Design Sprints

I believe Design Sprints are now a well understood format with lots of companies having tried them out once or twice, using them sporadically across the year or leveraging them for nearly every new product innovation.  How embedded they are is often driven by a companies’ appetite to learn quickly (and continuously!) with their customers involved from the outset.

Back in c. 2016, I decided I wanted to move from reading about Design Sprints to facilitating them along with colleagues from my direct team and stakeholders across the business. I already had the book ‘Sprint’ by Jake Knapp that does an amazing job of explaining the framework. So, the key challenge was now engaging my peers (Directors across the business I was in at the time) and some of my more ‘free-thinking’ team members to come and have a go with me. There is no doubt, to secure approximately seven folks from various teams to step out of their day-job for five days and take part in a Design Sprint needs significant influencing and evangelising skills. But I somehow managed to make that first one happen and, of course, there were some moments where I felt out of my depth or I asked the group to take an impromptu break while I quickly referred to the book to remind myself of the next step.  In that first Design Sprint, I facilitated the group to create a really interesting app concept for a new persona segment that the business had never focussed on before.

I went on to facilitate four more Design Sprints in that business, each time engaging around a different hypotheses and new colleagues and subject-matter experts taking part. The key point is that sometimes the specific hypothesis was ‘proven’ and an idea was taken onto a product roadmap for further discovery.  However, it’s an equally great outcome from a Design Sprint if the hypothesis is ‘disproven’ across the five days – as this means we’ve learnt more about our customers and business models quickly - and not burnt thousands of pounds/dollars in the process).

Since this time, whenever I’ve started leading a new team, I love to listen to the discovery processes and models they already have in place.  And, if I don’t hear Design Sprints as a framework they sometimes deploy, I get on my evangelising ‘soap-box’ and share my experiences (the good and bad). This has led to me buying many more copies of the ‘Sprint’ book for my team members over the years. And I’ve been able to actively coach and sponsor more facilitators and groups running Design Sprints across the last c. six years.  Seeing them run in different companies and industries is always exciting to me - but also reaffirms there is no ‘cookie-cutter’ way to tackle product discovery – every situation and concept is often quite unique.