Run a better Design Sprint, be prepared
Imagine you are working in a product team and you’ve encountered a problem that could be solved with some collective thinking. You think a Design Sprint would be a good idea—and you’d be right. If you haven’t run a design sprint with your team before you could pick up the Sprint book and learn the in’s and out’s before starting yours. And, if you have run a sprint you might know all the methods and are ready to go.
At Signal UX, we provide Design Sprints as a Service (DSaaS, yup it’s a thing, as of just now) for companies building digital products. I’ve found, when working with teams that are very familiar with their products and customers, some leg work prior to the sprint goes a long way.
In my case as the hired gun, I start with only a surface level knowledge of the product we are trying to improve/create. The idea of using the valuable time of a sprint simply to get on the same page with the rest of the product team doesn’t sit well with me. It most certainly doesn’t resonate well with members of team that think to themselves, this guy doesn’t know a thing about our product. Yeah, that’s not a good feeling.
I listened to a podcast about how Google corporate runs design sprints, they recommend a rigorous amount of preparation prior to a sprint. And to me that just makes good sense. So while ‘unpacking’ is still an important part of the first phase of the design sprint, it helps to know what’s in the bag.
Some of the areas we look at to prepare for a sprint are as follows:
Any research documentation available
Any and all analytics available
Competitor reviews
Stakeholder interviews
User interviews
Scheduling expert presentations, external and internal
Scheduling users for the user test, existing and new
That’s a lot of stuff right? But consider occupying the time and energy of a busy group of people for 3 to 5 days without it. While this level of preparation certainly requires more work, there are a bunch of upsides—the effort is not wasted fluff, you understand the problem or opportunity, you are on the same page with everyone else, the design sprint runs smoother, and the team can spend more time on creative thinking and solution development.
We compile all the information gathered into a Design Sprint Brief. On the first day of the sprint, we start with presenting the brief. It gets everyone on the team aligned, well-informed and ready to tackle the challenges and activities over the course of the next few days.
