Enterprise Design Sprints by Richard Banfield Discover

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Design Systems Handbook

Design Leadership Handbook

Design Thinking Handbook

Principles of Product Design Enterprise Design Sprints

A Design Sprint provides a simple, timeboxed problem-solving framework for product teams to get answers quickly and effectively. The exercises embedded in the five phases are designed to reduce politics, increase collaboration across functions and put the focus on answers (outcomes) and not just assets (outputs). Contents

What Design Sprints Do for Enterprises Get ready to sprint

When to Sprint Is it time?

Getting Senior Buy-in And Support On your mark...

Planning Your Design Sprint A team sport

The Design Sprint Let’s Go

Beyond the Five-Phases How’d you place?

Appendix The cool down Chapter—01

What Design Sprints Do for Enterprises

Get ready to sprint By Richard Banfield The design sprint has become a trusted format for problem- solving at many large companies, but there’s still concern amongst some enterprise organizations that it’s not appropriate for their needs. The evidence is mounting to the contrary as massive organizations, public enterprises and government agencies rack up successes using sprints to overcome design and product roadblocks. This book will explore their stories and address the specific challenges enterprise organizations face in preparing, running and implementing the findings of design sprints.

I first heard of design sprints in early 2014 during a lunch with Google Ventures (GV) advisor, Rich Minor. During the lunch, Rich told me about a designer, named Jake Knapp, who had been leading exciting work with some of GV’s portfolio companies. As Rich described it, Jake’s design group at GV was achieving meaningful design wins in a week or less. I was skeptical at first. But by the time he had finished describing the five-phase process, my love affair with design sprints had begun.

Over the months that followed we started using the design- sprint methodology on internal projects at my design firm, Fresh Tilled Soil, and with some adventurous clients. The more we used design sprints, the more impressed we became with the rapid results and the enthusiastic reception from clients.

We weren’t the only ones diving in. Dozens of startups and design studios around the world also were trying to understand how, when and why a design sprint should be used. I frequently heard from product and design teams that a design sprint could solve all problems, and admittedly, I shared their optimism.

Throughout those early months, we tried hard to make the design sprint a starting point for every new project, and we learned a lot of valuable (and tough) lessons, including when to do a design sprint and when to do something else. As powerful as the design sprint process can be, it’s not appropriate for every project. (More on this later.)

In 2015, I published Design Sprint: A Practical Guidebook for Building Great Digital Products with C. Todd Lombardo and Trace Wax in an effort to share best practices we discovered with the entire design and product community. Since then, I’ve worked alongside my own team and enterprise teams to apply the design sprint methodology to hundreds of UX, product and design problems. The most exciting new discovery is the fact that design sprints are as useful to enterprise organizations as they are to startups. I’ve interviewed hundreds of enterprise product and design leaders on their experiences with design sprints and this guide aims to bring best practices up to date with information specifically relevant to teams and facilitators operating within the complex worlds of large organizations.

How Enterprises Benefit from Design Sprints

Design sprints are for small, nimble teams, not large enterprises. This is both fact and myth.

It’s true you cannot run a design sprint with 3,000 participants. Or 100. Or even 50. However, if you conduct it with the right dozen participants, you can bring rapid strategic results to an organization with thousands of employees.

Greg Storey, executive director of design at USAA and previously incubator program lead at IBM, says momentum is perhaps the biggest value that design sprints bring to a large enterprise. Storey emphasized the value of speed, “I think what makes them unique, and why we’re still using them, is we would hear [from senior leadership], ‘I can’t believe you got this much work done in this short amount of time.’”

For many large companies, momentum is difficult to build, making design sprints an attractive approach for high priority projects. Product managers find sprints especially useful in meeting their responsibilities to increase the speed of discovery and delivery.

Even when sprints take longer than average to execute, they get the attention of decision makers, because they produce actionable results and provide answers to momentum- scrubbing problems. Design sprints are an excellent way for groups to get unstuck and find a path of tangible progress for their companies.

Sustaining the momentum after the dust of a sprint has settled is a different challenge all together. But we’ll talk about how to do that in Chapter 6: Beyond The Five Phases. For now, let’s look at some of the other enterprise-specific benefits generated by design sprints.

Unpacks the complexity of the problem – When approaching innovation or problem solving, bigger companies often have more considerations to contend with than smaller organizations. More technology, more people and more customers. The design sprint methodology helps to unravel the complexity by unpacking the various components, testing them and validating or invalidating each one.

Reduces risk by providing deeper insight into the scope of a potential project – Knowing where to place your bets is a challenge all companies face, so bets must be carefully calculated. Too big, and you lose precious capital. Too small, and you lose impact. The exercises underpinning design sprints break apart a project so it can be scoped with clarity. They act like a zoom lens that can be aimed at any part of the project to reveal more detail or determine the level of risk.

Increases collaboration and understanding – The participatory nature of design sprints increase opportunities for communication between team members, and between teams and users. In fact, the human collision points are often the creative tension that drives innovation as the design sprint process innately shifts the mindset from arguing over solutions, towards exploration and discovery.

Demystifies the work of the design and dev teams – Organizational silos often make it harder for functional groups in an enterprise, like designers and developers, to understand each other’s work. Design sprints put these people together in ways that promote understanding and empathy.

Diminishes organizational politics in decision-making – Politics in a large organization typically boil down to competition for resources and influence. It doesn’t have to be maliciously motivated to derail a well-intentioned project. In contrast to these cultural norms, design sprints democratize decision-making by emphasizing facts and evidence over assumptions and opinion. Testing ideas and prioritizing customer feedback forms the core of the process.

Highlights what knowledge gaps exist in your team – Design sprints spend a lot of time bringing clarity to the problem. (This is different from many other business processes that focus most of their efforts on the solution.) When discussing assumptions as a group, it becomes undeniably clear what the team knows and what it doesn’t know.

Gets people talking – A design sprint often brings different functional representatives, departments, vendors, and domain experts together. For many of these people, they will be collaborating or meeting each other for the first time. New connections mean new ideas and possibilities. “If these folks have never met before, then we’re really benefiting and learning from them,” says Founder & President of Voltage Control Douglas Ferguson. “They’re definitely going to have experiences we’ve never had.” Simply getting people talking, who are disconnected by an organization’s complex structure, is an undervalued part of the design-sprint process.

Provides unbiased language for strategic discussions – A design sprint can give an enterprise the language it needs to share ideas and discuss problems without bias. The individual exercises focus teams on empathetic communication, elevating facts over opinions and breaking big problems into manageable pieces. Pulling problems apart with the right communication tools makes them seem less overwhelming and solutions become emergent, rather than dictated.

Ferguson shares an interesting anecdote about these last two benefits of design sprints. “I was working with a VP of product for a large company. Historically, he was able to just say ‘jump’ and people would jump. He built the roadmap, he defined the requirements, and people would go build.”

During the design sprint, the VP expressed a desire to return some authority to the team, but he kept falling back on old communication habits. Ferguson suggests it was because he lacked a new language to match his intentions. “Through running a design sprint, I saw him adapt and change to the point where you could see he was starting to really see the value in it. The biggest part of it was just learning to work in a new way. He reprogrammed how he thought and behaved.”

Transformations like this are common in design sprints. Participants receive new tools, in the form of language and behaviors, that set them up for more empathetic and collaborative engagements. I saw it first-hand when the CEO and COO of OfferLogic joined their product team during a design sprint I was facilitating.

When these senior leaders saw their ideas objectively scrutinized without personal bias, they realized just how opinion-based their viewpoints were. We all watched in surprise as they expressed delight in having their minds changed.

Richard Banfield — FRESH TILLED SOIL

“We’re not leading our people by selling our ideas to them. We’re actually restricting people’s creativity by doing that,” said OfferLogic co-founder, Doug Mitchell. This awakening happens when teams are provided with new tools to interact and collaborate.

Design Sprints 101

The purpose of the design sprint is to get answers to a set of vital questions, not just to produce the prototype for the next version of your solution. A designer should always prioritize answers over prototypes. Put another way: outcomes over outputs.

To understand the true value of outcomes over outputs, it’s useful to see the distinction through the lens of the enterprise customer and end-user. Outputs are the features and benefits of a service or product. Outcomes are the meaningful experiences customers receive when those services or products are put to work.

Consider the manufacturing enterprise that builds family cars. Their output is shaped metal and plastic. However, customers see more than just that. The customers see a way to get their families safely from one place to the next. They’re looking for the peace of mind that comes from being good protectors to their families. That’s the outcome. Outcomes convey meaning and relationship value, and they reflect the brand promises.

I’ve come to love design sprints for the simple reason that they focus people on valuing outcomes. Even when a sprint fails to provide a specific solution, the net effect is a team that’s more aligned on the big picture, which increases trust and brings barriers down.

The 5 Day Design Sprint

Five Phases in Five Days

The design sprint framework is broken into five stages, typically delivered over five days: Understand, Diverge, Converge, Prototype, and Test. Design sprints align the team around a real or hypothetical problem, design an experiment to test this hypothesis and then focus everyone’s efforts toward a mutual goal of discovering a solution. This alignment, scrutiny and validation improves the chances of making something people want.

By adhering to a strict schedule, there’s little or no waste in design sprints. Each phase has been carefully crafted to allow for enough time to do the exercises, but not so much time that teams can get lost in over-analyzing their ideas. The five phases also are crafted to reduce misunderstandings. First, by walking a team through the process of diagnosing a crucial problem to be solved, then by shifting the team’s attention to identifying as many possible solutions, and finally by zeroing in on the concept that has the most value to users. Let’s take a look at the questions each phase forces us to answer:

• Understand: What is the problem we’re trying to solve? Is this a real or imagined problem? Who is this problem relevant to and why do they care to have it solved?

• Diverge: What hypothetical solutions might exist to solve these problems? What are all the creative ways we could approach this problem? What are the boundaries that are either constraining us or helping us find a solution?

• Converge: Which of our ideas might work best to test our hypothesis? How can we select good solutions without being biased or presumptive?

• Prototype: What will we need to build to run an experiment? How will we conduct this experiment to get the answers we need?

• Test: Who will be the best people to experiment with? How will we find them and include them in our tests without influencing their choices or feedback?

Flexible Time-frame

One of the most frequent questions I hear is, “Do we really need to do the design sprint in five days?” In most cases the answer is simply, “yes.” However, in some cases the best answer is, “It depends.” It’s tough to carve out the time, especially at larger organizations. But doing so allows teams to really focus and go deep in critical areas. Before you completely dismiss the idea of dedicating five straight days, consider this: A client recently told my team it ordinarily would have taken her company a year to achieve as much as they did in a one-week design sprint.

With that said, teams that absolutely can’t dedicate a full work- week should aim to complete all five phases over a period of time that delivers the same value. For some organizations that may mean breaking up the five phases of a sprint and doing them as single days spread across several weeks, or longer.

Alternatively, some organizations choose to complete an entire sprint in less than five days. A small team can often get through the exercises quickly, if they stay focused. (I’ve facilitated design sprints in periods ranging from three to four days.) The tradeoff is that as you shorten the duration of a design sprint, the depth of each phase becomes unavoidably more shallow, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

At The Home Depot, the team running design sprints, lead by Brooke Creef and Ryan Johnson, discovered they could get the best results by creating different time-boxed sprints for different outcomes. Their team has created three options: a one-day problem framing, a three-day design sprint and the standard five-day sprint.

“We were thinking, how can we take this across the organization…into enterprise, into HR, into finance…”

Paul Stonick — THE HOME DEPOT

Brook Creef, Paul Stonick and Cliff Sexton discuss how design sprints came to The Home Depot and how they are spreading across the organization.

If a problem needs extra research to determine whether or not it’s worth solving, Home Depot begins with the one-day process. “The one-day problem framing is when a product partner comes to us, and they potentially want to do some ideation around an idea or a hypothesis,” explains Creef. “Here there might not be any research, and so we don’t want to necessarily turn those partners away, but we want to make sure that we are protecting the integrity of the problem space.”

During the one-day framing process Creef and Johnson’s team takes participants through the first three phases of a design sprint. “At the end of the problem framing, we usually come out with anywhere from three to five sketches or wire frames that the team will then bring up in fidelity and test after the design sprint,” Creef says.

Make It Work

Johnson and Creef also developed a three-day design sprint that appears to work well for Home Depot’s design-culture needs and fast-paced work environment. The three-day agenda goes through each of the five phases in a condensed timeline.

To ensure success, Creef and Johnson front load the three- day process with a generous amount of user research. “Research inputs for this sprint are three or more of the following: user-testing protocol, survey data, customer insights, data analytics and a cautious value-proposition canvas,” Creef says. “At the end of the sprint, the team delivers low-fidelity prototypes or wires [wireframes], value assessment and a level-of-effort assessment, a roadmap prioritization and debrief deck.” Creef’s team named this upfront research the “Understand phase” and renamed the first phase of participant work (typically called Understand) to the “Investigate phase.”

The Home Depot’s 3-Day Design Sprint

“We’re really excited about the design-sprint opportunity, and working with our store partners,” says Paul Stonick, director of online user experience for Home Depot. “We have the benefit of 2,200 stores around the country, and Puerto Rico and Canada and Mexico. So we have an opportunity to take the design sprint in a different direction where we partner with our in-store partners, and we walk out at the end of the week with a digital prototype and a store prototype.” By leveraging what Home Depot is doing across interconnected retail they have become a $7 billion e-commerce site. “We feel there’s an enormous opportunity right there to really change the business, and really make a difference.”

We have the benefit of 2,200 stores around the country, and Puerto Rico and Canada and Mexico. So we have an opportunity to take the design sprint in a different direction where we partner with our in-store partners, and we walk out at the end of the week with a digital prototype and a store prototype.” Leveraging what Home Depot is doing across interconnected retail they have become a $7 billion e-commerce site. “We feel there’s an enormous opportunity right there to really change the business, and really make a difference.

Paul Stonick — HOME DEPOT

Thinking About Shortening Your Design Sprint?

Home Depot has developed a way to make shorter sprint processes work for their needs. But before you decide to condense a design sprint for your organization, ask yourself two questions:

01. How much work are you going to otherwise accomplish in those five days that’s mission-critical to your business?

02. Would your business be at risk if you worked on only one thing for five days?

“A Design Sprint is already a compressed design cycle, so when you do it in fewer than five days you are asking to compress it even further,” says master design-sprint facilitator, Jill Starett. “If a 500-meter dash feels too long, and you claim to only have time for a 50-meter dash, you will still run a race, but a very different one. And no matter how you slice it you will not cover the same distance.”

Lastly, I’d urge facilitators to limit each phase to no more than a single day, because the time constraint acts as a forcing function to produce results. We’ll discuss this topic in more detail in Chapters 4 and 5.

A Design Sprint is already a compressed design cycle, so when you do it in fewer than five days you are asking to compress it even further. If a 500-meter dash feels too long, and you claim to only have time for a 50-meter dash, you will still run a race, but a very different one. And no matter how you slice it you will not cover the same distance.

Jill Starett — FRESH TILLED SOIL

Design Sprints and Organizational Maturity

The challenges of planning a design sprint will vary from organization to organization. We’ll examine different tactical approaches in chapters 3 and 4, but let’s first discuss the strategic considerations of culture and organizational structure in planning a sprint.

The maturity of an organization determines in large part how it will embrace design and its rewards. Using Noel Burch’s Four Stages of Learning as a framework, we can predict how a company may or may not recognize the value of a design sprint. These stages are even more relevant when applied to teams and individuals. Take a minute to consider where your organization or team lives.

Organizational stages of maturity

If your company is at stage 1 or 2, you’ll be better off bringing in an expert to facilitate the design sprint. By doing this you’ll accelerate the learning process and provide an objective facilitator to manage the team. If you’re at a stage 3 company that’s already experimenting with innovation projects inside the business, you may want a member of your staff to lead the design sprint, but under the mentorship or guidance of a seasoned facilitator. Stage 4 companies should be able to run all design-related exercises internally. Use the matrix below to further analyze where your team or company is right now. Naturally, there will be shades of grey where your organization may have teams in different stages of learning. Don’t try to match your entire organization to a stage, rather use it a guide for your specific project and design-sprint planning.

Also, don’t be tempted to overestimate where your company or team sits in this continuum. It’s more important to honestly identify your strengths and weaknesses.

A design maturity model

If You’re at Stage 1… This stage is characterized by a culture that’s short on vision and strong on sales. In other words, customers call the shots by demanding new features, and the company simply responds without thinking of the long-term impacts.

If you’re at this stage, it will be necessary to do more preparation before starting a design sprint. Preparation will anticipate some of the push-back you’re likely to receive from team members who are unfamiliar with inventive, design- orientated sessions. The language of design sprints, and thus design thinking, will be new to your organization. Providing the team opportunities to discuss their fears, concerns or assumptions before the design sprint starts is critical to success.

“In more and more of our design sprints with larger companies, we run a framing session beforehand which is a one day opportunity for them to not only discover which problems they want to prioritize and focus on but really get clear on why it’s important,” says Jay Melone co-founder of New Haircut, a New York- and Berlin-based firm specializing in design-sprint facilitation. “Ultimately we’re after that really clearly defined problem statement that sets up a really well-articulated sprint.”

Preparing for a design sprint in a company environment that’s new to design-lead practices also means being aware of how it’s positioned. Know your audience and prepare accordingly. This may include giving your design sprint a different name that’s a better fit for your culture (more about this in chapter 3). You’re also going to be better off with a seasoned facilitator to help you plan and run the sessions. If you don’t have the budget to hire a facilitator, then we suggest investing in the appropriate training.

If you’re at Stage 2…

Organizations at this stage are often aware of the advantages of design-lead solutions but haven’t developed the internal skills to run these sessions alone. There also may be pressure from the larger organization to focus on company-level financial metrics when assessing the effectiveness of a design sprint. While there’s nothing wrong with including high-level financial goals in the conversation, the design sprint outcomes probably won’t have an immediate impact on metrics like share price and quarterly profits. It’s more realistic to focus outcomes on qualitative customer feedback and actionable insights. Companies at stage 2 often have a strong process culture (e.g. Agile, Lean, etc.) but they’re still struggling to link these processes to outcomes that move the customer experience forward. This adherence to process can slow improvements and innovations down. The design sprint can be a low-risk bridge between rigid process and flexible collaborative techniques. By running a design sprint you’ll give your team a taste of what it’s like to make quick progress on problems that have become roadblocks to progress. Once your team sees the advantages of a design sprint, it’s less likely to be drowned out by the tide of arbitrary schedules, meetings and check-ins so common with processes like Agile.

“Provide an introduction of what is design, what is user- centered design, why are we here today, how has this been used in other applications that they can relate an emotional story to,” says New Haircut’s Melone. “We try to find stories that anyone can resonate with and feel some kind of connection to and awaken the mindset.”

In companies at early stages of maturity, there’s also a tendency to pigeonhole design sprints as an exclusive design- team activity. But designers are not the only people who need to be involved in the design sprint. As digital transformation expert, Jose Coronado says, “In the design continuum, all decisions that impact the product or service are design decisions, regardless of the roles or responsibilities of people who make them.”

Coronado’s experience at Accenture and McKinsey & Co. gave him access to dozens of enterprise design sprints. His work with McKinsey’s enterprise clients reinforced his perspective that an organization’s bias towards what is or isn’t design can result in only designers being invited to the design sprint.

Avoid excluding non-designers by inviting all the relevant functional teams to an info session on design sprints. At my firm we call these “DNA sessions.” This stands for Discovery Needs Assessment and includes several people from different, influential parts of the organization. To ensure these sessions are successful in gathering information and aligning people on the goals of the upcoming design sprint, it’s important to include influencers who may not attend the actual design sprint, but have the power or authority to approve it or decide its necessary.

If You’re at Stage 3…

In most stage-3 organizations, delivery of design and UX services is delivered on a project basis. Design engagements tend to be discrete and focused on improving the unit economics of a product or service. As organizations adopt stage-3 thinking they begin to see design as a mindset for solving a wide range of problems. I like to say that these organizations have moved from design with a little “d” to Design with a big “D”.

ServiceNow, a cloud-based software company with dozens of locations around the world, is an example of a stage-3 company that has dedicated design and UX resources in the business, but those resources aren’t yet integrated into cross- functional product teams.

“We have a three-legged stool of architecture, design, and development that we’ll bring in on a pre-sales engagement, so we’re not a billable team. We’re not a paid service,” explains AJ Siegel, UX/UI Manager at ServiceNow. “We’re a cost of sale for ServiceNow to help get customers excited about investing in our platform. And so, we’ll engage over a very short period of time. This is perfect for things like design sprints, because we’re going to engage for anywhere from one to six weeks with a customer depending on the depth that we need to go.”

Given the structure of ServiceNow’s organization, this use case makes perfect sense. Their UX/UI capabilities are treated like an internal agency for other departments to use on demand. Design sprints are considered a tool offered by this agency-styled service, and thus it makes sense that Siegel’s team would be the facilitators and coaches of a design sprint for their own organization.

Alignment around goals is another characteristic of enterprises becoming stage-3 organizations. For these companies to make a successful transition to this stage, particular attention needs to be given to ensuring all functional teams or departments are working towards the same outcomes. While strategic and product-vision alignment are the cornerstone of this transition, design sprints can serve to align teams in a very practical way, especially during the prototype phase. “It’s a form of requirements alignment,” says Douglas Ferguson, “Not only are they converting their requirements into a potential solution, but they’re also getting their team aligned on these requirements.”

The hands-on dynamics of a design sprint give teams tangible experience with design thinking. Thinking by doing is a powerful way to teach teams and organizations new skills. Ferguson says the prototype serves two functions. Firstly, it’s a “concrete thing” everyone can understand, because it’s right there in front of them. Secondly, when the ambiguity of what they’re building has been removed, the questions about what to test become a lot more specific. More specific questions result in better experiment design. A general question, like “What do our customers want?” is hard to test, because answers can include a wide variety of preferences and choices. A very specific question, like “Will a new customer prefer to receive account confirmation by email or text?” is significantly easier to test.

If You’re at Stage 4…

For the company that’s entered stage-4 thinking, the customer appears at the center of every conversation and metric. Company-centric measurements are replaced with metrics that measure customer satisfaction and happiness. This aligns well with the user-centric nature of design sprints. Validating whether or not the customer values a certain product or feature is the cornerstone of the design-sprint process.

When combined with a company-wide appreciation of design’s ability to solve problems, the design sprint can help reinforce a learning culture. “Ideally you want to get your company to the point where it’s always in a hyper-learning phase,” says Nate Walkingshaw, CXO of Pluralsight, one of the world’s largest online-learning companies with hundreds of employees spread across the world. Because a company like this needs ongoing insights from customers to drive innovation, the design sprint is valuable for facilitating discovery. Walkingshaw describes this always-curious state, “Assume you have a lot more to learn. Structuring teams around that assumption gives you the organizational mindset to always be pushing forward.”

Stage-4 companies, like Pluralsight, nurture a culture focused on understanding. This culture turns the gaze of the organization to the customer’s needs and pain-points. Teams spend significant time with customers trying to understand what drives them, and metrics also are focused on customer outcomes, not just internal economics.

For enterprises to transition to stage 4, they need to adopt processes and tools—like design sprints—that force them to validate new ideas with customers. Jay Melone describes how Rosetta Stone, the global language-learning company, used design sprints to help establish this mindset while simultaneously solving problems relating to a recent acquisition. “They were coming together to solve problems in a new customer segment and also to do it together [with the newly acquired team] for the first time where Rosetta Stone would be selling as a B2B play.” Melone says they used the design sprint as a way to get the teams talking and to further understand how it might be used in other applications. “They wanted to use this sprint as a way to really learn the process and the tools. They also wanted to figure out who should be in the room and the thinking behind the exercises,” he says.

It benefits an enterprise to identify where they are on the learning continuum and then plan accordingly to take the next step towards greater design and user-experience fluency. Assuming the organization will automatically make these steps in growth is a mistake. The identification and learning process needs to be deliberate and meaningful because the velocity of a product organization is highly dependent on the ability of its individuals and teams to learn new skills.

If your teams cannot assimilate the most up-to-date design techniques and processes, they will slow down the entire organization. One of the most important techniques is the design sprint. In the following chapter we’ll discuss the dynamics of the design sprint and when it’s most appropriate to use. Further reading

Visual explanation of a design sprint

What happens before a design sprint

How design sprints are used for requirements alignment

List of hacks to further improve your design sprint

Design Sprint: A Practical Guidebook for Building Great Digital Products

Sprint: How To Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days

Chapter—02

When to Sprint

Is it time? by Richard Banfield When design sprints were first introduced, they got significant traction in the digital-products space. However, the framework can be tailored to fit almost any problem-solving effort. Enterprises now use the design sprint to explore solutions for everything from logistics systems to sales scripts.

The design sprint is best used when you need an answer to an important question. Think of a design sprint as a validation machine. You insert questions in one end and you extract answers from the other. Questions can range from the strategic to the tactical.

Whether or not to run a design sprint depends on two important questions:

01. Is this a problem worth solving?

02. Do the important decision-makers in your company know this is a problem worth solving?

Answering these questions can be tougher than you might imagine. The world is littered with solutions that didn’t have a problem worth solving because too many companies regularly make the mistake of prioritizing solutions that customers aren’t willing to pay for. Our goal is to discover what customers need so that marketers don’t have to make them want something they don’t need.

For Customer-Driven Questions

Amazon recently entered the same-day shipping market to respond to the needs of their customers. This sent a ripple through the logistics industry, and FedEx Ground contacted my team to explore the question: “How could we support same-day shipping in response to changing customer expectations?” As customers expect faster shipping options, FedEx needs to stay ahead of the curve with new solutions or be out-maneuvered by competitors. Customer-driven questions like these are ideal for the design sprint.

What was most obvious in this particular design sprint was how organizational assumptions can act as biases towards certain solutions. One common assumption with enterprises is the sunk-cost fallacy. As enterprises like FedEx grow, they accumulate significant infrastructure resources. Trucks, airplanes, airports, etc. Typically these are assets, but as we move to a sharing economy where almost any service can be outsourced to a local provider, these assets start to look like liabilities. Because these resources required massive investments of time and money, few leaders want to walk away from them even when they should. This is called the sunk-cost fallacy.

Questions in situations like these abound. What assets do we have that can be reused in a new paradigm? How will we balance our current operational needs with those of the future? Who will deliver these new services? How will we interact with the customer? What new infrastructure do we need to support these new systems?

For Risks and Assumptions

Our design sprint work at FedEx Ground was aimed to validate potential solutions. They already had some solutions in mind and were seeking to understand which of these options would work best and what the customer would consider valuable. In cases like these, the first round of design-sprint work is focused on separating assumptions from facts. By nature, facts are lower risk than assumptions, because they have evidence to back them up. Assumptions might only be supported by opinion, anecdotes, and out-of-date experiences.

If you know in advance that it is going to work, it is not an experiment.

Jeff Bezos — AMAZON

Assumptions can send an enterprise off a cliff. Kodak discovered this when the company assumed digital cameras would take decades to catch on. This assumption ignored evidence, and the company paid the ultimate price. For this reason big, scary problems deserve design sprints. By comparison, low-risk ideas with high confidence don’t need the attention and structure that a design sprint provides.

The purpose of a repeatable process is to add efficiency and velocity to behaviors that might otherwise be unpredictable and unreliable. Without something like a design sprint, the vacuum left by a question might be filled with opinions. Or, out of a desire to maintain velocity, teams might substitute company mythology or widely held assumptions for real answers. Answers are the fuel for decisions, and since answers are the primary output of a design sprint, it’s necessary to first unpack and test the assumptions. Any assumptions that are high risk and low confidence need to be addressed. This can be politically difficult, because some assumptions may be upheld by senior opinions. We’ve all heard the phrases, “We’ve always done it like that,” or “I wouldn’t do that.”

In the next section, we’ll explore how assumptions, opinions, and capabilities can act as biased roadmaps for projects, and how design sprints can reduce the impact of internal politics, identify risks, and provide clearer direction.

What Design Sprints are Good For

Understanding why you might employ a design sprint to solve a problem or validate an idea is both important for the participating team, and for the people that will provide support and resources. Practitioners with design-sprint experience know how the process works to create business value, but for those who are new to the approach, there are always reasonable doubts.

One of the questions I’m asked frequently is, “How can a design sprint achieve in five days something that we haven’t been able to do in months or years?” To validate the high speed of a design sprint relative to the expectation that it takes a long time to create enterprise value, we need to explain how a design sprint delivers value.

The design sprint looks forward and thus can serve as a portal into the future. “We wanted to go blue sky and revamp an entire product,” Scott Yim, Senior Product Manager at Northwestern Mutual, says of how they applied the design sprint in response to feedback from the field. “We used the design sprint at the beginning of the project to define what the future could look like, and amongst the team, create a shared vision.”

It bears repeating that a design sprint is an ideal mechanism for uncovering customers’ needs. If you’re seeking answers about customer needs and potential solutions, a design sprint can do the job. Beyond identifying customers’ pain points, design sprints also are good for reducing risk, clearing up ambiguity and unpacking complex problems. Reducing Risk

In effect, the design sprint is a lens. It focuses attention on the highest risks and simultaneously aims to reduce the number of unknowns within a problem area. This extends to political obstacles, too. Knowing who is standing in the way of progress and what their motivations are, will provide a path to resolution that allows everyone to score a win.

Low risk, high risk

Clearing Up Ambiguity

Design sprints are ideal for clearing up the ambiguity that may be holding back decisions and progress. Use a design sprint when you have an unanswered question (or even several questions) that will increase risk if left unanswered. Because the design sprint approach is very similar to the scientific method, which prioritizes objective facts over opinions, it can be leveraged to separate fact from assumption. This makes it attractive to smart business leaders who seek evidence-based answers to drive innovation or improvement.

Many unknowns, high familiarity

Discovering User Needs

In the Understand phase, the first of the five phases, design sprints are about building a case around what your user’s pain might be. It’s important to note that traditional research alone won’t always give decision makers the insights they need. In traditional research approaches, there’s a risk that organizations will value data that supports an existing solution over contradictory data. Design sprints are very useful in aligning potential solutions to user pains. However, it’s important to note that feasibility and usability (two other important product characteristics) are not the domain of the design sprint. Desirability, feasibility, usability

Unpacking Complexity

Design sprints are also great for unpacking complexity. Enterprises are often complex by nature. This complexity is necessary for the business to deliver value and remain competitive, but it also means there are lots of dependencies and connections to each area of the business. A design sprint focuses on the human or customer experience making it easier to pinpoint the real pain point that needs to be solved.

Low complexity, high complexity Satisfying Multiple Stakeholders

The more stakeholders a solution is trying to solve for, or the more complex stakeholder needs are, the more suited a problem is for the rigor of a design sprint. Design sprint exercises allow participants to peel back the complexities with discrete thought experiments. This gives stakeholders more visibility into the nuances of the problem and the workings of the potential solution. The more visibility, the more likely a proposed solution will get support from all involved.

Although a design sprint can examine the needs of many stakeholders, it’s worth noting that it’s still a good idea to prioritize your outcome for a primary stakeholder to ensure your efforts aren’t too diluted.

Few stakeholders, many stakeholders

Gathering Proof for Decision-Makers Big companies often mean more gateways, influencers, and decision-points. A single successful design sprint will not get you through all the decision-maker tolls on your journey to shipping a new product or feature. It will, however, provide proof points and evidence that you can use to gather the approvals you need at each decision point.

Neeta Goplani, a Senior Director of Experience Design at Manulife / John Hancock, the financial services giant with thousands of employees, conducted several design sprints, which she renamed Spark Sessions, to establish proof points for future product discovery conversations. Given the highly regulated nature of financial services, Goplani was incentivized to reduce risk and seek validation for all UX projects. By seeking customer validated answers before she met with senior leaders she was prepared for the inevitable questions. Following Goplani’s efforts, Design Sprints have become a popular way to fill the gaps in enterprise knowledge.

Home Depot’s UX team takes a similar approach. They consider the outcomes of each design sprint opportunities to gather further leadership support. “We go out a week and a half after the design sprint and we meet with our core team,” says Brooke Creef, UX Manager, Design Sprints at Home Depot. “Then additionally we present out to our stakeholders and leadership. We have something called office hours, where we meet with our VP. He was our first executive supporter of the program.”

“Once we started to get the grassroots support, we were able to make a lot of progress really quickly.”

Ryan Johnson — HOME DEPOT

Ryan Johnson and Jay Dicenso discuss some of the challenges and opportunities in getting non-designers to participate in sprints, and some of the tactics they use to engage them.

Creef points out that by closing the loop and showing senior leaders what has been achieved, the leaders see the value more easily and become excited about the work. As a result, Home Depot’s leadership has embraced design sprints and given them a “top-down push.”

Focusing on Tough Questions

The ultimate goal of using the design sprint is to adapt the mindset of the team from just shipping deliverables to getting into the habit of answering tough questions. This switch in behavior won’t come at the same speed for each participant. Expect some pushback and even some misunderstanding. It’s better to be prepared for the naysayers than be caught off guard by their questions or frustrations.

While surprisingly useful as a driver of business value, a design sprint can’t be expected to solve every problem the enterprise will face. In the next section, we’ll discuss the scenarios when a design sprint is not a good choice.

What A Design Sprint CAN’T Do

The original design-sprint format popularized by the Google Ventures team has been interpreted by some as a one-size- fits-all model. This was never the intention, and it’s definitely not the case for enterprise-level projects. Although UX, design and product teams have adapted sprints to find new applications for its prototyping value, it can’t be used in every situation. Below are some situations in which a design sprint is not useful for enterprises. (It’s worth noting that this list is specific to enterprises. In some startups or small innovation groups, a design sprint might be the appropriate tool in these situations.)

For small iterative changes to an existing feature(s)

If you have an established product and you’re making small iterative updates, a design sprint is going to be too much tool. Rather, use one of the many exercises in the design sprint repertoire to answer a specific question. A quick prototype of a new improvement doesn’t need five days to prepare. Mock up a rough version and get it under the noses of customers that same day.

To update a prototype that’s already generating feedback

Once you have a prototype out in the wild and you’re receiving feedback from customers, it’s not necessary to do an entire design sprint before making refinements. Simply determine the questions you’re seeking to answer, identify the relevant feedback you’ve received, and make adjustments. If you want a more formal process, consider doing the just the last three phases of the design sprint (Converge, Build and Test).

Whenever there is no research

When planning a new project initiative or innovation, it’s best to already have research about what problems are worth solving (see chapter 1). Although the exercises in a design sprint help reveal a customer pain point and potential solution, they’re not ideal for establishing whether a market exists for that, or any, solution. Fundamental research is necessary for enterprises to discover opportunities that can then be validated with a design sprint. Don’t skip the research. Solutions without markets are destined to fail.

When seeking a high fidelity design output

A design sprint intentionally doesn’t provide high fidelity designs that you can immediately use in final product design. Remember, the purpose of a design sprint is to provide answers and direct your team’s attention to potentially viable solutions. The final design of your product or feature probably won’t look anything like the prototype you made to test your hypothesis. Keep your expectations real and you’ll be fine.

As a replacement for iterative workflow

Workflow considerations are slightly different from the iterative feature changes listed above. A feature change is often a discrete update, while iterative workflow is a choice of methodology (i.e. Lean). While a design sprint can be valuable to test feature changes, it won’t be a substitute for the daily design and dev backlog. In enterprises where waterfall is still the preferred methodology for processing this daily work, the cadence of a design sprint is going to feel much faster. But that’s not a problem as long as you run the design sprint in parallel to your backlog of design and dev work. Stopping regularly scheduled work to do a design sprint, however, can be more disruptive than helpful in waterfall environments.

When looking for evidence of product-market fit Finally, there is little evidence that evidence from a design sprint also confirms a product-market fit. Unless you are also testing pricing and benchmarking competitive offers, you’ll find it very difficult to know if your validated prototype is something people will pay for or switch over to from a competitive option. You’ll need to do further testing and possibly even ship an MVP to establish whether your market even wants your lovely new solution.

Like personas, JTBD (jobs to be done) and experience maps, the design sprint is just one of the many tools available to the designer and the broader product team. So it’s important to make sure you’re applying a design sprint to a design-sprint job. It’s also wise to remember a design sprint can invalidate an idea as easily as validate it. This sometimes means you’ll get an answer you don’t expect.

In a recent enterprise-client engagement, we were faced with a situation where a senior manager was convinced his product needed a significant redesign. It likely would have cost several hundred thousand dollars considering the complexity of the product. However, the team learned on the first day (Understand phase) that a redesign wasn’t a problem in need of solving. We pivoted to focus on the real issue affecting sales: The lack of a clear value proposition with accompanying language and sales collateral.

Here’s an Unfortunate Truth…

Even if you do a design sprint correctly, you’re still likely to have lots of unanswered questions.

The very nature of this type of inquiry is that it reveals potential problems that need solving. Expecting your design sprint to be the endpoint for research is a recipe for disappointment. Instead, look for the doors that open through the process, and use your new insight to define additional research and data- gathering efforts. Establish this expectation with participants throughout the design sprint so you’re not asked to answer awkward questions at the end of the process.

The design sprint is a powerful tool with wide appeal and application. But it’s not going to solve every problem. Whenever you’re considering a design sprint, come back to these last few sections and confirm you’re setting yourself up for success. It’s also useful to know the exercises inside the design sprint, as each has the ability to be used discreetly. Understanding the value of each exercise will help you decide if you need to run an entire design sprint, or just a few of the phases.

I like to think of a design sprint like a superhero’s utility belt. Sometimes you need all the tools in the belt, and sometimes just one or two will do. Chapter 5 will examine the tools in the design-sprint belt. The guidelines follow directly from your decision to move ahead and will provide you with a detailed plan for your design sprint.

More reading on this topic.

Lean UX For Enterprise Fundamentally, the Lean UX framework is similar to the design sprint. Both follow the scientific method of establishing a hypothesis and then testing that hypothesis in an effort to reduce risk and maximize understanding. This is good news for Lean organizations because your design sprint participants will feel at home with the process.

What will be even more familiar to Lean practitioners is the emphasis on testing ideas and “getting out of the building” to talk to customers. In no way is a design sprint a replacement for the Lean methodology, a process which incorporates several aspects of discovery, development and delivery.

Ian Armstrong, principal UX designer at Dell EMC, describes the relationship between the Design Sprint and the Lean UX approach like this, “Lean UX follows a build > test > iterate loop. The idea is to get a product in front of real people, learn from them, then improve it. The problem with lean UX is that users aren’t very forgiving and they aren’t big on second chances if we piss them off. Design Sprints are part of a dual- track agile methodology. They follow an unpack > ideate > evaluate > test > refine pattern that results in a user-validated (but rough) draft in a short span of time. It’s a non-standard sprint, executed with the express purpose of defining a robust agile backlog for design and development.” The opportunity for Lean teams is that the design sprint will formalize the interview and qualitative data gathering a little further by providing a very specific hypothesis to test against. If you are using Lean as your primary delivery process my recommendation is to use the design sprint as a way to reduce initial risk on new initiatives or as a way to get answers to big questions.

Ultimately talking to customers is a priority in any investigation of what works and what doesn’t. Agile, Lean and design sprints all put an emphasis on testing assumptions with real users. If you’re already doing this as part of your design and development work, then you’ll find it very easy to get support from your team for the testing that’s part of a design sprint. A decision tree on when to talk to customers. Source Joe Pour.

Design Thinking

In essence, Design Thinking is the umbrella under which the methodologies of Lean UX and design sprints reside. Therefore, fitting a design sprint into a culture of Design Thinking is generally easy as there will be a deep understanding of the principles that guide the process. In spite of that understanding, there might still be resistance to the specific exercises or rigid five-day schedule of a design sprint. In these cases, I recommend showing how the flow of the design sprint matches the double-diamond flow of the traditional Design Thinking methodologies.

The double diamond approach to design

Common Questions and Answers for Leaders

Here are some common questions or push-backs senior managers have when asked to give up time for a design sprint:

Q: What is a design sprint and why do I need to be part of it?

A: The design sprint is a customer-focused method used to unpack problems, get answers, and validate potential solutions. It’s become a popular way to efficiently and collaboratively jumpstart a project or initiative. Your involvement will increase the chance of us discovering answers to some of the tough questions we’re dealing with. Without your involvement, our progress won’t be as significant or we may miss something important.

Q: That’s nice but I’m not a “designer.” Is this workshop still right for me?

A: Design sprints aren’t just for designers. They’re actually most successful when cross-functional teams work together to uncover and test a problem or set of problems. The focus is on understanding problems and developing solutions, not on design. Design sprints are frequently applied to challenges within all facets of business including product design, marketing and operations. Q: My team is already represented at this workshop. Why do I need to be there too?

A: If your representative has the authority to make decisions on your behalf, then you won’t need to be there. However, if you’re concerned they might lack important insights or perspectives that will impact the outcomes, I’d recommend you personally participate.

Q: What can I expect to get out of this?

A: We will actively solve problems that are holding your team back. Common outcomes include getting answers to tough questions, validating solutions, removing obstacles in understanding, and increasing team motivation and momentum.

Q: I can’t be there for the full 5 days.

A: Ideally, we’d like you there for each day, but we can make some adjustments. If we can’t have you for all five days please join us for the first two phases and the final phase. This is when we’ll agree on the problem area that needs the most attention, and when we’ll test the solutions with actual customers. On the days in between, we’ll make decisions on the solutions and how to test. If you want to be part of that, you could call in for certain exercises.

Q: Do I need to prepare for this?

A: No prep work is required for participants except to consider that this is a proven approach to answering tough questions. All you need to do on the days of the design sprint is show up ready to collaborate, participate and have fun. If there’s any research we feel you should read before the start, we’ll send you a summary to review.

Fostering a Culture of Innovation

Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale

Chapter—04

Planning Your Design Sprint

A team sport by Richard Banfield Starting Before You Start

In the first two chapters, we emphasized the need to prepare appropriately to ensure success. This preparation sometimes referred to as “phase zero,” can be easily overlooked in the rush to get started. I strongly suggest giving phase zero the attention it deserves beginning several weeks before a design sprint. Even more time will be necessary for projects that involve senior team members and/or hard-to-tie-down customers.

Getting prepared involves inviting the right people, finding a good place to work uninterrupted, having the right supplies and, most importantly, setting up customer interviews. These are all related but independent tasks, so it might be necessary to delegate to your team. We’ll detail each of these tasks, and more, in this chapter.

“For me as a researcher, the planning phase is extremely important…what is the information the team has around the user?”

Marta Rey Babarro — GOOGLE Marta Rey Babarro, Kai Haley, and Jenny Gove from Google discuss some of the planning and preparation that go into running a good

Sprint, including Sprint Briefs and Lightning Talks.

Setting a Goal

One of the first things to establish in phase zero is the purpose of the design sprint. The previous chapter outlined what sprints are and aren’t good for, so I won’t go back over that but know that phase zero is the time to make those determinations. Founder & President of Voltage Control, Douglas Ferguson suggests having the end in mind as you plan your sprint, “While I don’t advocate that teams lock their goal in stone prior to the sprint, it is helpful to explore the goal and have a thoughtful perspective on where you’re generally pointed.” A goal also aligns the group and helps them see the meaning in their participation.

Naming your design sprint

One of the frustrations design sprint organizers experience is convincing their colleagues to participate in something with the name “design sprint.” To the uninitiated, it sounds like something only designers should be attending.

If you encounter this bias, consider renaming the session something that will resonate positively with participants. Innovation Bootcamp, Spark Sessions, Discovery Sprint and Deep Dives are just some of the names you could use. Neeta Goplani, who I introduced in chapter 2, says renaming design sprints to Spark Sessions immediately changed the attitude of her senior managers at Manulife / John Hancock and gave her the buy-in she needed.

Goplani isn’t the only one who’s used this tactic. “As a veteran ed tech development director and product manager, I have worked through the development process using many different approaches and techniques, some worked well and others did not,” says Christine Sandvik, product manager at Imagine Learning in Provo, Utah. “While working as a consultant, I started using design sprints, which I called ‘concept sprints,’ to help clients understand why they needed to build a product or feature. The word ‘concept’ better described where I needed to concentrate most of our time—at the very beginning.” Establishing if you’re sprint-ready

In enterprises with siloed functions, it’s important to confirm that the group knows why they are about to embark on the design-sprint journey. Even if you have an enthusiastic group of people, a facilitator, and you believe you have a good problem to solve, you might still not have the ingredients for a successful session.

Jay Melone poses two questions to help ensure you’re “sprint- ready”:

01. Does everyone involved in, and impacted by this problem, understand why this is a problem that needs attention?

02. Is this a problem worth solving?

Melone cautions, “If the answer to either of these is no, you cannot begin a design sprint. Well, you can, but don’t expect it to go well.” It’s better to postpone than attempt to muddle through. The most common misunderstanding is that understanding the problem translates to having a goal to achieve. Goals are not problems.

If you’re in any doubt, Melone suggests conducting a framing session before deciding to do a design sprint. The purpose of the framing session is to avoid “asking 7-10 people to spend five days (not including travel) running a full design sprint”. The framing session normally only requires a few hours and aims to separate the organization’s goals from the real pain points experienced by the customer. For example, “Launch new single sign-on feature” is an organizational goal, but without evidence that the customer needs this feature, it’s unclear if it’s a problem worth solving. Participants of a framing session each make a list of all their goals (individual and organizational), they then work as a group to discuss which of these goals are motivated by customer problems or by internal desires. Eliminate duplicates, merge similar challenges or create themes. Finally, discuss and prioritize the issue that will have the most impact, based on the resources (time, people, budget) at your disposal.

If you’re struggling to include the right people, even at this early stage, or if you can’t decide if this is a problem worth solving, take a step back. Rushing into a design sprint can backfire if you don’t have support, so rather take it a bit slower. In my experience, getting buy-in in larger organizations is the hard part, but it has to be done. But Do You FEEL Ready?

Knowing when you’re ready is closely linked to preparation.

Preparing needs to be a balance between understanding what’s ahead and not getting stuck doing too much up front. For a facilitator an investment in how to run a successful design sprint (like reading this book) is necessary, but how much preparation will depend on the experience and cultural support of design thinking practices. Even for design veterans this sense of readiness can feel like more art than science.

“We chose the design sprint because we needed to do discovery for a brand new feature, but didn’t have time to do proper directed discovery as usually done here,” says Tanya Golubeva, Product Manager at Pluralsight, an online learning platform that recently completed a successful IPO. “The goal was to understand the feature we wanted to build, design it, and test it with a few internal customers. My UX designer organized how the days would be run. We both read the [design sprint] book, but I wish we would’ve had the entire team read the book first. Also, there were a couple of days when we were doing an exercise (like crazy eights), where preparation ahead of that day would’ve been extremely useful.” In spite of this Golubeva felt the sprint was a success. “The team was initially really worried about spending an entire week not working on quarter’s priorities but by the end everyone was very supportive of us doing this work,” she says.

If you’re still uncertain if a design sprint is right for your team, consider doing a discovery needs assessment (DNA). This is an informal session of questions that can illuminate any major concerns and identify knowledge gaps. You can find all the DNA questions in the Appendix.

My advice is to approach the first design sprint as a learning exercise. Allow yourself permission to stumble a little and learn through experience. This mindset will allow you to get your feet wet while remaining mindful that obstacles will need to be overcome through experience.

Who Needs To Be at Your Design Sprint?

Have you heard the business fable about the chicken and the pig? It goes like this: When producing a dish made of ham and eggs, the pig provided the ham, which required a significant sacrifice. The chicken provided the eggs, which was an easy contribution. Both were needed, but only the pig was deeply committed.

When it comes to including people for the full five phases of your design sprint, try to choose only the pigs. But there are other considerations at play, too.

Group Size

Four to eight participants is an ideal size for momentum and efficiency. For larger groups, you’ll need to invest more time in preparation and logistics, and an experienced facilitator will be critical to keeping the cats herded.

Douglas Ferguson suggests pre-filtering exercise content with larger groups. “While it is possible to facilitate a larger group, it is important to consider the amount of content they will generate.” Ferguson suggests consolidating the teams inputs by splitting them into smaller groups during the sprint and asking them to narrow down their exercise answers before they share them with the entire group. “When working with larger groups, I recommend having them pre-filter their content. Instead of sharing all their sprint questions, they will just pick two or three. Instead of posting all their ‘How Might We’s’ on the wall, have them pick their top five, four, or three. Depending on the number of participants, you can decide how much content is best.”

Insight Owners

The guiding principle here is to have the right people in the room to find the answers you seek. It’s more important than having every department represented. With that said, you’ll want the following domains represented regardless of the group size:

• Product ownership

• Design

• Development and/or engineering

• Marketing • Senior leadership that represents the company level goals

PRO TIP — Hiding in plain sight

Employees from support and sales teams that talk with customers and prospects every day often have the best context and insights to share.

Diversity

You want a diverse group of people in the room. A diversity of backgrounds, functional knowledge and experiences helps avoid biases that come from groups that have common domain, demographic and cultural backgrounds. Diversity is also proven to be good for business, so I recommend building teams that reflect the widest possible diversity across your organization or pool of stakeholders.

“We worked really hard at dispelling the myth that you had to be a designer to contribute something valuable.” Scott Yim — NORTHWESTERN MUTUAL

At Northwestern Mutual, Scott Yim and his team work hard at getting participation from people outside of the design team in sprints.

Northwestern Mutual’s Scott Yim remains attracted to the design sprint because the process supports collaborative culture. “I just found it results in a better end-product for the user.” says Yim, “The diversity of opinion, experience, and thought around the table, where everyone is bought in and feels that sense of ownership. That’s something we can cultivate and make fabric of our culture. It just results in a better product at the end of the day.”

You Still Need the Chickens

You want to include the pigs whose jobs depend on the outcome of your design sprint. But you still need the contributions of some chickens, too. Trying to include everyone in a design sprint is difficult, but fortunately, there’s another option.

Ferguson suggests conducting “daily office hours” as a way to involve more members of your company without making the core sprint team too large. “Simply invite [the contributors] to attend daily office hours after the sprint team is done for the day. Walk them through all of the assets and activities of the day. Answer any questions they may have. This typically takes only 30 minutes and will allow you to include more people in your process. They will feel more included and understand the process and typically go on to be advocates for the solution.”

Facilitator Jay Melone also sees the value of preparing many but inviting a few. “Sometimes I’ve got a much smaller group in the framing and most of those people join the sprint. In other cases, a company might have a lot more people in the framing and only a subset of those people come to the design sprint.” Melone, who teaches design sprints to companies like Nike, Verizon, Audible, and Boeing, understands that not everyone will be available for the five-day sprint, but there’s no reason you can’t educate all the influencers and contributors. “Doing a problem-framing session beforehand is a good introduction to the mindset and the thinking.”

When you’ve got teams that aren’t familiar with design sprints, that could mean they’re not fluent with the broader UX and product-design world. So a design sprint is a good opportunity to bring a large group of people up to speed while making sure your smaller group of participants is prepared to work with the right attitudes and fluency. Setting Expectations and Roles

Design sprints require a lot of work and focused attention from participants. In order to complete a successful sprint, it’s important to manage expectations in advance. This includes making sure everyone knows the goal of the sprint and what he or she needs to do to be valuable to the process. Here are some other important things participants should know:

• A design sprint can’t solve every problem.

• The process likely will uncover additional problems that need attention.

• You probably won’t learn everything you set out to learn.

• Solutions and hypotheses may be partially or completely invalidated.

• Some things you test won’t work. • Shared understanding is the desired outcome, not a prototype.

Reading through this list you may worry that no one will want to participate. I find it’s helpful to discuss what will happen after the design sprint. Explain that If the original problem is solved, you might move on to refining your prototype and start planning how to integrate it into your product cycle. Discuss the possibility that if none of the solutions you build and test work, you’ve discovered what won’t be a good solution. This is a good thing. You just saved time and money.

When you don’t find a working solution, it might be necessary to go back to phase one and focus on understanding the problem. Did you solve for a problem that was meaningful for your company? Was the problem worth solving for your customers? You’ll have a ton of knowledge from the design sprint that will make a follow-on effort more efficient. If you ended up with more questions than answers, you’re doing a good job. This normally means you’re getting closer to a viable solution. But it’s important for participants to know this.

However your design sprint turns out, you’ll want to set expectations and do some light planning for what comes next. Participants get pretty invested in their ideas and want to know what the next relay of the course looks like after the sprint is over. (We’ll come back to this in Chapter 6.)

The Roles of a Sprint Team

Part of the magic of a design sprint is the separation of work between team members. Unlike traditional brainstorming sessions where all the members simultaneously generate ideas, the design sprint recognizes that a specialization of efforts creates a better result. By giving members roles that create, instigate, organize or collect, the design sprint provides focus where it’s most valuable, and flexibility when it’s required.

The Facilitator: This person will lead the design sprint. Their responsibilities are to ensure the right people are there, the background research has been gathered and the test subjects (customers and stakeholders) are available for interviews. They also are responsible for keeping the team focused on the tasks.

If you’re considering this role, but you don’t feel comfortable directing other people, you might need to hire a professional design-sprint facilitator. You’ll learn a lot just by watching a pro at work. Also, don’t try to facilitate and be an active participant. Facilitation is a full-time job and trying to do more will reduce the value of your participation and of the entire design sprint. Focus on doing one thing well.

Product Owner: This is the person at the company with the initial product vision or the person with ultimate responsibility for the product or project. New product ideas tend to be overseen by the person who is leading the innovation effort. Existing products will generally have a product manager or product lead who currently has responsibility for the product or service. Their title is less important than their final decision- making power over the project. If they can shut down your design sprint, then you’ll want them in the room.

Note Taker: This person’s job is to document the work. That means collecting all the notes, sketches, Post-its, and taking photos of anything that goes up on the whiteboard. Make sure the note taker has a system for ordering and labeling everything. There’s nothing more frustrating than looking for an important insight only to discover it wasn’t labeled or captured correctly. I highly recommend putting all these documented notes into a shared folder and creating a simple PDF of each of the phases. There’s no right or wrong way to capture notes, but clarity and access is important. Team members: The rest of the team will be made up of the people you need to get the work done. As discussed previously, who gets invited will depend on what insights you will need (inputs) and who can help you get the answers you need (outputs).

Pre-Sprint Research

Pre-sprint research is critical not just for setting expectations, but also to enable the overall success of a design sprint. To make the most of the five days of the sprint, you’ll want to have a general idea of the customer’s real pain points. In a recent design sprint with the multinational software services group, CA Technologies, the facilitator Jill Starett showed a few short video clips of someone unsuccessfully trying to use their product for the first time. Jill says the video created tremendous empathy between the design sprint participants and the user, and this empathy was the necessary foundation for a true understanding of the pain point.

Customer interviews are another tremendously valuable tool. I recommend conducting between six and twelve interviews with current or prospective users before the design sprint to try to get clear on the problem you aim to solve. These interviews can be arranged and conducted by the facilitator or delegated to other team members. My preference is to have as many participants as possible engaged with customers or prospects before the design sprint starts to increase their sense of belonging and purpose in the sprint.

Along with interviews you’ll want to collect and review any qualitative and quantitative data that will provide valuable insights to the sprint. This could be surveys and studies, or data analysis from current product usage. I’ve found that spending the time to draft user journeys and experience maps before the design sprint also provides a solid foundation for conversations on day one. These user journeys and experience maps needn’t be comprehensive, as you’ll explore them in detail as part of the Understand phase.

Less Is More

It’s the organizer’s responsibility to ensure all participants are informed. However, too much research can easily overwhelm a design-sprint team. If you create a research brief to distribute before a sprint begins, keep it to no more than two pages (one piece of paper front and back) with relevant data points for research review.

When it comes to pre-sprint research, quality is more important than quantity. For example, when we embarked on a design sprint for Netapp, a Fortune 500 cloud-storage enterprise, we discovered the persona research they were referencing was four years old. The research predated several of their products and clearly needed updating. This made us aware that research hadn’t been a priority for a while and that we’d need to dig a little deeper to get the useful information we wanted. A bit of secondary research can also be helpful to set the stage for participants without overloading them with too much primary data.

Preparatory background research also includes some basic competitive analysis. Are there already solutions out there? Who has already succeeded or failed with this problem? My favorite research trick is to call competitors pretending to be a potential customer to hear how they pitch and price their solutions. How a company positions their value is a window into how well they understand their customers. Nuts, Bolts, and Logistics

Image searches for the word “collaborate” invariably return stock photos of fashionably dressed hipsters standing at a Post-it note-covered whiteboard. The hipsters usually look fake, but the Post-it notes and whiteboard are totally legit. They’re part of the nuts and bolts that allow ideas to get out of our heads and into the collaboration space.

Working closely with a group of people you may have just met can be a big cognitive strain. Having the right environment, tools and mood can mean the difference between healthy collaboration and frustrating interaction. The little things go a long way towards making a group feel comfortable. “I had one participant who asked for salsa music on day two,” remembers Jill Starett. “She danced in place while she sketched.”

Everybody Loves an Agenda

It doesn’t have to be detailed to the minute, but participants like to have an agenda that gives them some sense of what they’ll be up to each day.

I prefer to start early when people are fresh and caffeinated, and then knock off a little early. Ending early gives me time as the facilitator to answer the individual’s questions and prepare for the next day. Whether you start earlier or later, try to keep each day to no more than six hours of actual work. Focused, creative work can be exhausting, so it needs to be paced. Depending on the group size you may want to add a few breaks for coffee and lunch. This gives participants time to catch up on emails, make calls or check in with their teams.

I’ve noticed cultural preferences play a big part in how the day is scheduled. In the U.S. it’s acceptable to have a working lunch where participants grab a sandwich and continue to push through the exercises. In Europe, a longer break for lunch is expected. I personally prefer a longer break, as it allows participants to disconnect for a while and recharge. The key is to balance focused participation with time to rest, reflect a bit, and communicate with the outside world.

As the facilitator or organizer, it’s your job to make participants feel comfortable about the work ahead. Before the sprint, send emails to the team with subject lines like: What to expect next week, or Stay tuned: We’ll be sharing an agenda template soon. Once underway, communicate the plans for each day upfront and at various intervals throughout the day. Add reminders of the schedule to the facilitator’s slide deck and hand out copies of the agenda to everyone on arrival for Phase 1. This will allow participants to plan phone calls, email or check- ins, and to handle any family obligations with less stress. Check the Appendix for templates to use in these helpful communications.

Supplies you’ll need to be effective

The tasks of sketching, creating shared-lists, crafting prototypes, and note-taking will require supplies. Below is a recommended list:

• Post-it notes (a selection of colors and sizes is helpful)

• Sharpies

• Blank sheets of printer paper or heavy-stock printer paper to prevent Sharpie leakage

• Whiteboard and whiteboard markers (the more colors the better) • Circle vote stickers (also called dot stickers)

• Easel pads or large pads of paper

• Craft paper or card (for prototypes)

• Adhesive tape

• Smartphone (for taking photos) or camera if you prefer

For groups considering larger interactive prototypes, add cardboard boxes and packing tape. Of course, you’re not limited to these suggestions. Feel free to use whatever you find in your workspace. I’ve seen some pretty cool airport security gate mockups made from old moving boxes, tablecloths and conference room chairs.

We’ve made it easy for you and created an Amazon shopping list for the supplies you’ll need. Feel free to customize your choices. Recruiting customers for interviews

The sooner you start the process of finding customers to interview, the more successful the day-five interviews will be. For B2B enterprise customers, recruiting can take several days, so don’t wait until the last minute. If you already have access to customers then contacting them and communicating your requests for interviews will be as easy as sending out emails or making phone calls.

If you’re testing a new product, you’ll need to recruit prospective customers and this can be a little more complicated. There are several ways to do this. I recommend reading the guidelines provided by Steve Krug and by GV’s research team.

Setting Up, Getting Comfortable and Feeling Safe

I like to say that a design sprint is really just a good excuse to get people talking and bonding in a safe environment. Everything you do leading up to, and during the sessions, will have an influence on how participants think and behave. The room, the preparation, the tone of communications and even the dress code sends strong signals about what is expected of the team.

As Daniel Coyle writes in his book The Culture Code, “Seen through this lens, culture is not about soft stuff, it’s about signaling. In other words, culture is not a set of traits, it’s a signaling contest. Improve your signals, improve your culture.” I encourage organizers of sprints to create strong signals of creativity and psychological safety. Tell your team early and often that this is a safe place to be creative without judgment.

Be hard on ideas, and soft on people.

C. Todd Lombardo

C. Todd Lombardo, Chief Product Officer of Vempathy, makes non-judgment a core part of design sprints by creating “Rules of our Design Sprint” at the start of day one. On a large sheet of paper he writes the rules that will keep people feeling open to sharing while scrutinizing the facts. His #1 rule is inevitably: “Be hard on ideas, and soft on people.”

The Room Physical space influences how we behave and interact. A big room with plenty of whiteboards and natural light is the ideal physical space for a design sprint. Cramped, windowless environments will stifle creativity and can send the message that the design sprint is low-priority. The room also needs a place to pin or tape up sketches. If possible, try to secure a location off-site and away from daily distractions.

Don’t overlook the environmental impact of too much formality. Invite the team to wear casual clothes for the design sprint and ask them to bring their favorite snacks. “How many times have I heard participants say they should have worn different shoes, because man, the design sprint keeps you on your feet,” says Starett about the time spent at the whiteboard sketching and debating.

For design sprints that fall on a holiday, ask participants to take it a step further. “Our design sprint kicked off on Halloween,” says eClinicalWorks project lead Raj Indupri. “Half of the participants were in costume. Including one who dressed up like a witch.”

Take pictures of the team working together and share them with the group at the end of each day. Let participants take their work home with them once it has been captured. I’ve seen prototypes carefully packed away or carried out of a design sprint by their proud creators. Bonding is inevitable when people work closely together and participants often ask for something to remember those collaborative moments.

“At the end of a design sprint the participants absolutely couldn’t leave without having us all take a group picture as a way to say, ‘Yes, we did it!,’” says Tim Lupo, senior product manager at Fresh Tilled Soil. “That picture felt like the moment when you leave summer camp after having made tons of new friends who challenged you to do things you wouldn’t normally do outside of camp.”

You also can get participants in the groove by incorporating music into your exercises. Music keeps the energy up, gets the creative juices flowing, and is a good mechanism for crowd control. I use music at the start of the day to set the mood, during heads-down design sessions and to combat the inevitable post-lunch drowsiness. It’s certainly not necessary to have music playing all the time. Here are a few of my favorite Spotify playlists: electronic beats, soundtracks, and salsa.

Remote Design Sprints Increasingly, design sprints are run with teams in several locations, but I highly recommend in-person sessions whenever possible. In fact, it’s often better to postpone a design sprint until you can find a convenient time for everyone to be together. However, if you can’t avoid it, there are some creative options for remote sprints.

Remote sprints don’t mean you have to do every day remotely. You can create a combination of on-site and off-site days that suit the team’s schedules and location. If it’s possible to do at least the first two days on-site, do that. It’s generally better to do the early phase in person to maximize the opportunity for chemistry and sharing ideas.

If you have to run a design sprint remotely, it’s best that all participants be remote. Having half the team in one location and the rest working remotely can create an us-versus-them mindset. You can level the playing field and keep everyone engaged by making the entire team remote.

If you go for a remote sprint, invest in a good multi-person conference system that can support several people continuously. You want to be certain everyone can talk, share, draw, and prototype in ways that keep them engaged. Screen- sharing and high-quality audio features are essential. Research suggests audio quality is often considered more important than video quality. Nevertheless, a good webcam is always appreciated.

The activities of a design sprint form a natural rhythm of (1) set clarity for activity goal and steps, (2) ideate individually, (3) share and diverge at a group, (4) converge as a group. Remote sprints can take advantage of this rhythm by allowing people to disconnect for stage 2 in the cycle. They may not need to do this for every activity, like crazy eights, but for some of the longer activities, like storyboarding, it‘s a necessary and useful reprieve to disconnect. Even if participants just mute and turn off cameras, it helps relieve the fatigue associated with a day- long conference call.

Capture everything from a remote sprint in whatever form makes the most sense for your team. For example, you can take photos of whiteboard sessions and sketches, use Google docs for notes, and video for interviews. My team has used a combination of Zoom (video conferencing), dedicated landlines (audio), Slack (messaging), and Google slides and docs (notes and visual asset capture) to run remote design sprints. We also use Rev.com for audio transcriptions when necessary. Further reading

Just Enough Research

How to run a remote design sprint without going crazy

The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle

Chapter—05

The Design Sprint

Let’s Go by Richard Banfield With a few minor exceptions, there are five phases to every design sprint. As mentioned in chapters 1 and 2, completing all five phases in five days is the best approach to delivering design-sprint value. In this chapter, I’ll explain the logic behind each phase and why the exercises work best in this order:

01. Understand

02. Diverge

03. Converge

04. Build

05. Test The 5 day design sprint process: Understand, Diverge, Converge,

Build, Test.

Phase One: Understand

PRO TIP — Recommended Schedule

Introductions, agenda creation, and roles – 20 mins

List assumptions and facts – 30 mins

Review background research and findings – 1-2 hours Needs, Wants and Desires or Real Pain Points – 1 hour

User’s journey or Critical Path – 45 mins

Develop ‘Problem Statement’ – 45 mins

Retrospective – 15 mins

Overview

The first day of the design sprint is about reducing the noise of assumptions and establishing a clear signal for why we should be addressing this particular problem. The team will review the background research, identify gaps in knowledge and expose the riskiest assumptions.

Introductions, agenda review, and roles (20 mins)

My recommendation is for the facilitator to introduce team members to one another well before the sprint starts. A video conference works well for this, allowing everyone involved to see who will be there and start getting comfortable together. For larger organizations with distributed teams, it’s likely people will be meeting each other face-to-face for the first time on day one. So plan for a little extra time for socialization and a round of quick introductions. Use name tags if necessary.

It’s also a good idea to get everyone to share their concerns from the start. Use the Hopes vs. Fears exercise to provide an opportunity to get personal expectations out in the open. Once this is done, the facilitator should assign roles and walk everyone through the agenda.

List assumptions and facts (30 mins)

The first exercise of the day is to list the assumptions on a whiteboard, or equivalent space that everyone can see. The facilitator asks questions like: What do we assume about the customer? What about the current buying experience do we assume is working for the user? Are we sure that the customer can articulate our product’s value? Have we asked customers what they want?

The facilitator uses these questions as prompts for conversation between team members, ensuring that everyone has a chance to provide suggestions or questions of their own.

The assumption board will be referenced and updated throughout the design sprint, so place it somewhere visible. Next to each assumption write down how the assumption can be tested, and what a validated or invalidated test result would be. Although this process is done primarily during the Understand phase, continue adding assumptions and associated tests as the team discovers them over the course of the sprint.

Assumption Test with… Validated if…

Customers want a Prototype and TBD shorter checkout interview process

Customers Interview TBD understand the value of this feature Enterprises can harbor institutional-level assumptions that are based on years of habits and even successes. But these assumptions can be extremely dangerous in today’s rapidly changing business environments, especially if they’re incorrect or founded on outdated information.

Review background research and findings (1-2 hours)

It’s important to collect, organize and distribute background research several days before a design sprint starts. But it’s difficult to ensure the team will review it before arriving. So it’s best to go through the research on day one. For complex problems, reviewing the research will take up a good part of the day. But it must be done. Without background knowledge, the team will be poorly equipped to work on the exercises that follow.

PRO TIP — Park It

During the discussions on assumptions and research, the teams will also generate ideas that may serve as future solutions. At this stage, it’s important to stay focused on the definition of the problem and not get distracted by potential solutions. Instead of squashing any ideas for solutions, simply add them to a Parking Lot or Back Burner board where ideas can be recorded. These ideas often prove useful in the Diverge and Converge phases.

The aim of the research review is to make sure the team has a firm grasp on the business challenges, the customer’s current expectations and the value proposition offered by the business or product. This understanding will make comparisons to competitive options more fact-based and less likely to be influenced by opinion or presumption. (If there is no product yet, and this design sprint is being used to discover a new product opportunity, you might not have a clear value proposition yet.)

Needs, Wants, and Desires or Real Pain Points (1 hour)

Identifying the needs of your customer is probably the most important exercise of the day. Sorting between what the user needs, versus what they want, will help the team better understand the problem. For example, users may need to get from location A to location B but, how they choose to do that might be different from one another. One user may want to ride a bicycle, while another wants to drive a luxury car. The need is fulfilled in both instances but in very different ways.

User’s Journey or Critical Path (45 mins)

Plotting the user’s journey allows everyone to see where the contact points are between customer and product. The facilitator asks the participants to map the steps a customer takes while interacting with a product. Each participant contributes by adding, editing or clarifying activities like “customer searches for lighting solution on shopping site” or “company sends a notification to the user’s smartphone/ app.” By the end of the exercise, the finished product will look much like a children’s treasure map. Loosely mapped touchpoints with brief descriptions of what happens at each point is enough fidelity. High fidelity illustrations won’t add any additional value to this exercise. So just keep it simple.

I find this to be one of the most interesting exercises in the design sprint. How a company visually describes the customer journey explains a lot about the team’s understanding of the customer’s needs. The more the team is aligned around how the customer navigates the journey, the more understanding they have of the problem. As a facilitator, if you notice a lot of disagreement about the journey touchpoints, it’s worth going back and discussing the assumptions driving those interactions.

Develop ‘Problem Statement’ (45 mins)

Once the background research has been done and the needs of the customer have been established, it’s important to figure out what the problem is that needs solving. Identifying the problem and writing it in statement format also doubles as a vision of the future. Think of the customer problem and the product vision being two sides of the same coin.

My advice is for each person on the team to write their own version of the problem statement using the format below, and then compare versions with the rest of the team. Having discussed the variations as a group, the facilitator can then write a final version on the whiteboard.

To create a problem statement, replace the words in parentheses with your own vision of a solution:

PRO TIP — Create a Problem Statement

Today, when [customer segment] want to [desirable activity/ outcome], they have to [current solution] . This is unacceptable, because [shortcomings of current solutions]. We envision a world where [shortcomings resolved]. We are bringing this world about through [high-level approach].

Clearly identifying the problem is important, so don’t be afraid to rewrite this statement a few times or add a longer explanation if it helps with understanding.

You’ll also notice the last two sentences of the statement project what the outcome of a solution might be. It’s unlikely you’ll have a clear solution in mind, so focus instead on the outcome you’re seeking to create. For example, if we were to use a rideshare transportation example, we might say: “We envision a world where owning a car may no longer be a liability. We’re bringing this world about through smartphone access to a new kind of shared transportation solutions.”

As important as it is to determine if there is a problem, it is just as important to understand if that problem is solvable and whether it needs to be solved. The problem statement is the first step to answering the question: What is this product, and is it useful?

Retrospective (15-20 mins)

Before phase 1 is completed, it’s important for the team to circle up and discuss the day’s work, and plan ahead for the next day. I like to ask the team questions and look for alignment on the answers. The questions are a summary of the day’s work: Who is the ultimate user of the product or feature? Under what conditions would a user engage with this product or feature? What pain point do they have that will be addressed by this product or feature? What triggers, internal motivations or external pressures are involved in them using the product or feature? What outcome does the user expect from the encounter with the product or feature?

It’s possible that the answers to these questions won’t be crystal clear to begin with, that’s okay. Discussing them and aligning the team around what needs to be done in the phases that follow is more important than concrete answers. Phase Two: Diverge

PRO TIP — Recommended Schedule

Mind Mapping – 20 mins Crazy Eights – 30-40 mins How Might We – 30 mins Storyboarding – 1 hours Silent Critique – 1 hour Group Critique – 45 mins Retrospective – 15 mins

Overview

The goal of this phase is to generate possibilities. This follows directly from the Understand phase, where our goal was to understand the terrain and identify the problem worth solving. For this phase to be effective I recommend having the same mindset that improv actors embrace: build on the previous person’s idea. Instead of judging ideas, we’ll find the best solutions when we have an open mind and encourage crazy ideas. Mind Mapping (20 mins)

We start with mind mapping to warm up creativity and prepare the group for the exercises that follow. This is an individual exercise, so each person will do their own mind map. The facilitator reads out the previous day’s Problem Statement and then sets the timer for the group to write down ideas. Using a blank sheet of paper the participants write down ideas that might be solutions to the problem. Just like improv, by asking, “yes, and…”, each idea will generate another idea. Participants add each new idea to the previous idea with a connecting line. The result will look resemble an alien spider, with connected ideas radiating out from a starting point.

Crazy Eights (30-40 mins)

In a design sprint, we approach ideation in layers. The mind mapping gets the creative ideas out of the participants’ heads, and then the Crazy Eights and How Might We exercises allow us to go deeper. The time limit allows participants to explore ideas but deliberately doesn’t give them enough time to over- analyze their solutions. The objective is to generate ideas, not eliminate them because of judgments like, “Oh, that’ll never work.”

To do the Crazy Eight exercise hand out blank paper and have each participant fold the paper in half, then half again. This will create eight panels (front and back) on the sheet of paper. Give each person eight minutes to sketch eight different solutions, about one minute for each. Quick and dirty sketches are perfect. Once everyone is done, repeat the exercise. Repetition reinforces the “yes, and…” mindset and pushes participants to come up with new ideas that they may have never considered in the first round.

How Might We (30 mins)

How Might We is an innovation exercise used by Google, Facebook, Procter & Gamble, and design studio IDEO. The question, “How might we?” is another extension of the improv idea and pushes participants to think about how they could bring their solutions to life. To execute this exercise ask participants to write answers to the question as it relates to each of their solutions. For example, “How might we hail a taxi using a person’s GPS location?” Answers should be a short sentence or a sketched. Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, says the How Might We technique works best with ideas that are ambitious, yet also achievable. Brown says it doesn’t work as well with problems that are too broad.

Storyboarding (30 mins)

The storyboarding exercise is designed to take the ideas generated by Crazy Eights and expanded by the How Might We questions, and develop them further. Each participant starts with a blank sheet and adds three Post-it notes down the side of the page. They should choose the most promising solutions to storyboard. Each Post-it note is one frame in the storyboard. The top note represents the current state of the customer; the second note is how the customer would experience the new solution; and the bottom note shows the outcome created by the new experience. Think of this as a storyboard for a short film. Each note should be used to draw the action. Use the space on the paper to the side of the Post-it to write a brief explanation. Each frame should be self- explanatory. If a participant needs to explain what’s going on in a frame, ask them to redraw the action. Once everyone is done, hang the storyboards up in the shared space. Silent Critique (30-40 mins)

Once the ideation exercises are complete, the group will shift gears from non-judgemental creativity to individual critique. The purpose of doing this silently is so all voices get expressed, not just the senior leaders or influencers. Make sure all the storyboards are displayed on the wall, provide each person with several colored stickers (dot stickers) and ask participants to vote for the ideas they like best. Each person can use his or her entire allotment of stickers on one idea or distribute them in whatever way they see fit, even voting for their own ideas. The result will look a little like a series of heatmaps. The higher density dots indicate the most popular ideas.

Group Critique (45 mins)

Don’t do a group critique until the silent critique is complete. The group critique is exactly that, a chance for the entire team to discuss the ideas on the storyboards. The facilitator will gather everyone around each storyboard and ask them what they like about it. It’s essential that everyone gets to share what they like about each idea. The emphasis should be on the positives. In the next phase, participants will have a chance to think about the negatives. Note takers will capture this qualitative feedback.

Retrospective (15-20 mins)

This activity will be essentially the same each day–circle up, discuss the day’s work, and plan ahead for the next day.

Phase Three: Converge

PRO TIP — Recommended Schedule

Identify Conflicts (20-30 mins) Review Assumptions (10 mins) Review Back Burner Board (10 mins) Whiteboard the Final Storyboard (1-2 hours) Retrospective (15-20 mins) Overview

The purpose of the Converge phase is to reduce the potential solutions to a single version that will be tested. To make this convergence possible, the facilitator needs to ensure the assumptions identified in the Understand phase are being considered. Only the idea that addresses the riskiest assumptions and is aligned with the Problem Statement should move to testing. Converging is hard work. The team will be responsible for choosing some ideas over others. This means making tough decisions, so let participants know in advance to be prepared to let go of some favorites.

Identify Conflicts (20-30 mins)

The entire group will be involved in this exercise as they seek to identify storyboards that are so similar that they can be merged. Approaches that conflict shine light on what choices there are in solving the problem. Talk through the different approaches and decide which is the best to continue with.

Review Assumptions (10 mins) As mentioned, the alignment between a potential solution and the original assumptions is important. During each phase, the facilitator should remind the team of the assumptions. Gather the group around the assumptions board created on day one and discuss how the selected storyboard will address the assumptions. If the assumptions tests need to be adjusted or changed, do that now.

Assumption Test with… Validated if…

Customers want a Prototype and Customers shorter checkout interview choose the process prototype over the current checkout process

Customers Interview Customer can understand the clearly articulate value of this the value without feature prompting Review Parking Lot or Back Burner Board (10 mins)

If ideas were created in the Diverge stage that should be preserved, add them to the Parking Lot or Back Burner board. Record the best ideas and then move on. Don’t get too distracted by these sideline ideas.

Sketching (30-40 mins)

Once the reviews are complete, the teams will start with three quick rounds of sketching. Once participants have selected a single storyboard/idea to pursue from the Diverge phase, individuals must sketch out what the solution might be and then share it with 1-2 other people for feedback.

These small teams must then make tradeoffs to combine their solutions into one. Small teams repeat the process one more time by sharing solutions across the broader team and creating a single version of the solution. By stepping this out into a multi-pronged approach participants are less likely to be overwhelmed by a single big decision. It also gives them a way to clearly articulate the reasons behind the design decisions they made earlier in the day. Sketches from design sprint credit: Addi Hou.

Whiteboard the Final Storyboard (1-2 hours)

The final storyboard exercise is really important because it forms the foundation of the build and tests. The facilitator can lead this exercise by dividing the group into different roles. Some people will sketch while others rewrite the descriptions in detail. Don’t focus on design details, that will be the focus of the next phase.

The storyboard should be created in a way that the entire team can see it. The whiteboard is ideal. I’ve seen some cases where the facilitator does all the sketching at the whiteboard while the other members provide inputs. I don’t recommend this approach because it allows participants to sit back and watch the facilitator do most of the work.

Storyboarding with sticky notes. Credit Tim Höfer.

Retrospective (15-20 mins)

Phase Four: Build (Prototype) PRO TIP — Recommended Schedule

Create prototypes (as long as it takes)

Overview

In enterprise environments, I prefer calling this phase “Build” rather than “Prototype.” The reason is not all solutions will be prototypes in the traditional sense. Some of the solutions I’ve participated in have been things like sales scripts or service interaction models. “Build” is a more inclusive term that’s less intimidating for non-designers. However, if you’re reading this book, there’s a good chance you’ll be designing digital solutions, and in that case, “Prototype” should work just fine.

During this phase, the primary activity is going to be designing and creating something that can be tested. If the group includes designers then use these skilled people to create the screens, pages or features you’ll be testing. If you have developers on the team you can also create HTML/CSS prototypes that will live on the web. The additional fidelity and interaction of a coded prototype means you’ll have a smoother user experience, but it’s not required. If you don’t have developers on your design-sprint team, don’t panic. Paper prototypes are generally enough fidelity for testing your assumptions. The advantage of paper prototypes is they can be created quickly, inexpensively, and changes are often as simple as redrawing a screen.

Invision is made for prototyping and is my go-to tool for this exercise. Using the templates in InVision, even non-designers can create workflows using design outputs from applications like Sketch, Keynote or Photoshop. Even images from a smartphone camera can serve as the screens or pages of the app or website you’re designing.

Phase Five: Test

PRO TIP — Recommended Schedule

Interviews Final Retrospective Overview

The final phase of the design sprint is to test the original assumptions, validate or invalidate the problem statement, and extract knowledge about customer’s preferences. The output will be the insights collected from customer or prospective- customer interviews.

While design sprints are structured to generate more qualitative than quantitative insights, both are still considered important. In the Understand phase, when we are formulating our problem statement we’re reviewing or collecting insights by discovering the problems customers are thinking about. In the Test phase, we want to validate (or invalidate) the problem statement. We do this by conducting just enough interviews that we can gather whether that problem is real or just someone’s perception.

The collective facts obtained from these interviews will enable you to make decisions based on objective observations. To do this you’ll need to recruit 7-12 potential users and give them access to the prototype. Specifics of recruiting and testing are discussed in the sections below. Recruiting for Interviews

Bringing the users into the picture is often the most exciting part of the design sprint. Users are the fairy dust that you get to sprinkle on the design sprint because their feedback brings your prototypes to life. Once users start interacting with your prototypes you’ll get the answers you were seeking. The fundamental research questions or problem statements you need to answer will tell you who you need to engage in the interviews. Douglas Ferguson suggests asking the following questions: Are you looking for a new or existing user? Are they people who fit your sprint target? Whom should we exclude?

On the other hand, the design sprint’s short time schedule means you will need to start recruit candidates before you even start the sprint. Recruiting interview candidates will be different for each design sprint so I encourage you to plan ahead. Recruiting several users in just a few days can also be challenging and stressful. Without preparation, a team might find they have scheduled interviews with the wrong people. In a recent design sprint that was conducted to find solutions for LendingTree customers with low credit scores, the sprint team discovered that all the recruits had very high credit scores. As Ferguson cautions, “Be super careful that you are talking to the right people; take the time to prepare a proper screener.” I’m not a fan of recruiting potential customers using Craig’s List and the promise of $100 for their time. This approach attracts candidates who are more interested in earning $100 than they are in giving you feedback on a problem they care about.

Interviews (a few hours to an entire day)

The Interview

Each team will have specific roles during the interview process. You’ll need at a minimum, one person to conduct the interview and one person to take notes, or be the observer.

Don’t expect good results if the interviewer is also expected to take notes. It’s difficult for an interviewer to be truly present if they are also trying to be a good notetaker. An interviewer should be focused on the interviewee and asking the right questions, while the notetaker will be taking objective notes about what they hear and see.

If you have a larger team you can create multiple interviewer and observer teams. Assign roles the day before during the Build phase so team members can prepare for what they need to do. The interviewer will prepare questions. Author and researcher, Steve Krug has created an extremely thorough list of scripts and suggested questions for interviewers.

The Remote Interview

I recommend you do all user interviews in real-time and, wherever possible, in person. However, when a remote interview is necessary, a video conference with screen- share functionality is best. This will allow the interviewer and notetaker to see the facial expressions and body language of the user.

Video conference tech also allows the interview team to record the conversation and review it again with the broader team. If an extended team or stakeholders will be joining via video conference, it’s necessary that they remain quiet and objective, and not interrupt the interviewer. Keep all feedback until the end when the user has left the room or video conference. Don’t Coach Your Candidates

As excited as you might be about your potential solutions, be careful not to sell your ideas to the interview candidates. It’s more important to get a neutral candidate than someone that is going to support your idea. You are not selling or pitching them anything.

It’s also important that you don’t coach them towards an answer you’re hoping to hear. If a user is struggling, don’t jump to their rescue and tell them what to do. Rather say something like, “It looks like you’re still thinking about the step, can you tell me what’s on your mind?”

This Isn’t An Exam

Take your time to make the interview candidates feel comfortable. Interviewees can often feel like they’re being tested or graded so explain to them that their honest feedback is the best feedback. There are no right or wrong answers, only their unfiltered responses are needed.

This works in reverse too. Interviewers may believe an answer is wrong because of their own personal perspectives or biases. If you’re the facilitator, remind interviewers that they must be mindful of their tone of voice, facial expressions, and responses to feedback. Turning up your nose at a user’s response, because you don’t agree, sends a strong message that you don’t approve.

Negative Feedback is Often The Best Feedback

Rejecting feedback, because it wasn’t what you expected or desired, isn’t going to help uncover answers. Remember, a design sprint is a process for generating understanding. If a user is struggling through a flow or says negative things about the solution, that’s new information you can use to improve your work.

Instead of defending your solution to the user or redirecting them along a path you’re interested in, ask questions like, “Tell me more about that?” or “I’d love to know what you’re feeling?” Steve Krug has once again provided an excellent list of questions that an interviewer can ask.

Reviewing the Interview Sessions Your recollections will be freshest immediately after an interview. However, it’s also common for memories—even fresh ones—to be filtered or obscured in some fashion. That’s why it’s so important to review notes, video, audio and observers comments to fill in the perceptual blanks to which we’re all prone and gain a broader perspective on the interview.

Consider, too, that the more interviews you do, the more likely your brain will filter the memories in order of last-to-first. The most recent interviews will be clearer than the interviews conducted earlier in the day. This is called the and happens when we overestimate the likelihood of something happening because a similar event has either happened recently or because we feel very emotional about a previous similar event. This can easily be overcome by reviewing interview notes and video.

Final Retrospective (15-30 mins)

PRO TIP — Find the Problem Before the Solution

Customers rarely describe the solution to problems, but they are the best source for finding out what the problem is, and how important it is to them.

Setting the Mind to the Phase

“As I saw the evolution of sprints, and then I started hearing the stories of what sprints had done for those teams…I started realizing this is way bigger than what happens in the sprint.”

Marta Rey Babarro — GOOGLE

Jenny Gove, Kai Haley, and Marta Rey Babarro from Google talk about the evolution of sprints and how they have impacted teams across

Google.

Each phase’s name describes what the team will be doing, but it doesn’t describe how participants should think. Below is a list of character roles that will help you and your team bring the right mindset to each phase of the design sprint. • Understand – think like a scientist

• Diverge – think like an artist

• Converge – think like a detective

• Build (or prototype) – think like an architect

• Test – think like a journalist

Thinking like a detective

Think of your team as a group of forensic experts sifting through the clues looking for evidence. The question you need to answer in the Understand phase is: “What’s going on here?” Seen through the lens of the customer, this might sound like: “Here’s a problem I would love to have a solution for.” In this phase, it’s important to stay away from questions and conversations about how a solution might be delivered or what form it might take. We’re not concerned with that at this stage. It’s first important to know whether there is a case that needs solving.

Thinking like an artist

Your customers probably don’t know what the solution should be, or that they even need it. All they know is they have a problem or a pain that they are currently putting up with. As a result, the customer is a great resource for understanding the problem, but not for trying to find the solution.

When you move to the Diverge stage, you’ll switch from an analytical mindset to a creative mindset. Your goal will be to create as many possible solutions as time allows. Embracing a sense of openness and a lack of judgment will help you get into the right frame of mind.

Thinking like a scientist

Converging on the best idea, or ideas, requires the puzzle- solving mentality of a scientist. During the previous phase, the team will have developed lots of possible solutions. The team will be piecing together the elements that work while discarding the ideas that don’t support our problem space. Don’t be afraid to put ideas aside if they don’t fit the best profile. Your Parking Lot or Burner Board is for capturing these ideas that may be worth exploring in a future design sprint or discovery activity.

Thinking like an architect

Having done the necessary detective work, your best idea will now have made it to the Build phase. As is often the case with building projects, we start by influencing its design, but then its mere existence has the effect of influencing how we behave. This is exactly what happens when we start architecting our prototypes. Our initial ideas become refined and improved when we see the product, service or ideas in action. This is sometimes described as “thinking by doing.”

Thinking like a journalist

If “thinking by doing” describes the architect’s mindset, then the journalist mindset might be described as “thinking by questioning.” Approach the problem as if you will be expected to provide sources, evidence, and a clear storyline. Think through the who, what, when, where, why and how the mantra of journalism. Consider questions like: How did we get to this point? Who is this about and who does it appeal to? Why were those people the target of this story? What makes them and this subject so interesting?