What is a Design Sprint?
One of my friends who is a product designer in Silicon Valley recommended that I read a book called Sprint by Jake Knapp.
While reading it, I gained a lot of good insights and decided to write about it to share the insights with others and also to use as a reference when needed.
Please know that this is just an overview of the book. The book itself has a lot more details and I would highly recommend reading it.
What is a Sprint in a nutshell?
A design sprint is a five-day process that was developed at Google in 2010. It’s for validating ideas and solving big challenges through prototyping and testing ideas with customers. It’s a quick way to answer big problems that a company has without any big-time commitments.
The sprint gives you a superpower: You can fast-forward into the future to see your finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitments.
With design sprints, you can skip the product’s build and launch phase and instead discover the best solution through prototyping and validating.
What do you need to do before you start a design sprint?
1. Choose a big challenge: Decide the challenge or problem that your company wants to solve.
2. Get a decider: The decider is someone who has the power to make decisions for the company. This decider can be a CEO or person who will make the final decision. If the decider can’t join, leave the decision to a person selected by the decider who can join.
3. Recruit a sprint team: Your team should have seven people or fewer. With more than eight people, the sprint moves slow. Get teammates that come from different parts in the company: decider, financial expert, marketing expert, customer expert, tech expert, logistics expert, and design expert.
4. Schedule extra experts: Experts in each specific field may not be able to join the whole sprint. To get their input, schedule 15–20min interviews with them on Monday afternoon to get some of their insights.
5. Pick a facilitator: This person will manage time, conversations, and the overall process. Someone who is confident in leading the group might be a good fit.
6. Block five full days on the calendar: To have a consistent sprint, you should reserve time with your sprint team from 10am-5pm.
What supplies do you need?
- Lots of whiteboards
- Post-it notes
- Dry-erase markers (lots of different colors)
- Black felt-tip pens
- Printer paper
- Masking tape
- Small dot stickers
- Large dot stickers
- Timers
- Healthy snacks
You may be wondering: do these supplies even matter?! I actually love that the book lists what we need. It’s so simple — you just have to get all these things and use them. Instead of having random tools and supplies that make for a chaotic workspace and no consistency. For the fast-paced sprint, having the most important supplies will make a difference in how people can work together effectively.
Now that we have all we need, this is what each day will look like.
Monday: “Understand”
1. Start at the end
The very first thing the team will do is lay out the long-term goal and the difficult questions that have to be answered. Start at the end means: at the end of the design sprint, what does your team want to be answered? What would have improved your project? Your team should discuss questions like:
Why are we doing this project? Where do we want to be six months, a year, or even five years from now?
Aim to have the long-term goal reflect the team’s principals and aspirations. Once your team decides on a long-term goal, write it at the top of the whiteboard (and keep it there throughout the week) so that everyone can move forward in the same direction.
2. List sprint questions
Now that the team has a long-term goal, it’s time to think about other important questions. If the team has unexamined assumptions then this is the time to question those assumptions (and find answers as much as possible). One example question is: “To achieve the long-term goal, what has to be true?”
An important part of this exercise is rephrasing assumptions and obstacles into questions.
3. Map
Your team will create a map that shows customers moving through the product. This will map will help everyone keep track of how things will be put together.
Instead of jumping right into solutions, take your time to map out the problem and agree on an initial target. Start slow so you can go fast.
4. Ask the experts
Your teammates have a lot of good insights. However, you probably won’t be able to include various experts from across the company in your sprint team. The goal of this step is to get insights from the experts on what they think about your long-term goals and assumptions.
Talking to these experts reminds the team of things they knew but may have forgotten.
5. Ask the “How might we” question
Thinking about the long-term goal, questions and the information from experts, the team will ask the question “How might we _______?” This open-ended question will force the team to look for opportunities and challenges and think deeply about potential obstacles rather than jumping to solutions.
6. Vote on which “How might we” question to pursue
Each member of the design sprint will get two votes. Each person casts their votes so the group can decide together on which question to pursue.
7. Decide on the target audience
The final task on Monday is to choose a target audience for the sprint. You will be interviewing users who fit this target audience on Friday of the design sprint.
Tuesday: “Sketch”
The team will come up with a solution.
1. Lightning demos
Each member of the team will come up with a list of products or services during the sprint. After they finish, each of them will give three-minute demos to their teammates, explaining what is cool about what they came up with.
2. Four-step sketch
Each member will work individually to sketch a solution.
This is the fastest and easiest way to transform abstract ideas into concrete solutions.
What is a four-step sketch?
Step 1: Notes
Gather key info (long-term goal, map, and the “how might we” question, etc…) This should take about 20min.
Step 2: Ideas
Doodle rough solutions (sample headlines, diagrams, stick figures doing stuff, etc…) This should take about 20 min.
Step 3: Crazy 8s Design Exercise
Rapidly create eight variations of your design. You should aim to make them all unique. Fold a piece of paper into 8 sections and spend 1 minute per section. This should take 8 min.
Step 4: Solution sketch
Spend about 30 minutes to flesh out the details from step 3. Each sketch should be a three-panel storyboard drawn on sticky notes. The key here is that writing matters. Don’t use lorem ipsum filler or draw squiggly lines to indicate the content. This is important because the text should explain what the product is.
Wednesday: “Decide”
1. Decide on the sketch
On Wednesday the team will critique each solution and decide which one is most likely to achieve the long-term goal.
2. Storyboard
Put the chosen sketch in the storyboard. The team will use the storyboard to imagine the finished prototype. This allows the team to spot problems and points of confusion before the prototype is built.
Thursday: “Prototype”
1. Prototype
On Thursday, the team will start building the prototype. In the book, it says that the prototype doesn’t have to be a real product. It just needs to appear real. Aim to make the prototype realistic since you want the user to react naturally and honestly.
Customer reactions are solid gold, but their feedback is worth pennies on the dollar.
If the quality is too low, people won’t believe the prototype is a real product.
Friday: “Validate”
1. Interview
On the last day of the sprint, the team will interview customers and learn by watching how customers react. At the end of the day, the team will have a solid understanding of what next steps to take (based on the learnings from a day of user interviews).
How many people should I interview?
The answer is surprising: five. Just five. You may think that the more interviews you conduct, the more you’ll get out of it. But five is the magic number. According to Jakob Nielsen, testing with more people doesn’t lead to many more insights but a lot more work.
It’s important to remind the customer that you are testing the prototype, not the customer themselves. It’s also important to ask “Why?” and not assume or jump to conclusions about why the user does certain things while interacting with the product.
2. Learn
After the interviews, your team will get together and find patterns from the interviews. At this point, the team wraps up the sprint story and makes a plan about what to do next.
Many times, a successful test is not the end of the process, but the beginning.
It’s what work should be about — not wasting time in endless meetings, then seeking camaraderie in a team-building event at a bowling alley — but working together to build something that matters to real people. This is the best use of your time. This is a sprint.
This blog has just scratched the surface. There are a lot more important details to keep in mind during a design sprint and so many great insights that you can learn from this book.
What do you get out of running a design sprint?
I haven’t run a design sprint before so I can’t speak from my own experience. However, while reading this book I learned that:
1. A five-day sprint forces teams to focus and work productively to get the answer to the problem quickly and effectively.
2. Instead of spending a lot of time and money on implementation, you can test out an idea in five days and see if it works. If it succeeds, that’s great. If it fails, it’s also great that you failed early instead of spending lots of time and money pursuing an idea that wouldn’t pan out.
3. The design sprint process aims to allow everyone an equal and fair opportunity to share their opinions and ideas. If you’re a shy person, you don’t have to worry about not being able to get your voice heard, you will have an equal chance to be heard even if other people in the group are much more vocal.
Final Thoughts
Before I read it, I thought that a design sprint was only for established companies, so I was a little bit hesitant to spend my time reading it. However, I found out that design sprints can be used in pretty much any setting. For example, students can use the design sprint process in an educational setting to tackle difficult questions. It was a huge benefit for me to know how design sprints work.
Now that I know how design sprints work, I’m excited that one day my team at work will run a design sprint and find a good answer to a big and important problem! To make that happen, I need to stay positive, work hard, take breaks, and sometimes go out and eat ice cream! Stay tuned for more posts about my journey towards becoming a UX designer… :)
