Design sprint

With a Design Sprint, a product doesn't need to go full cycle to learn about the opportunities and gather feedback.

A Design sprint is a time-constrained, five-phase process that uses design thinking to reduce the risk when bringing a new product, service or a feature to the market.

With more than 500 new apps entering the market every day, what does it take to build a successful digital product?^[1]

This process helps the team in clearly defining goals, validating assumptions and deciding on a product roadmap before one line of code is written. Main pillars of this process: Business strategy, interdisciplinary collaboration, rapid prototyping, and user testing. This design process is similar to Sprints in an agile development cycle^[2] that incorporates the same principles of learning early. Design sprints typically last one week.

Examples of situations that invite a Design Sprint

• Are you launching a new product or a service?
• Are you extending an existing experience to a new platform?
• Do you have an MVP but need an injection of UX / UI Design?
• Are you considering adding new features and functionality to your product?
• Does your product have opportunities for improvement (e.g. a high rate of cart abandonment?^[3])
• Do you want to empower your team and increase sharing and collaboration?^[4]

Phases

Before the Design Sprint, prepare by picking the proper team, environment, materials and tools.^[5]

1. Understand: Discover the business opportunity, the audience, the competition, the value proposition, and define metrics of success.
2. Diverge: Explore, develop and iterate creative ways of solving the problem, regardless of feasibility.
3. Converge: Identify ideas that fit the next product cycle and explore them in further detail through storyboarding.
4. Prototype: Design and prepare prototype(s) that can be tested with people.
5. Test: Conduct 1:1 user testing with (5-6) people from the product's primary target audience. Ask good questions.^[6]

Deliverables

The main deliverables after the Design sprint:

• Findings from the sprint (notes, user journey maps, storyboards, information architecture diagrams, etc.)
• Prototypes
• Report from the user testing with the findings (backed by testing videos)
• A plan for next steps

History

Design sprints have been refined by GV (formerly, Google Ventures)^[7] and have roots at IDEO and the d.school (Institute of Design at Stanford).^[8]

Team

The ideal number of people involved in the sprint is 4-7 people^[9] and they include the facilitator, designer, a decision maker (often a CEO if the company is a startup), product manager, engineer and someone from companies core business departments (Marketing, Content, Operations, etc.).

2016

2016 was the year of the first Sprint Day^[10] (March 8) and Sprint Week (April 18—22)^[11] where more than 400+ teams joined in^[12] including TIME, YouTube, and Frog Design.

Case studies

Examples of industries and problems that have successfully used this process in the past:

• Advertising (The Mobile Majority, 2015^[13])
• Coaching (Thoughtbot, 2015^[14])
• Coffee roaster (Blue Bottle Coffee, 2013^[15])
• Communications (Slack, 2015^[16])
• Education (Mentorina, 2016^[17])
• Entertainment (Shopify, 2014^[18])
• Furniture (CustomMade, 2012^[19])
• Gaming (Valve, 1997^[20])
• Healthcare (Zubia, 2016^[21])
• Language Learning (Rosetta Stone, 2015^[22])
• Library (Suffolk Libraries, 2016^[23][24])
• Non-profit (Miriam's Kitchen, 2015^[25])
• Pharmaceutical Industry (Merck, 2014^[26])
• Podcasts (Gimlet Media, 2015^[27])
• Radio (maRadio.be, 2016^[28])
• Real Estate (Trulia^[29])
• Special
  • Teambuilding^[30]
  • Side Projects^[31]

Resources

• The Design Sprint — GV
• Design Sprint Kit
• Design Sprint School — DesignSprintSchool.com
• Design Sprint Master community — SprintMaster.co
• Design Sprint for Enterprises — Hivelab.co
• Design Sprint Academy
• Design Sprint publication on Medium
• Duco App is a practical guide to running successful Design Sprints
• The Product Design Sprint, Github
• Agenda template for Trello available as a starting point for planning sessions.
• Design Kit: The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design

References