Design Sprint
In a nutshell
The world's leading organizations use Design Sprints to solve critical business problems and to drive digital transformation. Often people ask us what to expect in our MVP in a Week Program. This eBook intends to help understand all that.
The 5-day program helps get answers to a set of vital questions in the form of a testable prototype.
Participation is the key. By pulling in people from diverse groups to work on an idea together all at the same time removes bias of discussions, increases efficiency and focus.
The sprint is about moving fast, gathering momentum rather than stopping to keep checking whether the move is correct.
Customer-Centric Orgs
10 Habits worth cultivating
Designing a customer experience (CX) is key to the digital transformation of enterprise organizations. The value of understanding your user is incalculable, but the cost of answering questions, testing big ideas or even solving a challenging problem adds up fast.
Thoughtful research and planning are necessary, yet liable to derail timelines and inflate budgets if not carefully balanced. Success can be hard to achieve.
Can there be a simple and more obvious way to start working on a product/service?
Using three basic premises of Design Thinking -
Empathy, Ideation and Prototyping
5-day Innovation Journey
Ask interesting questions and incorporate human-centered approach. Help teams discover more original ideas.
By leveraging a multidisciplinary environment, Design Sprint is a proven method for accelerating innovation. Defining problems in conventional ways often leads to obvious solutions. The activities and tools of Design Thinking helps move through the discovery of customer needs, idea generation, and idea testing.
Helps shape the Customer’s Journey with improved outcomes.
Meetings and speculation can’t replace action and feedback
Most of us are really used to seeing these typical processes where there's the cycle of starting with an idea, spending some time designing, building and coming up with maybe multiple versions. Then deciding which ones to do, implementing and building them and reaching out to customers to know what they think about the idea.
Well, not bad at all as the process is the classic lean loop. But, what you normally see happens in this process is much more of the implementation and building phase stretching rather long with miscommunications, misalignments, a lot of back and forth of information and then the team getting back to the drawing board as things are not working; actually maybe not even get to launch or even find out whether the idea was valid and worthwhile to launch or know if it will have a positive impact on your business!
Design Thinking | Improved Outcomes |
| Identifying hidden needs by living the customer’s experience | Provides immersion in the user’s experience leading to better understanding |
Finding patterns and making sense of data | Gain new insights and possibilities with speed |
Translating insights into design criteria | Brings alignment and convergence around what matters to target audience |
Articulation of conditions necessary to each idea's success | Fosters clarity on make or break assumptions enabling the design of meaningful experiments |
Creating prototypes as pre-experiences for target audience | Get precise feedback at low cost and an understanding of true value offered by potential solution |
Delivering learning by doing by involving stakeholders/product managers, cross functional teams, target audience users and employees | Attain shared commitment and confidence |
Test and De-risk Ideas
Closing the loop and making it a lot smaller, validating and getting data on a product or an idea before spending all your time and money is what our MVP in a Week Program does; accelerating the move from strategy to results.
Day 1 | Day 2 |
Day 3 |
Day 4 |
Day 5 |
Create roadmap, define objectives and expected outcomes | Review ideas, brainstorm and sketch solutions | Critique each solution and storyboard best ideas | Turn story arc into prototype and pick medium for sharing story | Build a testable prototype and test with target group |
| Your Involvement | ||||
Provide audience details and business goals | Bring existing product ideas and brainstorm with us | Participate in solution critiques and help write the story | Make the prototype with us and share it internally | Select test subjects and run the tests to gather data |
While it won’t leave us with a finished product, it’s definitely the fastest and most economical way to validate business strategies or product ideas with real users.
Warming up for the Sprint!
Having conducted 50+ Sprints from startups to enterprises, we make sure that the sprint process is 10 times smoother with some planning. It's all about bringing the right mix of people together in a room (virtual or physical).
The core principles involve discussing each idea with visual concepts. Then building a story from start to end and working within a step by step framework.
Alignment is the big unexpected benefit!
The Right Fit
Fix, Grow or Re-invent a business
If we want to focus on speed, we must focus on certain business initiatives because we can’t do everything. If you’re going to accelerate, if you’re set up for speed, well, what directions should you take? Strategic intent and business case should guide the prioritization.
| Prioritization | Strategic Intent | Strategic Intent |
Fix | Operations are broken or not set up correctly and need to scale up. | Taking digital initiatives that were initiated to the finish line since funding has already been approved along with leadership acceptance. |
| Grow | Take advantage of the opportunities as customer needs change/evolve. The way we perceive and interact with the world is shifting to multi-sensory, multi-device experience with multi-modal touchpoints. Read our e-Book on Multi-Experience to understand the shift. | Companies that want to serve their customers throughout the journey can take leapfrog actions to find innovative ways to fulfill growth opportunities. |
Re-invent | Invest in new initiatives to embrace digital acceleration. | Innovate to capture new segments, launch new digital products/services. Read our e-Book to find out how you can accelerate digital innovation using iterative methods. |
Sprint Preparation Worksheet
How to get started to make the sprint smoother, more enjoyable and just overall better.
Pro Tip
It is to get things started but will change once we get new inputs from the whole group
Purpose | Steps | Questions | Outcome |
Collect some background information and get an idea about what the team will be thinking about and doing in the workshop. Having a small catch up chat is an amazing way to get a great headstart and getting an understanding about the topic. | Pre Sprint Conversation with Product Managers/Product Owners | What are you trying to achieve? | Helps formulate How Might We (HMW’s) questions
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| Write notes here … | |||
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It’s crucial to think about the customers and the target market you may have or already know. This will help choose a behavior that we want to influence through the solution. | Ask general questions about customers and the target markets | Who are the existing and target customers for the sprint? What’s the gap between them? What does the typical user journey look like? What’s working well, what’s not? | Leads to Target profile and to initiate a first draft of the Map |
Framing our own version of what we think a Long Term Goal should be and eventually agreeing on the main goal for the sprint.
| Talk about Long Term Goal | What are the top 3 questions you would like to have answered in the Sprint? Where do we want to be in six months, a year, or even five years from now? | Identify and Define Business Objectives and Expected Experience Outcomes
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| Write notes here … | |||
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Think about what are the biggest challenges in trying to reach the long time goal and maybe even turn them into solution oriented questions.
| List down the main challenges and situations | What is the product/ service/business? What’s the challenge? What would you like to know from the end user? | Helps formulate Can We questions |
| Write notes here … | |||
| | | |
It’s crucial to think about the customers and the target market you may have or already know. This will help choose a behavior that we want to influence through the solution.
| Ask general questions about customers and the target markets | Who are the existing and target customers for the sprint? What’s the gap between them? What does the typical user journey look like? What’s working well, what’s not? | Leads to Target profile and to initiate a first draft of the Map |
| Write notes here … | |||
| | | |
Get your idea from slide deck into users hand
Let’s walk you through step by step process for solving big problems and testing new ideas in one week.
Day 1
Alignment and Defining the Challenge
Bring out the concerns and understand the hurdles or obstacles to achieving the Long Term Goal. This will help ask the right questions so that we can get to the answers. Turning the problems/challenges into positive ‘How Might We’ questions changes the perspective of looking at a problem to looking at an opportunity.
Outcome: Pick a high impact business challenge for the sprint. It does not need to map every scenario.
Pro Tip
No need to map every scenario
Day 2
Review, Brainstorm and Sketch
Focus on a high impact business challenge for the rest of the sprint. Discuss potential solutions, starting with existing ideas, brainstorming and sketching together to surface interesting ideas for the prototype (MVP).
Outcome: Get inspired with Concept Sketching.
Pro Tip
Visuals get the juices flowing
Day 3
Critique and Storyboard
Critique each solution and decide on the best ones for achieving the goal. Assess the ideas and select the winners.
Outcome: Organize approved ideas into a Storyboard that will align stakeholders and guide the plan for the prototype.
Pro Tip
Ask team to share realistic data/content
Day 4
Story Arc, Medium and Prototype
Flesh out the winning storyboard into an end-to-end narrative about the experiences we aim to create, identifying all key touch points between your brand and your customer.
Outcome: Pick a medium to tell that story (video, photos, drawings, notes) and share the resulting prototype with the team at large.
Pro Tip
Focus on what’s really important
Day 5
Prototype and Test
Make the sprint worthwhile by testing the prototype and gaining insights. Test the prototype with users and interview stakeholders to crystallize the insights from the sprint.
Outcome: Depending on the lessons learned, you can begin planning for another sprint, begin planning for production or put that old troublesome idea to rest.
Pro Tip
Learn by watching users reacting to the prototype
Key Deliverables:
 | |
Service Blueprint (Customer Journey Maps) Helps understand the optimal customer experience across all touch points. | MVP Prototype A high-fidelity interactive prototype that looks and feels like a real product and can be tested by actual customers. |
Jumpstart your product development process
Starting with an MVP workshop helps avoid many of the future blockers that pop up in the middle of developing a product from ideation to pilot to launch.
The 5 day MVP Program does help validate ideas quickly and affordably, providing a wealth of insights in a relatively short space of time. Before wrapping up the sprint, decide what to do with the prototype.
Improvise on the prototype and conduct a follow-up sprint?
Take up a different customer journey in another sprint?
Design Sprint Advantage:
Reuse the technique to develop and experiment with ideas time and again.
We’re done, what happens now?
Present Summarized Results
1 Document and summarize results to use in the future. For instance the solution that came out of it and summarizing all the user test results in a clean way. The summarized results include detailed recommendations for next steps, prioritized list of features to work on, feedback and patterns. It actually creates a sense of achievement. | 2 Patterns and outcomes of the results can be used to decide next steps. We also remind the sprint team what the original goal was and how it’s answering the really important questions. | 3 Provide detailed recommendations of next steps based on outcomes of feedback. For instance, whether to pursue certain features and certain parts of the concept or not. Basically prioritizing list of features and ideas. |
Ofcourse, we do check back with the team to thank them for all the hard work, how much they have done and how well that’s worked :)
Convincing your team and organization that sprinting is a good idea
Design Sprints are super rewarding and you can get so much done, prototyped, tested and validated all in one week. Here are some hint and tips to convince stakeholders to conduct a workshop.
- Reduce risk before investing money: Talk about the opportunity cost. Why spend months of meetings picking up the pieces when you can spend 5 days with a multidisciplinary team to come up with high value added ideas and find a clear UX direction.
- Great accelerators to help break silos: Use Design Sprints as a way of getting teams to collaborate and work towards a common goal. Make noise in your organization as you will have something to show at the end of the sprint. You would have narrowed on a problem, set a vision, looked at the competition, ideated, prototyped and tested.
- Improves Productivity: Mention previous projects on which you have lost valuable time in unnecessary back and forth trips. All activities are aimed at producing something concrete and useful for the continuation of the Design Sprint and the project. Allows to focus on what is most important in your service or product/service.
- Demonstrates the power of innovation: The whole team is brought together to respond to an identified challenge and come up with creative ideas and turn those ideas into shareable stories. Highlight that among the most innovative and competitive companies at the moment (Google, Facebook, AirBnb, Uber, BBC …) Design Sprint has become the tool of choice to find answers to big questions.
- Present this as a change management experience: The Design Sprint is structured to help people work together. Try to work differently for a couple of days. It’s amazing what you can get out of a week of sprinting.
- Come up with a good Sprint Goal: If the starting problem is important enough, you will have no problem getting your team together.
Sprint Stories
Fix (Synnex) Re-imagined B2B Commerce for Re-Sellers 4 Week Sprint |
New Product (Startup) Designed 1st Online Platform for Financial Modeling and Valuation 2 Week Sprint |
Growth Opportunity (Cisco) Envisioned Sales Acceleration Program impact for Leaders 2 Week Sprint |
Ready to Workshop with Us?
Change the way you do your work and focus on things that matter the most. Now that you have an idea of the workshop, all that’s left is to get started to