Design Sprint Facilitation
Need an answer to a big question? Have team alignment problems that are affecting performance? Are there differing opinions as to the overall product vision and how to prioritize your backlog? Design sprints are a great way to address all of those problems and more.
Design Sprint Facilitation
The quicker you can iterate and validate product ideas, the quicker you can get your teams aligned and executing on a goal that everyone understands.
It’s hard to be innovative when your team is mostly focused on making incremental improvements. Face it: giant leaps don’t happen through iterative tweaks!
But taking that next big step can involve some significant risks and costs. Design sprints, when done correctly, are a great way to minimize the risks associated with entering new markets, designing new products, or developing new functionality for millions of users.
Not only are design sprints are a great way to quickly identify problems, test ideas, and accelerate your learning, they're also a great tool for gaining team clarity and alignment around what the real customer problems are, what needs to be built, and how to prioritize everything.
Understanding the Basics
Depending on how much background research you have, design sprints (including testing your idea with real users) can often be completed in as little as 5 days. And while there are some variations available, and we can create customized sprints, the general process involves 5 main components:
Understand
Design sprints start with framing the opportunity, identifying the problem to be addressed, documenting your team’s assumptions, and getting everyone to agree on how to prioritize both business goals and user needs.
Generate
Next, start exploring possible solutions to the problem and don’t be afraid to mix in some creative, constraint-busting type of thinking. Ideas rule and right now, the goal is to generate as many different options as possible.
Decide
Choose the best idea(s) that will help you learn the most about the problem you’re trying to address. Decide what type of prototype will do the best job of validating or invalidating your assumptions and map out a plan to build it.
Prototype
Roll up your sleeves and get to building. The focus for this step should be on speed of development, usability, and providing just enough detail to enable you to test your ideas and see if you’re on the right track.
Validate
Show your prototype to real users/customer and see what happens! Pay attention to what works (and what doesn’t) and get real-world feedback on whether or not you’re addressing the right problem.
Ready to get started?
We have over 20 years of proven experience in user research, rapid prototyping, and product evaluation and we're always excited to work with new clients!
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