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.

What is a Design Sprint?

The design sprint espoused by Google is a 5–10-day process of validating ideas and solving problems through research, conceptualization, and testing solutions with hypothetical end-users. Usually, sprints are exercised by teams which may include a designer, researcher, strategist, visual designer, and anyone else deemed fit to participate (managers and/or executives).

How it Works (The Google Way)

Teams of ~5 people are organized to work together in one–two week sessions where they’re tasked to solve a problem or work on a particular facet of a product (it could be the ‘account’ section of a website). On day one, members are asked to take part in a lightning round where they ask experts (often within the company) key questions that will help them understand the problem they’re tackling. One day two you then jump into ‘solution mode’…