Design Sprints are Absurd

It’s Time to Get Serious

The ‘Design Sprint’, made extremely popular by Google Ventures is a highly problematic approach to innovation. At best, it’s a glorified ‘team-building’ exercise that has made its way into thousands of massive corporations, startups, and company workshops. Due to its adoption and promotion by Google, it has spread like absolute wildfire, but even on its’ best days shouldn’t be really be taken seriously in any organization, big or small. The reasons are simple.

First, it lacks any scientific rigor. Second, it creates social tension, leading to hurt egos and learned helplessness. Lastly, it is just too hasty and rudimentary for massive, multi-million dollar decisions to be made. Moreover, design sprints are an exercise better suited for social conferences— not high stakes development decisions. Could you imagine Nasa using design sprints to develop solutions for a man-mission to Mars? It’s absurd.

The ‘Design Sprint’ has been made extremely popular by the book ‘Sprint’ by Jake Knapp, which outlines how an electoral conceptualization and omission process can help companies ‘solve anything ever’. The only problem is that sprinting never really solved any worthy problems. What it does do, is inflate ego’s while creating group friction which is inherently bad for innovation and the organization at large.