No. People
4-7+
Time
5 Days
Difficulty
moderate
Participants
Facilitator, Business Decision Maker, Customer Representative, User Experience Designer, Marketing, Technical Lead
This practice is part of: Product Ownership.
What is it?
It is a 5 day customer-centric process for rapidly solving big challenges, creating new products, or improving existing ones.
Design sprints enable you to:
- Clarify the problem at hand, and identify the needs of potential users
- Explore solutions through brainstorming and sketching exercises
- Distil your ideas into one or two solutions that you can test
- Prototype your solution and bring it to life
- Test the prototype with people who would use it
The process phases include: Understand, Define, Sketch, Decide, Prototype and Validate.
Why use it?
The aim is to fast-forward into the future to see your finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitment. It is a simple and cheap way to validate major assumptions, the Big question/s and point to the different options to explore further through delivery.
This set of practices reduces risks when bringing a new product, service or a feature to the market. Design Sprints are the fastest way to find out if a product or project is worth undertaking, if a feature is worth the effort, or if your value proposition is really valid. For the latter one should also consider running a Research Sprint.
It compresses work into one week and importantly tests the design idea and provides real user feedback in rapid fashion.
How to do a Design Sprint? - A Sample Agenda
By now there are many different variations of the format. You may come across the Google variation, a GV variation, the Design Sprint 2.0 (which is the agenda shown below).
The best is to try different variations and judge which one works for what context.
Monday
- Intro
- How Might We
- Map
- Notes Taking
- Crazy 8’s
- Long Term Goals
- Sprint Questions
- Lightning Demos
- Drawing Ideas
Tuesday
- Decide on Solution
- Storyboard design
- Decider Vote
- Storyboard Final Walk-through
Wednesday
- Prototype creation
- User test preparation and recruiting
Thursday
- Testing with customers
Friday
- Showcase
Related Practices
Research Sprint
News Headlines aka Cover Story
Rapid Prototyping
Pretotyping
User Testing
Further Information
The GV Design Sprint with link to the book
The GV Research Sprint as introduced by Michael Margolis
The Enterprise Design Sprint by Designbetter.com
The Design Sprint 2.0 by Jonathan Courtney from AJ&Smart