to explore methods and tools used.
Jet van Genuchten, a product manager at Neuraum Ventures, shared 5 key learnings in 5 minuted from her experience running in-house design sprints.
Read below a summary a set of principles to keep in mind as a moderator for effective outcomes, what to be aware of when applying them in practice and for which problems to apply them best.
What is a design sprint and why to fit in into 4 days?
The idea of Design Sprints is not completely new, they are based on ideas from Design Thinking, borrowed a lot of all things from agile and user research methods and quite some companies like IDEO apply similar concepts. Google Ventures have though experimented with and polished an approach that worked really well for their many startups to answer critical business questions in a super short amount of time.
Their respective design sprint kit recommends the following schedule:
On Monday, you’ll map out the problem and pick an important place to focus. On Tuesday, you’ll sketch competing solutions on paper. On Wednesday, you’ll make difficult decisions and turn your ideas into a testable hypothesis. On Thursday, you’ll hammer out a high-fidelity prototype. And on Friday, you’ll test it with real live humans.
But what happens, if as an agency, when your 52 weeks are filled with 52 design sprints? What if you could reduce the resources to run a design sprint? What if your company wants to enjoy the warm summer days with 4-day-work week (i.e. Basecamp)?
Effective moderation is one of the challenges of running a design sprint. In order to ensure energetic moderation throughout the first 2 days and keep the stakeholders motivated and engaged, AJ&Smart has divided the moderation into 4 parts (Mon morning, Mon afternoon, Tue morning, Tue afternoon) and take turns in who moderates which part.
The team shrunk the standard HMW exercise and left out of some other exercise from Day 1 to make it possible to get to sketching part already on day 1 :). On Day 2 they apply their own Storyboarding Process 2.0, which brings more structure into the discussion and as such makes that day more efficient.
Energetic and motivating moderation is what makes a difference in running a successful sprint!
What are key principles for an effective design sprint?
Below are some core principles moderators should promote and apply that proved to be essential to a successful outcome for keeping the momentum and the energy going:
- 10x, not 10%
It often seem easier to make something 10 percent better than it is to make it 10x better. Because by making things 10 percent better, incrementally, you can keep focusing on the existing tools and assumptions, and on building on top of an existing solutions. Making something 10x better, require you to think out of the box, be crazy and by that, but this is what — it not creates way more passion and motivation but also allows for true innovation. - Don’t rely on creativity
You don’t need a designer to do design sprints, the process itself supports you to create ideas no matter what — everyone can have ideas and any idea (no matter if good or bad) may lead to an awesome new idea (so don’t judge). - Getting started is more important than being right
If you wait for the perfect idea, you will wait forever. You’ll see, once And by the way, how do you know if you’re right, if you don’t get started? - Done alone, together
Quite a lot of activities in a design sprint are done alone but simultaneously in a team. The goal is not to discuss solutions but to individually review and remix existing ideas to generate competing solutions. This technique prevents early judgement of ideas, and thus allow to create much better solutions. - Time-boxing is key
Get a timer that’s large enough to be visible to everyone, plan the day’s tasks ahead and time-box them. Just enough time to get it done and not enough time to get it done perfectly (that’s not what we’re trying to do!). The benefit is not only to get things done on time, but also your participants will stop thinking (stop reading emails on their phone) and start doing, which is quite essential when it comes to ideation. - Showing tangible results is more important than discussion
Building a prototype also requires you to be creative and think out of the box if the product is not digital. Apply for example 3D printing if you design a physical product. Or the prototype could be the material that sells the physical product or device: a brochure, website, video, slide deck (think how dropbox introduced their product first, nothing was there but a video)
Do Design Sprints work in Practice?
Short answer: YES. But …
… you’ll get better with time. One single design sprint won’t solve magically all your problems. Ideally, a first sprint helps you generate validated ideas which you can then dive deeper into to add it into our product roadmap. And don’t forget, an outcome of a validation day could also be the idea does not work, which may seem unsatisfying. But hey, it only took you 4 days to find out, not 3 months instead!
…don’t do it too often. Building a prototype to verify an idea and getting things out into production are two different things. Allow some time in-between design sprints to make best use of them. Practice has shown that approx. every 8 weeks seems to be a reasonable time-frame
…they also have a cost attached: time (reparation and team not available for other tasks during that time), money (need to by amazon vouchers for user testing?), people (yes, the stakeholders need to invest their time, too!) and space (occupy the meeting rooms for a week!).
When to use Design Sprints?
The following scenarios have proven to be a great starting point for design sprints. But keep in mind, running really successful design sprints require some practice and you’ll get better, learn and improve over time. And as a last piece of advice: don’t give up if the first time does not seem to run smoothly, the concept may sound crazy but it really works!
- High Uncertainty: you are facing a big problem and the solution is either unclear or you can’t come to an agreement.
- High Risk: you have a solution at hand for a problem but it requires a lot of time, effort and money.
- Not Enough Time: you are up against a deadline with an important project and you need a good solution, super fast.
With that, we wish you a great rest of the week and hope to see you at our next meetup! Stay tuned for upcoming dates and topics on our meetup page and Facebook group, and for more updates on PM tools, how to’s and tips, give us a follow here on Medium.
