GVDS April 2019: The other side
Takeaways from the Global Virtual Design Sprint last April 2019.
If you’re not familiar with the Global Virtual Design Sprint, I suggest you visit https://www.virtualdesignsprint.com/ before reading this.
So here we go again, it’s the second run of the Global Virtual Design Sprint organized by none other than Robert Skrobe. This time it was bigger and better, the event ran for the whole month of April and got up to more than 200 sign-ups from people all over the world. Comparing that to November’s run where it ran for a week and got around 60 initial sign-ups, this was on a whole new level. This time, the volunteers had 15 different challenges to choose from and 4 types of Design Sprints to choose from. By the end of the event, there were a total of 9 teams taking on different challenges.
I was lucky enough to be able to give some help in organizing the event leading to April by working on the website during my extra hours, but Robert deserves all the credit in managing all the craziness before and during the event. None of this would’ve been possible without his own craziness. Thanks, Robert!
New people and actual experience
What does the GVDS offer?
It’s my second time to join the effort and I brought as much enthusiasm as the first time since it’s always a great opportunity to meet and work with new people from different backgrounds and experiences. Aside from the networking opportunities, the GVDS also offers a way where new facilitators, designers, researchers, or basically anyone interested, to gain first-hand experience in design sprints. While for those who are already familiar with design sprints, it’s a platform where they could try out the process in a remote/virtual format, or even try new variations on the original process without any risk. Lastly, it offers a lot of incentive to use new collaboration tools and methods for remote work.
What were my goals, expectations, and why did I rejoin?
Having already participated last November, I rejoined mainly because I wanted to polish my facilitation skills in different ways. First, I wanted to be in a design sprint as a team member. Since all of my design sprint experience so far has been as a facilitator, I wanted to take a back seat and find out how it feels like to be a sprint team member to understand which areas I would need to pay close attention to when I facilitate my own sprints. The second reason was the topic, my team’s challenge was “Ideal Collaboration; Explore the optimum way to kick off a project with a new client”, since I work with clients, this was an obvious choice for me. And lastly, was the Design Sprint format with a Problem Framing session, Design Sprint Academy released the 3.0 version of the process and I wanted to try it out myself to find out first hand if a problem framing could fill in some gaps in my own process.
When the sprint week came, I was happy to be grouped up with an awesome and diverse team. I got to work Sally Rowe and Marco Angeles from Australia, Katy Plant from San Francisco, Raul Espinosa from Mexico, Wesley Rasines who’s also from the Philippines, Ying Mei Lum from Singapore, and the great Jon Dunning from New Zealand. Also, it was great to work “side-by-side” again with Brian Leung from Hong Kong who was my teammate in the November run of the GVDS and in the organizing team. We had some challenges along the way, but everyone was great and the team came through to the finish line. To my teammates, great working with you all, hope we get the chance to work together again.
Learnings, reflections, and takeaways
During the Week, I wrote down the things I’ve learned as we went through the different exercises. I had my personal objectives with this sprint and I was successful in getting insights that I could use, here are the most important ones.
What new things did I learn about facilitation as a participant this time and what ideas did I confirm or reinforce?
Facilitation from a team member’s perspective
For me, the biggest difference between facilitating and being a team member is the mental load. As a team member, all I had to do was think of the exercise at hand and focus on my ideas as compared to being a facilitator where I had to think of the alignment and the process. It felt great to be on the other side and focus on understanding the problem and creating solutions. The exercises were as fun to do as to facilitate them and I got a couple of ideas on how to maintain good energy and facilitate deeper thinking throughout the process by congratulating everyone for the finishing the job and having the team members explain their thinking more.
I did intend to just focus on being a team member but I will admit that I wasn’t able to completely let go of the facilitator mindset; I still puzzled on how things were aligned and pace of the sprint so this affected how the sprint felt for me. In the back of my mind, I was thinking about the alignment of the team with respect to the challenge, the framing of the problem, the results of each exercise with respect to the challenge, and how it would ultimately affect the outcome of the sprint. I did raise concerns about it a couple of times, but since the top priority was to keep the ball rolling, we always chose to move on. I honestly felt like “that” member in the team, but it did give me insight into skeptical members who question the process and how I could handle them in the future.
I realized that there should a good level of tolerance for discussions to address concerns with the process and alignment before choosing to move on. Sacrificing a couple of minutes, or even scheduling for it, to help skeptical or “lost” members would result in better team energy and cooperation. Of course, we can’t dwell for too long, but it helps to at least address the concerns and spend some time on it instead of just having the “ Getting started is more important than being right” response. With the pace of the sprint, it’s easy to get left behind when a member has a lingering concern and they’re still dwelling on it. Also, reminding the members that it will feel weird or difficult from time to time is another way to cut out their worries.
Facilitating in the Virtual Format
Working in the virtual format brings unique challenges but the biggest one would be logistics. Due to timezone differences and the amount of time that the volunteers could offer, we only had 2-3 hours of online time each day, this forced us to perform some exercises offline and work asynchronously. Given the limitations in having the whole team online at the same time, the Virtual Design Sprint requires its own process to guarantee success. Based on my experience in the last 2 GVDS runs, we can’t just port the in-person process into the virtual format and use the time we have. This requires the virtual process to be more intentional with online and offline activities to maximize the time when all the members of the team are present to work together. This means that some activities that are done “Together-Alone” should be done offline and alone in order to maximize online time and guarantee that we finish the sprint in time.
Another challenge with the virtual format is the energy of the team. The design sprint is exhausting by nature, that’s why it’s called a sprint, so it was designed to start on a Monday and end each day on a good hour. In the virtual format, however, the team members come from different timezones, this means that some of the members would have had gone through a day’s work already, nearing their bedtimes, or awake in the wee hours. This becomes a challenge for facilitators to keep the energy levels high, especially because it’s also remote and the human interaction is very low. There’s no one straight answer to this challenge since every facilitator would have a different way to manage the energy of the team, but it helps to keep this in mind.
Design Sprint Process
In this GVDS run, I set out to try 2 exercises to update my Design Sprint Process, specifically problem framing and a better version of the storyboarding session. First, I wanted to try out a problem framing session and find a format that works well for it; in our GVDS Sprint, we used a W4 exercise for our problem framing session, but we were only able to go through with it on Day 1, which means that we already did the expert interviews asynchronously when Problem Framing should be done on Week 0 before any of the exercises. I can’t completely measure how effective it was, but I felt that there was still some misalignment as we went through the rest of the sprint so I have yet to test it out again.
The reason behind doing a Problem Framing session with your whole team is to get better alignment on the challenge. The Design Sprint 2.0 however, which I mainly use, goes through the problem framing only with the facilitating team; my concern about this is that during Day 1 when the problem is framed, the members would have too different understanding of the problem which could result in LTGs, Sprint Questions, and HMWs that are not exactly related to what we want to address in the sprint. I see that with having the whole team frame the problem together, these things could be avoided and we’d have ideas built from different perspectives around the same problem when we get into the sprint.
I also wanted to update my storyboarding sessions by introducing a new exercise and formalizing the storyboarding process. The challenge with what I’m currently using is that it’s too much of a free-for-all, where all the members work on the storyboard all at the same time, which could be hard to manage. Also, in a remote or virtual format, there is no process for visual storyboarding and we usually end with the user test flow and the designers are left to it pick it up from there. Based on my experience, it results in too much work for the designers on prototyping day since they are left to interpret a lot of things from the user test flow and create the prototype from that. I wanted to test out an exercise that manages the storyboarding to get better results more efficiently in remote and in-person scenarios.
In our GVDS Sprint kickoff, Robert Skrobe suggested that we use an exercise called Art Direction for the storyboarding session, however, we weren’t able to do it. On the 2nd day, we ended with an 8-step user test flow which meant that we didn’t have a visual storyboard and the designers had more than enough work to do on prototyping day. Luckily, we had some online time on day 3 and we asked some of the members to create wireframes on other parts of the flow that needed more detail while we, the designers, started working on some of the screens and the assets in a breakout session. This gave me ideas for a different approach to the storyboarding session that would make use of breakout sessions and would take inspiration from the Art Direction exercise that was talked about during the kickoff session in week 0.
The things I’ve learned from this GVDS run gave me ideas for a Sprint Process specifically for the virtual format. I’m looking forward to getting it down on paper and testing it in soon; I’ll make sure to share it as well.
Overall, I would count my 2nd GVDS experience as a success. I was able to achieve the things that I set out to do when I joined and have better confidence in the format. We had some hiccups in the team but that’s the essence of the whole event, a chance for new facilitators to try out their skills and for others to improve their process. In the end, I took home a lot of insight into what it feels like to be in a non-facilitating role and a lot of ideas for a virtual design process. I’m looking forward to the next run in October and how the GVDS would progress; we’d have to keep a close eye on what Robert will be cooking.
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