Product teams continually strive for innovation in order to stay relevant with their users, stand out in the market and improve how they operate. While developing new innovations, it is vital to find product-market fit and test assumptions with existing and potential users.
A great way to discover and validate new product ideas is by using a Design Sprint. A Design Sprint is a workshop where teams test product ideas by creating and testing prototypes within a five-day period.
An overview of the Design Sprint structure
During the workshop, teams tackle critical business questions through sketching, prototyping and testing ideas with real users and customers, within a five-day period. This short time frame allows the product team to quickly see whether they are on the right track without losing a lot of precious time.
How can product teams be empowered to innovate?
1. Dedicate time for cross-functional teams
Giving product teams the necessary time to spend on discovery activities will allow them to have the space they need to innovate and to find potential ways to solve a business challenge.
Innovation is achieved by a diverse group collaborating on a common challenge. This involves cross-functional teams, such as product managers, designers, marketers, business stakeholders and software engineers, coming together to meet the same goal.
2. Involve development, find those who are excited to be in
It is important to have representatives of the development team involved in the discovery phase as they are the experts when it comes to knowledge of the existing software and its potential. Not all developers would want to be involved in this early phase, but make sure to include those who do.
As Marty Cagan argues in his book Inspired:
“If you’re just using your engineers to code, you’re only getting about half their value.”
We see this in practice; when engineers and developers are included in this early phase their teams are ready to meet all the challenges when the prototype is ready for development.
The challenges may not be related to software design, the challenges could vary from ‘How to utilise voice activation with your services’, or ‘How to give your clients the best customer support experience’.
3. Get buy-in from the team before the design sprint
When organising the workshop, make sure the people you are inviting to the design sprint are aware of the process and have an idea of what’s to come. Make sure they all know why they are invited to take part in the sprint, and that they are enthusiastic to contribute to the team.
Consider the personalities in the team, and what actions you may need to take to make sure everyone is comfortable and excited to be part of the workshop.
How can a Design Sprint help?
Design Sprints can help feed the development process.
1. Confine it in a week, don’t spread it out
A Design Sprint can be perceived as a large investment for a team to work on a single topic. However, teams benefit from this time spent together on the workshop where they can focus and collaborate on the same challenge.
The alternative to confining the Design Sprint in one week is to have multiple meetings and workshops spreading over several weeks. Stretching out the Design Sprint in this way makes it harder for teams to stay focused on the challenge, and key details and decisions can easily be lost.
Aim to have a confined, fully dedicated timeframe were all members are fully available and focused on being involved in the design sprint. Spreading it over a longer period will make it easy for people to jump out and be focussed on other things.
2. It removes risk by testing prototypes
Design Sprints reduce the risk of developing new products that have not been validated by the market.
The risk is reduced by constructing a clickable (or paper) prototype in a day as part of the workshop, rather than spending months building the entire solution, and only then testing it with customers. For a successful Design Sprint test with as many as real users as possible, ideally five users. Make sure you arrange the user test meetings in advanced of the design sprint.
By following this process teams can ideate, measure and learn using prototypes rather than complete products. This means teams can figure out what are the right ideas to invest in, construct and launch.
How using prototypes to test product ideas, speeds up the product discovery process.
3. Get alignment and think about products useful for users.
A further benefit is teams can test many ideas in the time it would take them to fully build one item. Teams can quickly iterate on an idea, by responding to the results of the prototype tests.
By building things that have been continuously tested with users, teams can be confident what they are building is relevant and useful to users.
How can this scale in my organisation?
How can Design Sprints be scaled up?
1. Facilitators are important and you need to coach others
There may already be a few people in your organisation comfortable with facilitating a design sprint — they could come from the design, product or project management departments.
Training others to learn how to facilitate a design workshop can be a useful way to grow the company’s internal knowledge base, and to empower more teams to use this method of product discovery. By sharing the facilitation workload, more teams can innovate on and solve all manner of business problems in a far more efficient way.
Facilitation expertise can be grown internally, with coaching from those already in the know with those who want to learn, and by creating shared resources (both digital and physical) for teams to use in every workshop they wish to run. Teams can learn from each other and share their experiences across the business.
There are also plenty of online resources that can be used to learn more about Design Sprint facilitation with companies such as IDEO, AJ&Smart offering relevant content and training, and, of course, the book Sprint by Jake Knapp.
2. Spend time getting buy-in from people in the organisation
When you start having design sprints more regularly in your organisation, make sure to set internal expectations. This includes participants, stakeholders both internal and external and those who sponsor the team’s time to invest in the workshop.
Getting buy-in from stakeholders is vital to successfully scale Design Sprints across an organisation. Otherwise, teams may not be permitted to spend the continuous 4–5 days needed to complete the workshop.
In addition, it is important to set expectations for the likely outcomes of a Design Sprint, this can be done by presenting outcomes of previous sprints and explaining how Design Sprints work on a high level.
Manage expectations of stakeholders, the result will be focussed on a business challenge, the team will not be able to tackle all open business problems. By setting expectations correctly, you can help ensure the team does not have any unrealistic targets set upon them.
3. Make sure you keep track of learnings, overall design sprint results and track progress
Once you have Design Sprints working at scale, with multiple teams engaging in a workshop a few times a year. Having an additional place to coordinate between teams is very helpful for:
- Keeping track of which business challenges have been picked up and which are planned for the upcoming workshop?
- What happened in previous Design Sprints, where any lessons important for the next group to know?
- What are the recommended next steps from each sprint?
By having this additional coordination effort, you can make sure teams really learn from each other, and pick up work from other teams when possible so they don’t start working on a business challenge from scratch.
4. Do it regularly and often and make it a standard process.
The best way to train, learn and coordinate design sprint capabilities in your organisation is to do it often, practice by facilitating & participating in workshops, and make sure to gather feedback from every workshop. Document the lessons, outcomes including recommended next steps and feedback and share learnings across teams.
In conclusion
In summary, Design Sprints is one of many tools to help you to do product discovery, and by scaling it across your organisation multiple teams can benefit from validating ideas and assumptions with customers fast!
Teams should be empowered to innovate by allowing them to run their own Design Sprints. Individuals who want to learn can be trained by those in the know as well as using external resources on how to facilitate the workshop.
Once you have Design Sprints running amongst multiple teams, make sure to have share resources so teams can learn from each other. In addition to this, make sure there is a place to keep track of what work was covered in previous workshops and what were the key lessons of the challenge.