Design Sprint

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.