When To Do a Design Sprint?
Introduced by Jake Knapp while at Google Ventures, Design Sprint is a five-day process that is employed by startups and businesses to solve complex problems and validate ideas. It helps businesses to answer key business questions and make project cycles less arduous. Google Ventures described it as “a ‘greatest hits’ of business strategy, innovation, behavior science, design thinking, and more.”
While this approach has become more popular since it was developed at GV, there are still those who find it hard to see the value in it. This is especially common among those that are just learning about it. Dedicating the amount of time needed seems like asking for too much.
Five Days, Too Long
A design sprint brings together some key people and experts, including Product Owners, designers, developers, and prototypers, for five days. The team will usually focus exclusively on this process for the length of time it will run.
It is more than just a 30-minute or one-hour meeting to discuss some matters. Rather, it entails employing a design thinking process to come up with useful insights and ideas, prototypes, and more – this surely requires more than a half-hour meeting. Decision-makers sometimes find it difficult to justify the time that goes into a design sprint. There is a reluctance to devote five FULL days when considering other things that could seemingly have been achieved during that time.
The fact, however, is that a design sprint actually compresses several weeks or months of work into just a few days. The process aims more at outcomes rather than outputs. It is designed to help answer key sprint or business questions. If we are finding it hard to justify giving five whole days to this process, we may need to critically assess if the trade-off for run one is really too great. How much would we have achieved by devoting that time to some project?
This process doesn’t always have to take five days – it may be shorter depending on the context or format. We can run a design sprint in 2-3 days in some cases. Care should only be taken not to make it shorter than is necessary. We need to note that focus is critical to success, and that’s a major benefit from design sprints. Running them helps us to be more focused in our approach and to prioritize better. It is not just about doing things but about having the right impact.
Design Sprints Save Costs
Time is a resource. The five days that are typically required for a design sprint are an issue more because of their cost implications. It means designers and developers, for instance, would stop doing their “core” work during the time. This makes the process look expensive.
The truth, however, is that a design sprint can actually save us money!
We could choose to use our time to “get something done” rather than devote it to a sprint design. But many companies have gone that route only to find down the line (and after spending thousands of dollars) that buyers aren’t showing significant interest in what they have to offer. The traditional mindset – especially one that doesn’t value processes such as design sprints – contributes to the failure of many products.
A design sprint can help us to know what is more likely to work or not work for us to use available resources efficiently. It will assist in guarding against friction and help to align everyone to produce a significant impact. The process provides a clear structure on how to tackle and solve complex problems efficiently.
Running design sprints let us know where best to focus our attention and direct our efforts. This way we are in a better position to be more productive. The process enables us to quickly validate ideas. It helps us to decide the right way to go and the wrong to avoid. This can help to preserve the limited resources we have to work with from wastage.
Design Sprints in Practice
Apart from Google Ventures that helped to popularize it, many companies have adopted this methodology or variations of it. KLM Airlines and Slack are two of those corporations.
Top design strategist C Todd Lombardo has a couple of great examples of how design sprints can help us get better value from our time and money. In one instance, a client had approached his firm while contemplating a complex product redesign that would have cost them up to $200,000 or even more. The team, however, found that such a costly redesign project wasn’t necessary, thereby helping the client to preserve their resources.
The said client also saw a significant increase in their revenue after using insights from the design sprint to improve their processes. Contrary to the thinking that design sprints are expensive, they are often a bargain when we consider the benefits accruing from them. The methodology reduces friction and lengthy debates. It keeps us from holding meetings during which discussions go on and on without achieving much.
When Should You Run a Design Sprint?
The most obvious time to use this methodology is when we are working on a new product or initiative. Running it will help everyone to be better focused on what to work on while also improving prioritization. It aligns everyone on what is most important and makes resolving any conflicts down the road easier.
We can also find a design sprint useful when we are looking to improve our current offering. It provides an opportunity to quickly come up with fresh ideas and validate them. If we can avoid being too specific, almost any time is good to run a design sprint, especially when working in iterations. We can, for instance, carry it out when we are pitching to a stakeholder or if simple A/B testing isn’t enough to answer the key questions we have.
Design sprints will work well for practically all major problems that require input from different experts to tackle effectively.
