The Everyday Design Sprint: A step-by-step guide to facilitate an 8 hour Design Sprint - online
A Design Sprint still holds up as one of the greatest tools to solve complex problems with a small, diverse team. You want to improve a process, develop a new product or iterate on a service? Then go for a Sprint. If the conditions are right, there is no better and more rewarding way to speed up your project.
After released in 2016 by Jake Knapp, the process has been further developed and made even better by AJ&Smart’s Design Sprint 2.0. Many exercises were polished and the overall format was shortened.
But with the world shifting to online workshops, we experienced three problems with the way Design Sprints work right now:
- Convincing people to take part on a 4 or 5 day process is still hard. Thus, only a handful companies and departments use them regularly. It is still seen as something that takes a lot of time and ressources. Thus, it’s not applicable to the “everyday”.
- In an online world, sitting in a workshop in front of your laptop for more than 4 hours is just nuts. Nobody can keep their focus for that long and still produce great results.
- Some exercises of the Sprint lower the speed and motivation of the team. They waste everyones time. Participants can’t and don’t need to grasp every aspect of the Sprint.
We at Strive managed to reduce the weight of the Sprint by cutting unnecessary tasks, shifting them to the facilitator and thus, saving a lot of time while keeping up the momentum. We call it The Everyday Design Sprint.
The Everyday Design Sprint is an online workshop format that requires the whole team to take part only 8 hours in total. For most challenges, it produces the same result as the classical Design Sprint which takes 12 to 18 hours. In this guide’ll show you exactly how to run and facilitate it.
But before you read on. Who is this guide for? It’s for (Semi) Pro Design Sprint Facilitators. So, if you already facilitate Design Sprints and now looking for ways to make your Sprints better, this is for you. It ads a major selling point by reducing the total amount of time needed and thus, making it more accessible for your team and/or clients.
We do our Design Sprints with one facilitator only. Being fast with Miro is an important requirement for The Everyday Design Sprint.
Ready? Let’s jump right in.
The structure of The Everyday Design Sprint
In this guide, we’ll focus on the workshop part of the Sprint — thus, all exercises that brings your team from a problem to storyboard. We’ll have a few words on prototyping as well as getting feedback at the end of this article.
For the workshop, we usually block two consecutive days, each 4 hours. We wouldn’t recommend doing 8 hours in a row because keeping up the energy for that long is hard.
The focus of the first workshop day is getting the group to identify the core problem and then sketching a mass of potential solutions. Whereas the focus for the second day is to vote for the best solution and creating a storyboard.
Our Design Sprint teams still consist of 6 to no more than 8 people. If it’s more than 8 The Everyday Design Sprint won’t work due to the lack of time. In our experience, more people don’t lead to better results.
The step-by-step guide
The following section will provide the agenda, exercise details as well as times for each day. Each exercise is designed specifically to safe time and reduce waste.
The times we provide are not fixed. They give you an indication on how long each exercise should take. Depending on the Sprint and your team, some exercises will take more or less time.
Day 1
1. Intro — 10 Minutes
We start our Design Sprint by making a very brief introduction to the process and the rules (pass-the-mic, no multitasking etc.). Keep it short without getting too deep into the format. If your group don’t know what a learning prototype is, show one and make sure everyone understands the outcome of the Sprint.
2. Lightning Talks and Noting HMWs — 45 Minutes
We always start the Sprint with a brief discussion of the problem. If necessary invite experts and/or customers to talk about a specific challenge they noticed or have. The role of the facilitator here is to get to the core of the problem, getting as many insights from the team as possible. Here are a set of questions we love to ask:
- What is the concrete problem we’re trying to solve?
- Who is affected by it?
- Why hasn’t this been solved before?
- What is the data behind it?
The goal of this exercise: Getting as many important hypotheses and challenges as possible. Everyone within the team is listening, talking and writing HMWs (How Might We’s…) at the same time. Thus, it has strong similarities like the Design Sprint 2.0.
However, during this exercise the facilitator gets an extra task. Next to asking questions, the facilitator defines cluster headlines for the voting session. So that all HMW’s concerning e.g. the Support or Finance can be directly clustered in the next step. We do this by reading through the HMWs of the participants and putting them onto the board without the participants noticing them. This looks something like this:
After finishing the talk, each participant usually has a lot of HMWs on their workspace (15–20). Instead of going and reading through all HMW questions, we ask each one to mark her/his own most important HMW questions by changing the post-it color. Both exercises save a lot of time for the voting session.
— — — Break — 5 Minutes — — —
3. Voting for HMWs — 30 Minutes
Now it’s time to find the most important HMWs for the Sprint. Thus, clustering and structuring all individual prioritized HMWs is still necessary.
Doing this with the whole team takes time and eats a lot of energy. We therefore use the 5 minute break between this and the last exercise to make an proposal. The facilitator uses the time to assign each HMW to the clusters headlines, which were defined before. After the break we present a structured HMW board ready to go on with the voting.
After reading aloud and quickly discussing each HMW and cluster, ask the team if any important questions are missing and add them to the board if necessary. Afterwards we vote and finish the exercise.
4. Map — 20 Minutes
Like in the classic Design Sprint, we also use the Map to primarily allocate our HMW question(s). This exercise helps everyone to get on the same page to strengthen the solution sketching phase afterwards.
However, the map itself isn’t something that should be created with the whole team. It drains a lot of energy as well as time while adding no value. Why?
a. ) The map doesn’t have to be 100% correct and/or complete. It just helps us to get a rough idea to allocate our HMW questions.
b.) The group still tends to discuss every point, actor and goal in painstaking detail. Getting everyone to agree on the abstract level costs a lot of energy.
As one of the major changes in The Everyday Design Sprint, we as the Sprint planners and facilitator create a map beforehand. No matter how the discussion and HMWs turn out to be, an abstract map of a Sprint can always be made beforehand. Ideally, the Map proposal has been created and discussed in the preparation phase and with the help of the client.
The Map proposal is then being presented to the team which helps to dramatically reduce discussions and make more meaningful changes, even if some points are missing or wrong. If done right, agreeing on a focus point is also much easier.
— — — Break — 10 Minutes — — —
5. Lightning Demos — 50 Minutes
The Lightning Demos start the second part of our Sprint workshop. Here the team has to shift its focus from framing the problem into finding solutions. Thus, it still holds a very important part for the Everday Sprint.
Like in the Classic Design Sprint, your team has 20 minutes to find examples from outside that help to answer the HMW questions and inspire the team.
Afterwards, depending on your team size, everyone will present their results by using Screenshots or URLs on the Miro Board. That usually takes 20 to 25 Minutes.
— — — Break — 10 Minutes — — —
6. 4-Part-Sketch (1) — 50 Minutes
Now to one of the most rewarding epxeriences of any Sprint — sketching. After trying a lot of variations, we still recommend using the 4-Part-Sketch framework from the Design Sprint 2.0 of AJSmart. We start off with Notes, Doodling, Crazy 8’s and finish the exercise with a solutions sketch. Here is a quick overview:
- The Note exercise helps the team to get started by just copying what we already have (HMWs and their favorite Lightning Demos) — 5 Minutes
- While doodling the participants create a lot of unstructured solutions by either coming up with new ideas or iterating on the Lightning Demos — 25 Minutes
- The Crazy 8 exercise is still a must have. It helps most participants to take one step back and break their old thinking patterns — 10 Minutes
- The solution sketch is postponed to the next day. Here participants will have enough time to bring their ideas to life, which will be shared by everybody — 50 Minutes, Day 2
We know, breaking the flow by postponing the solution sketch to the next day does sound far from perfect. However, we haven’t noticed any negative effects on the results. An extra night of thinking and sleep was even helpful in some instances.
Although done online with a lot of digital tools in hand, we still insist that everyone uses pen and paper. It just creates better solutions and sparks creativity.
Day 2
1. Intro — 10 Minutes
It’s time to kick-off Day 2. By the end of this day you’ll have a storyboard and everything in place to build a learning prototype.
Start the workshop by giving a quick recap of the last day. Focus on the Map and the HMW questions. These will help us with the next exercise: the Solution Sketch.
2. 4-Part Sketch (2) — 50 Minutes
Ask each one in your team to create a solution sketch. The results of this exercise will be shown to everyone in the group. We didn’t modify this exercise, the Classic Design Sprint does the job pretty well.
We still use 1–3 pieces of A4 paper. As guidelines, we highlight making it self-explanatory, that ugly is ok and giving their finished work a catchy titled. Afterwards, everyone uploads their solution sketch to the Miro Board.
Depending on the complexity of your Sprint, it’s also possible to reduce the time for this exercise to 35 to 40 Minutes.
— — — Break — 10 Minutes — — —
3. Heatmap — 20 Minutes
We continue the Sprint with the Heatmap exercise. Your team now has the chance to go through all of the Solution Sketches. Every good idea is rewarded with one or many red little dot(s). The participants can distribute as many dots as they like. 20 Minutes should be enough time without getting into a rush.
4. Solution Presentation — 60 Minutes
Now it’s time the present the Solution Sketches. The short presentations are held by the creator, not by the facilitator. Why? Compared to an onsite sprint, it is very hard to ensure that all Solution Sketches are self-explanatory. In order to keep up with the time and to ensure that no idea is lost, it is better that participants present their own solution with a strict time cap.
One round of solution presentation looks like this:
- The creator presents his/her solution sketch, highlighting the red dots as well as the new ideas (3 Minutes).
- The group has the chance to give feedback and ask questions (3–4 Minutes).
- The group applauds and cheers for the creator and goes on with the next sketch.
Yes, anonymity still helps to fight the HIPPO (Highes Paid Persons Opinion) effect. If you have the feeling, that this is a problem within the group, you could still go for the classic way.
— — — Break — 10 Minutes — — —
5. Notes and Synchronized Voting — 20 Minutes
We move on with the Notes and Synchronized Voting exercise. We ask each one to fill out a template post-it — voting for one individual concept that should be the winner sketch. Additionally, we ask everyone to note three reasons on why it is the best (usually, these should include answers to our HMW questions). As a bonus, we ask the participants if they would add another idea from the previous sketches into that concept. The post-it template looks like this:
Especially when ideas are similar, it’s still unbelievable important to fixate people on one solution sketch.
It is helpful to remind the team that we’re making a bet, that this is not the final solution. Ideas will be tested in a learning prototype which can be disposed quickly.
6. Solution Discussion — 20 Minutes
Ok, now that we’ve got a winner sketch it’s time for a brief discussion and the the potential implications of the vote. According to the Classic Design Sprint you now have two possibilities: going for an all-in-one or rumble two different Solution Sketches.
However, sometimes it is valuable to add a third option, which we’ll call Mix. When is this option valid? In some challenges solutions tend to go in the same direction. Thus, (very good) ideas of other Solution Sketches can be added seamlessly and without much effort into the winner sketch. So, why not integrate them?
Our experience showed that this option often helps participants to move on, without having the feeling that important ideas got lost. However, you as a facilitator have to make sure, that these ideas can be implemented without any further discussion to a new Master Solution. If the discussion gets too long, leave it out. Besides, if solutions differ substantially, Mix shouldn’t be available as one of the options.
— — — Break — 10 Minutes — — —
7. Storyboarding — 25 Minutes
This exercise includes one of the biggest changes in the Everyday Design Sprint. When going into storyboarding, we usually face following issues:
- No matter how you explain this exercise, bridging the mental gap between the solution sketch and the concept of a learning prototype is still too big.
- After pushing through a lot of exercises, the teams energy is low.
- As an effect, participants have problems coming up with a good initial proposal. They feel confused and their motivation drops because they know that they can’t add value. Even when using the User Test Flow of the Design Sprint 2.0 exercise in-between.
Therefore, we skip the User Test Flow exercise and use the 10 minute break to prepare a first proposal. It doesn’t have to be perfect, however a valid proposal can be made a very short timeframe. It helps the team to understand what is being asked, ready to have a valuable discussion.
After presenting the User Test Flow proposal, the facilitator focuses on the points where the prototyper might have questions and tries to get as many info’s from the team as possible. In our experience 25 to 30 Minutes is enough. Of course, this requires you to understand which decisions have to be made by the whole group.
The final Storyboard has not to be perfect either. It’s just an agreement on how the prototype should roughly work. When building the prototype the next day, one or two participants of the Sprint (the Decider) are available for any more questions we might have.
8. Feedback — 10 Minutes
You made it. We use the final 10 Minutes to collect feedback and present the next steps of the Sprint.
After the Design Sprint Workshop
So, what is happening after the workshop? We continue like the classic Design Sprint by creating the learning prototype and testing with target customers.
Day 3, Prototyping: We strongly suggest not to involve the whole team in building the prototype. Like mentioned before, 1–2 people from the team to support if any artifacts are missing e.g. texts, pictures etc. Almost all prototypes can be done with a very small team and an experienced prototyper.
Day 4, Testing: Participants can decide on their own if they want to join the interviews or not. We also reduced the timeslots for the interview slots to 45 Minutes. And doing short 15 Minute breaks inbetween. It’s enough.
The results of the Sprint are then presented and distributed in a dedicated session the week after.
FAQs on The Everyday Design Sprint
Q: Why are the Sprint Questions missing?
A: This is a tough cut, but we think that the tradeoff between time and impact of a seperate Sprint Question exercise is considerably high. Yes, if correctly understood by the participants they can help you as a facilitator navigate through the Sprint by delivering guidelining hypotheses. And they made a lot of sense in the classic Sprint because they built the groundwork before getting into the Expert discussion. However, it is possible to filter important hypotheses during the Lightning Talks and thus, the HMW questions. We usually reframe them and add them to the Storyboard on Day 3.
Q: Why is the Long Term Goal missing?
A: The motivational impact of the long term goal is small, especially when doing a Sprint that has not the ambitions to change the world. In our view, the faster pace and focused work leads to a higher energy and motivation within the team. If you still want to have a motivating statement, frame it before the Sprint.
Q: What are the breaking points of The Everyday Sprint?
A: Yes, timing here is key. As a facilitator you have the key to steer the conversation into a right direction, using the breaks to create proposals and get the process through.
Q: Shouldn’t the facilitator use the breaks for him/herself?
A: There are still enough break times to give you a rest. Besides, you still save 4–6 hours of workshop time in total. That gives you more power to go through the Design Sprint week.
Conclusion
If you facilitated Design Sprints before and want to add a big value to the process: this is your shot. In our view, The Everyday Design Sprint is a motivating and rewarding experience. It reduces Workshop times significantly without having impacts on the sprint results.
If you are interested in our Everyday Design Sprint Miro board or want to have a chat, just send me an E-Mail to semih@strivestudio.de.
✌️ Semih
Semih is one of the founders of Strive, an agency for New Work. Follow him on Twitter, or learn more on our company website www.strivestudio.de.
