How to make your remote design sprint a huge success
Design sprints are common practice at Zalando, but while we were planning to run one last month the world changed. Everyone had to self-isolate and working from home became the new responsible thing to do, so on a rapid pivot we had to make the sprint completely remote.
We love to adapt, and although this was a new challenge for us I’m happy to report that it went really well, far beyond our expectations. Here’s the story of how our first fully remote design sprint went and advice on how to run one yourself!
The goal of our design sprint
The design sprint was part of a bigger collaboration between two internal teams: Zalon and The Studio. Zalon — Zalando’s free personal stylist service — works with stylists who curate and deliver complete outfits to customers based on their preferences. The Studio — which is in some ways like an in-house agency — joins forces with different teams across Zalando to design experiences and craft creative strategies for individual projects. As a member of The Studio team, it was my job to facilitate the remote sprint.
The aim of the collaboration was to explore how we can utilise the full potential of our talented Zalon stylists to help customers even more. The hope was to enable stylists to give better recommendations, advice, and guidance to customers that goes beyond just delivering curated boxes of clothes. We also made the decision to brainstorm new services that may help our customers in the times of Covid-19.
With these things in mind, our overall goal was to align all stakeholders and identify a preferred customer value proposition that we wanted to pursue further. We felt the design sprint was a good approach because it would help us turn high level goals, customer needs, and our research findings into an actionable strategy for product development.
Our team
Our team was made up of product managers, designers, developers, and of course the project sponsor. In total our group comprised ten people, and we received input from external and internal experts as well.
Regular sprint vs remote sprint
A typical design sprint is intense, the timeline is short, and the team is forced to maintain a high degree of concentration while working together. Normally you have the ability to monitor and herd the group to encourage better collaboration. Under these new circumstances, however, I realised that I had to step up in terms of facilitation; I had to communicate clearly, iterate through multiple communication channels, and enable people to work autonomously. Early on in the sprint I established rituals and habits that would be used throughout — for example even just saying the name of each participant to tell them it was their time to share — to help things run smoothly.
The realities of running a remote sprint
It’s exhausting to do a design sprint online; it takes a lot more effort to stay focused that’s for sure. As well as a check-in at the start of every day, we made sure to balance the intensity by taking consistent breaks every one and half hours. We also varied group work with individual work in order to let people organise themselves better.
You have to be honest and realistic about everyone’s attention spans, I tried to throw in some ice breakers (for example, I made people add where they were from on a map of the world), jokes, and I even created a standing desk to make sure I was more visibly present. One thing I found helpful was to have everyone mute their mics when they weren’t talking but keep the video on so I could monitor when people started to fade.
How to run a remote design sprint
Our tools
We utilised Hangouts for audio and visual communication, and we worked collaboratively on a Miro board which was essential to our success!
If you’re interested to know more about different tool options to use during remote design sprints you can take a look at this YouTube series from Just Mad. They also created a Miro template that you can use right away!
Breakdown of the sprint structure
Generally I tend to follow the Design Sprint 2.0 mapped out by AJ&Smart. It’s condensed into four days, but as we had more time I tweaked the structure slightly to give us two days to build the prototype instead of just one.
The structure looked like this:
Day 1: Start with a round of introductions, establish ground rules, create a sprint question and challenge, brainstorm, and wrap up with the 3-part sketch.
Day 2: Vote and choose a solution direction, build the user test flow, and finally create a 10-screen wireframe. Day two involves a lot of discussion, so to engage the entire group better, vary who you ask to share. You may also want to let the designers work and then gather feedback.
Day 3: Start the morning with just the Decider and designers and clarify the elements of the wireframe again. Then the designers start building whilst others create the test questions.
Day 4: Build, build, build!
Day 5: Interviewing users! This is a long day so be prepared. It’s easier if one person does all five interviews while the others take notes. Luckily now remote interviews are easier than ever!
Surprises and challenges
The best part about the sprint overall was just how well it went! The participants were fantastic and engaged the entire time, onboarding new tools went quickly, and even the outcome we have now is on par with (if not better than) other offline design sprints I have run before. Although that being said, it was extra demanding for everyone and lots of breaks were needed.
The only thing I would change would be to limit the number of people in the group; there were ten of us which was far too many, five to seven would be a good number. Other than that it was a fantastic experience with lots of positive feedback!
Why now is the perfect time to start a remote sprint
My main takeaway after hosting this design sprint is that remote work on Miro is very doable and can really help in our current situation. I’m now looking forward to bigger collaborations, possibly with our offices in Dublin and Helsinki, in order to keep working together. I also found that the new tools like Miro and Figma are changing how we work in a very inspiring way.
