Google Design Sprints Teaches Startups Three Important Lessons

Much has been written about the upcoming book “Sprint”, from Google Ventures. This book is a big deal, and here’s why. It explains how companies, from startups to multinationals, can test a solution to a problem or value proposition in only five days and find out if the idea might work in the real world. If you apply this to the early startup world, it means that in five days, you’ll learn whether your idea works. That’s pretty fast.

Here’s how many early-stage startups create their product:

• They do some interviews with/studies of potential customers
• They build a product (solution)
• They launch the product
• They adapt the product in lean ways to get product-market fit (too late!).

The problem with this scenario is that the validation and testing of the product doesn’t happen early enough. This is exactly why the Design Sprint methodology is so powerful. It enables you to take a short-cut to validation, before you build the product.

You can see the problem: validation (ideally) should happen before building and launching. Google Design Sprints is a great way to ensure you follow this this methodology when working on your products.

But what if you’re already working on your startup, you’ve launched, you’ve got some early traction? Your day-to-day operations are running, and you’re not in a position to organise a five-day Design Sprint? What can you learn from Google Design Sprints?

Here are three powerful lessons from Design Sprints that you can apply to your daily startup decision-making:

1. Consensus-Driven Decision-Making is Flawed

A lot of early stage startups think they’re using a lean approach to test their value proposition, but are they really? The issue is that, somewhere in the process, the day-to-day decisions are opinion-based and/or likely made by the person with the most influence. This is a problem. First-time entrepreneurs in particular are often guilty of being very passionate (which is good) and taking feedback personally. They believe passionately in their idea, but have no healthy filters to discover what really works. The reality is that some or all of your idea might not work, and only a minor portion of your larger vision may hold water. It’s your job to find out what works and what doesn’t. When doing Google Design Sprints, you’re forced to develop many solutions to the problem. People work separately on different solutions to minimize groupthink. Then they select the best idea using structured critique and voting methods.

When applying these lessons to your startup decisions, beware of being tricked into making consensus-driven decisions or using your own opinion for decisions aimed at getting a product-market fit. The truth is, you don’t know what works. You need to create several different ideas and validate them.

2. Create Many Ideas

Often, decisions at startups are made under time pressure. It’s common to run with the first idea that comes to mind. In contrast to this seat-of-the-pants approach, Google Design Sprints forces people to come up with many ideas in a short time and then use a defined process to select the best one. The value of this approach lies in not selecting the first idea, but in generating many, and in using real metrics to define ‘suitable’ solutions.

3. Test With Real Users

Only when you show your product/solution to real potential users will you learn whether your solution works. When using Design Sprints, you prototype with your team and perform a user study to get genuine feedback from real people. With modern prototyping tools — like inVision — you can easily apply this method to your own processes. Prototyping a solution need not take long. Having a perfect prototype is not necessary. Good and relevant feedback is. Testing your solution with real users allows you to learn in detail what doesn’t work and what does — so you can focus on the latter.

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