Design Sprint: what it is and why it helps
What a Design Sprint is, and how this method can help you answer a business challenge.
Designing a product, digital or otherwise, can be a long path full of pitfalls. Inside an organisation, for reasons that vary from case to case, project work often follows complex procedures that are far from agile.
That happens in part because the project itself is complex, and in part because the team is not set up to respond quickly to what the client needs. The worst outcome is to spend time and resources on work that never delivers the result you were hoping for.
What is a Design Sprint?
The answer to that problem is the Design Sprint: a working method shaped at Google that, through participatory workshops, compresses the design phase considerably.
It is a collaborative process that helps companies find answers to a business challenge, turning a rough idea into a prototype validated by real people, step by step, in four or five days.
The method was conceived and developed by Google Ventures and is the work of Jake Knapp. Large international organisations use it today, and so do many smaller teams that have found a reliable way to tackle organisational questions. The approach is a careful balance of Design Thinking, customer development and an Agile mindset, set out in a standard, repeatable form.
In 2018 Knapp, together with AJ&Smart, introduced Design Sprint 2.0. The main difference from the earlier method is duration: the new version runs over four days instead of five. After more than 350 sprints, Knapp and his team tightened the system, which made it possible to shorten the time the process takes.
How does a Design Sprint work?
The method has clearly defined stages, each with its own goal:
- Understand the problem and decide where to act.
- Ideate a concrete set of possible solutions.
- Decide, turning ideas into hypotheses.
- Build a realistic prototype.
- Test with live feedback, including through an A/B test.
The workshops of a Design Sprint also need a clearly defined team. It should include a decision maker, a facilitator who moderates the sessions, and people with expertise in marketing, technology, finance and design: roles that help validate the project and move it forward.
In today’s market, the way we design is changing quickly, as the needs of the people who use the product change. Being able to build working prototypes of an app or a website very quickly, and to get feedback almost at once, means a substantial saving of money, time and energy.
“The workshops of a Design Sprint need a clearly defined team, including a decision maker, a facilitator who moderates the sessions, and people with expertise in marketing, technology, finance and design.”
The benefits of a Design Sprint for your project
The advantages of this approach are many. Among them, it can turn meetings into time of high value for everyone involved: you hear the whole team, you include people in creating value, and you take decisions quickly, cutting endless debate.
All of this adds value to the project and helps you give the client a fast, useful answer, walking with them, through the making of their new digital product, on the path to a result that works.
The method also lets a company focus, for a short run of days, on a single project at a time, solving the challenges it poses quickly, thanks to a very different way of collaborating, including online.
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