What is a Design Sprint?
A Design Sprint is a unique five day process for validating ideas and solving big challenges through prototyping and testing ideas with customers. The book “How To Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days” (by Jake Knapp) refers to it as:
“The ‘greatest hits’ of business strategy, innovation, behavioural science, and more — packaged into a step-by-step process that any team can use.”
In five days, the Design Sprint will help you to:
- Understand. Map out the problem and pick an important area to focus.
- Ideate. Sketch out competing solutions on paper.
- Decide. Make decisions and turn your ideas into a testable hypothesis.
- Prototype. Hack together a realistic prototype.
- Test. Get feedback from real live users.
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- A decider. They call the shots. Whether that’s the CEO or senior executive, they should be involved in the discussions early on since their decision will influence the sprint goal and the final product.
- Facilitator. The time keeper. They keep track of the team’s progress during the Design Sprint and ensure that everyone is playing their part. They need to remain unbiased in their opinion when it comes to decision time.
- Marketing expert. The person who is skilled at crafting your company’s messaging to your customers.
- Customer service. They interact with your customers on a regular basis and truly understand who your users are.
- Design expert. They design the product and help to realise the vision of the goal.
- Tech expert. They are in the best position to understand what your company can build and deliver.
- Financial expert. They can explain how much the project will cost and how much the company can expect to get from it in return.
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Preparation:
- Block out the entire week in you and your team’s calendar.
- No devices are allowed in the room. This is so that the entire team is focussed one hundred percent of the time.
- Stock up on post-it notes. You’ll need these to jot down ideas and map them on a wall.
- Whiteboards and plenty of markers.
