5 Things I Learned from 6 Remote Design Sprints
There’s been a growing buzz lately around remote design sprints, from this post by Ross Chapman to a worldwide design sprint event organized by Sabrina Goerlich and Robert Skrobe, it feels more and more that remote sprints are an idea whose time has come. Remote sprints bring teams together at lower costs, connect people who ordinarily may not connect and even allow for opportunities for learning and growth that in-person sprints sometimes don’t.
A few months ago, I had the experience of facilitating six remote sprints across multiple time zones in the space of four months. That experience showed me that remote sprints can be very effective, at times even more effective, than in-person. To succeed you need to focus and manage expectations, be willing to experiment and ready to constantly adjust the core elements of the sprint based on the situation.
Some background. These sprints were not planned as remote, in fact I had never facilitated a remote sprint before. My client, a multi-national telecommunications organization, had hoped to hold in-person sprints in multiple global locations, but a corporate travel freeze forced consideration of remote as an option. Fortunately, I was able to find a number of resources, especially from the wonderful folks at Mural, which helped me gain the confidence to recommend remote sprints as a viable alternative. Another specific background point was that the outcome of the sprints developing a marketing message for new technology across multiple silos in the organization. Because of this our prototype was not an app or Web site, instead it was a “pitch deck” and message map.
What I learned from the overall experience is that the core success factors of design sprints: speed, constraint and bias for action, can be effectively reconfigured in a remote environment even when participants are located across huge time zones. I learned a tremendous amount of ways to make remote sprints an effective alternative. Here are the key ones:
- Timing — Get Shorty
From the beginning it was clear that the typical sprint day of 6–8 “leisurely” hours would need to be cut back to a spartan 3–4 hours in order to schedule across multiple time zones. With one team member in Kuala Lumpur and another in Finland and the rest scattered in between, there was little leeway to schedule a time when one person’s session wouldn’t end at 2 AM or begin at 4 AM.
Adding to the need for speed was the very real question of maintaining remote interest and engagement over a six-hour period. This is tough enough in-person so a six to eight-hour conference call with most participants at their home office is an obvious recipe for boredom, slack chatting or visits to the fridge. The time zone constraint ended up being a blessing in disguise that forced us to create a tighter schedule made up of shorter exercises and a more rapid cadence.
There was no real magic here. We started by taking the basic sprint schedule and exercises and shortened them, refining as we went along. The sample Day One schedule below gives some idea of how we adjusted the timing for the exercises. And while this schedule looks wonderfully well-organized on paper the reality, as all sprinters know, was often quite different requiring a good deal of adjustment on the fly.
You can read more about Solutions Quadrant Mapping here
2. (Note and) Vote Early and Often
Even with shortened time frames there was still a serious challenge of how to engage and maintain inclusion. In-person you can always get a sense of who’s avoiding participation, checking their phone or just plain shy. With remote sprints this can be nearly impossible. Requesting that webcams stay on or calling on people ran into resistance and technical challenges. So how could you make sure that everyone was staying involved?
The answer oddly enough was leveraging the power of remote note and vote. The rapid cadence of exercises and the ease and anonymity of noting and voting created a much easier and more inclusive opportunity for participation. An in-person sprint can make some team members to be shyer about noting and voting (especially when higher ups are in the room), but in my remote experience there seemed to be little shyness in posting and even over posting notes. If I noticed a slow start I would jump in and note ideas on my own to get the ball rolling, but generally the anonymity of remote noting seemed a greater spur to participation while creating more openness for building on other’s ideas.
And while the anonymity of noting motivated strong and inclusive ideation, the anonymity of voting seemed to supercharge it even more. Compared to in-person sprints remote anonymous voting lowered shyness and organizational pressure. Plus, the curiosity factor of seeing vote totals revealed all at once built interest and kept everyone involved. Finally, an additional potential benefit was that decider voting did not seem to be overly influenced by the wholly anonymous voting of the remote sprint.
3. Facilitation: Know when to hold ’em and fold ‘em
The facilitator role in remote sprints can be significantly different from in-person sprints. Part of this the need to be more than usually mindful of overall engagement. Even more important was the ability to be continuously open to on the fly adjustment by either changing the schedule, expanding a discussion or politely shutting down conversation.
In these short sessions every moment counts, but some moments count more than others. It’s being sensitive to a discussion or a vote needs to be drawn out further or even reframed. In a number of cases it was necessary to keep discussion open following a vote whose result surprised team members and stakeholders. Allowing further discussion or even re-voting helped the team gain confidence in the shortened process and acceptance of new ideas especially when, as in many cases the re-voting supported the original conclusion.
Similarly, it’s also important to know when to shut down a discussion, speed up or even skip an exercise. In these cases time constraint is a powerful ally and the ability to point to the dwindling schedule is a powerful incentive. When the same points are being repeated, often by the same people, or the rate of noted ideas is dwindling it’s probably time to skip ahead. Skipping and cutting things short, when needed, also helps create a rapid cadence of activities that can help energize the team and get more engagement and creative results.
As a facilitator this means you might have to make more “executive decisions” than you are used to. Sometimes it’s breaking a log jam to make quick card sorting decisions or working with the stakeholder/decider overnight to try to remove extraneous directions in the discussion. And while this might feel like putting our thumbs on the Design Sprint scale, encouraging constant progress and rapid decision-making can give the team more confidence that the sprint is moving in a positive direction. As a facilitator this is the opportunity to leverage your role as an “honest broker”; reflecting the will of the team rather than the direction of one or two members.
4. Alone, Together, or In Between
Remote work generally means work from home and remote sprints are no exception. But in some cases team members may decide to work together in groups. Sometimes this is because of local culture, convenience of being in the office or the need for a better wifi and AV experience. The problem with this scenario is that it can create an imbalance between small groups and individuals which can lead to groupthink and isolation from the general flow.
Small co-located groups often have the advantage of eye contact and direct conversation that individual remote participants don’t. When you combine this with the probability that these groups could often be from the same business unit there is a strong potential for groupthink that would minimize creativity. Conversely it also heightens the potential for isolating individual participants who may feel unable to stand in front of the combined weight of a group. In addition co-located groups might ignored or sidelined, especially if they find that their ideas are disconnected from the team.
A solution for this, suggested by Shipra Kayan, is to strongly recommend during planning that all participants only join remotely, either from home or office. While this may feel artificial, it has the effect of dramatically leveling the playing field, minimizing groupthink and improving the level of contribution. Shipra has also mitigated this with the excellent suggestion of having team members pair off during exercises such as drawing an idea which I explore below.
These caveats aside I would recommend co-locating participants during prototyping stage. I discovered this almost by accident when a group that had been working remotely ended up collocated in the office during the prototype day. In this case, with much of the direction already decided, they were able to work their portion of the prototype more effectively because of the ability to quickly exchange ideas and iterate in the same physical work space.
5. (I Can’t Do My) Homework
Just because you can’t get a full 6 hours from the sprint doesn’t mean that you can’t get more focus and time from the team. This is where the role of homework comes in. Daily homework is already a part of in-person sprints, research for lightning demos as an example, but with remote sprints it’s role can play an even more important function. Assigning small regular homework following each session allows participants to maintain focus throughout, reflect or reveal new creative opportunities and most importantly help ensure that the sprint is top of mind for the entire week. While the pressure for shortening sprint sessions exists for both in-person and remote sprints, by introducing homework you are helping the team to commit to the sprint as the most important thing they are doing this week.
Homework makes this commitment more of a reality and it also can help counter one truth of both in-person or remote sprints: Pre-work rarely works. That great big deck that you prepared with your stakeholder might generally get a cursory look in advance, or simply get lost in email. A better way to convey this information might be to parse out the contents as an assignment across the first three or four days.
One of my favorite homework exercises is the final phase of the four part drawing. It’s nearly impossible to this 45 minute challenge into three or even four hour session. Instead consider taking the team through the first three parts of the drawing ending with “crazy eights” and assign the drawing as an overnight activity. You lose the immediacy of going from Crazy Eights to concept, but there is an opportunity for more reflection and “alone” thought that may not be available.
It’s also an opportunity to try another great modification that Shipra suggests: pairing off two team members ahead of the sprint to share, discuss and even remix their work before submitting it for the “art gallery” exercise which will start the next session. I think this can be a great way to maintain focus, build engagement, break silos and stir up thinking during the sprint. I can’t wait to try this idea for my next remote sprint.
Facilitating remote sprints has demonstrated to me how powerful and flexible the original sprint process really is (thanks @jake). We’ve already seen successful adaptations of the original formula into four and three day design sprints and remote sprints are the next opportunity to prove this. There are certainly trade-offs and compromises, but by building on the unique benefits that remote and focusing on the core success factors of speed, constraint and bias for action remote sprints can deliver on the value, promise and effectiveness of design sprints.
