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TRANSCRIPT
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By Richard Banfield
Enterprise Design Sprints
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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).
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ContentsWhat Design Sprints Do for Enterprises Get ready to sprint
When to SprintIs it time?
Getting Senior Buy-in And SupportOn your mark...
Planning Your Design SprintA team sport
The Design SprintLet’s Go
Beyond the Five-PhasesHow’d you place?
AppendixThe cool down
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Chapter—01
What Design Sprints Do for Enterprises Get ready to sprint By Richard Banfield
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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
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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
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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 SprintsDesign 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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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happens when teams are provided with new tools to interact
and collaborate.
Design Sprints 101The 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
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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,
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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
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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.”
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 MaturityThe 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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence
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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.
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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…
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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Further readingVisual 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
http://www.xplane.com/designsprintshttps://designsprint.newhaircut.com/what-happens-before-a-design-sprint-v2-b69056f187d1https://voltagecontrol.co/design-sprints-for-rapid-requirements-acceptance-9ef59139dc0ehttps://voltagecontrol.co/our-top-7-design-sprint-hacks-f6a089ec51f9https://www.amazon.com/Design-Sprint-Practical-Guidebook-Building/dp/1491923172/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1530666849&sr=8-2&keywords=design+sprint+book&dpID=51rr3EbaKTL&preST=_SX258_BO1,204,203,200_QL70_&dpSrc=srchhttps://www.amazon.com/Design-Sprint-Practical-Guidebook-Building/dp/1491923172/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1530666849&sr=8-2&keywords=design+sprint+book&dpID=51rr3EbaKTL&preST=_SX258_BO1,204,203,200_QL70_&dpSrc=srchhttps://www.amazon.com/Sprint-Solve-Problems-Test-Ideas/dp/0593076117/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1518707468&sr=1-1&dpID=51piBEV0clL&preST=_SY344_BO1,204,203,200_QL70_&dpSrc=detailhttps://www.amazon.com/Sprint-Solve-Problems-Test-Ideas/dp/0593076117/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1518707468&sr=1-1&dpID=51piBEV0clL&preST=_SY344_BO1,204,203,200_QL70_&dpSrc=detail
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Chapter—02
When to SprintIs it time?
by Richard Banfield
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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
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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
https://www.behavioraleconomics.com/resources/mini-encyclopedia-of-be/sunk-cost-fallacy/
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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
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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.
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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 ForUnderstanding 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
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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.
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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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_methodhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 DoThe 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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
Further readingUnited Nations: Increasing food donations with design sprints
The Value of Balancing Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability
https://blog.ajsmart.com/united-nations-increasing-food-donations-with-design-sprints-876c09259f9bhttps://crowdfavorite.com/the-value-of-balancing-desirability-feasibility-and-viability/
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Chapter—03
Getting Senior Buy-in And SupportOn your mark...
by Richard Banfield
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James Bull, a senior leader of R&D programs at Shopify, set up
a design sprint workshop to spotlight different exercises, and
he invited his senior leadership to participate. Following the
workshop he sent this by email: “The team is so hyped on the
design sprint. The fact that our chief design officer and co-
founder were there was even better. They’re thinking, ‘Hey, if
the senior folks are there then it must be worthwhile’. Huge win
for us this week.”
Including senior leaders in a handful of exercises could be
all that’s required to get their buy-in and enthusiasm, which
is hugely important. If your leadership can’t see the value in
what you’re doing, the project likely won’t get far. It’s been
my experience that organizers who spend time rallying their
leaders’ support for a design sprint are more successful
than those who leave the preparation and communication to
chance.
Leaders are often tasked to make decisions regarding
resource allocation, planning choices, and talent acquisition.
To get a leader’s support for the resources and access your
design sprint requires, you need to put yourself in their shoes
and imagine what they require to feel excited about the sprint.
The more relevant information you can provide them, the more
likely you’ll get their blessing.
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PRO TIP — Sprint Before Sprinting
If you have a particularly difficult political environment or
a complicated organizational structure, consider running
a small internally focused sprint before your actual design
sprint. In this exercise, your organization’s decision makers
and influencers are your customers. Using their personal
motivations and pains as your problem statements, you can
work to find potential answers to their arguments before
you even engage them. This way you’ll have evidence-based
answers to their push-back or opinions well before you need
them. And you’ll definitely need them.
When communicating with leaders, or anyone who has an
interest in your design sprint, consider their motivations and
priorities. Being empathetic and thoughtful about their needs
gives you the perspective to help make your work relevant to
their goals. In some cases you might be able to connect the
outcomes of the design sprint to a person’s Key Performance
Indicators (KPIs) or Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).
Frequently these outcomes need to be balanced by the risk
of doing the additional work required by a design sprint.
Anytime a team is engaged on a design sprint they will not be
working on other work. In cases like these, asking for a little
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space to experiment with design sprints goes a long way.
Justin Sachtleben, Design Director of USAA, explains how this
worked for his team. “We approached the senior leadership
and said, ‘look we’ll do whatever you want after a couple of
weeks, but just like let us do a design sprint and show you the
results first.’”
USAA is a massive financial services organization with 30,000
employees and 30,000 external partners. Those two weeks of
experimentation gave the design team the wins they needed to
create trust with the leaders. “It was wildly successful and we
all had some great ideas, now our leaders want us to go work
on those things for the next year or so,” says Sachtleben.
Related to this is that most leaders hate surprises. Their jobs
require them to be informed, so the more you can prepare
them with knowledge and understanding, the better their
chances of looking good. If they look good, then that smooths
the path for your design sprint. The best receptions for design
sprints are fostered when both top-down and bottom-up
approaches are run simultaneously. Having a senior leader
champion design-thinking techniques will grease the wheels,
while actively involving your colleagues in workshops and
design sprints will convert them to believers.
https://www.invisionapp.com/enterprise/design-genome/report/usaa
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While the “ask forgiveness, not permission” strategy might
appear to be the way to go for some of you, the benefits to
getting senior buy-in are far greater. “The biggest piece of
all this is the transformational way we work, and the cultural
shift in how we work,” says Home Depot’s Creef, about getting
buy-in from the top. “Even our CMO has been exposed to what
design sprints can do, and the benefits of it. Basically, he’s like,
‘We should be working like this all the time.’”
“When we bring people together who are working on different products, it’s a really great opportunity for people to…cross pollinate.”
Kai Haley — GOOGLE
Kai Haley, Marta Rey Babarro, and Jenny Gove from Google speak
about the history of design sprints at Google and how the process
spread into teams like Corporate Engineering.
More Tips for Greasing the Wheels
https://invisionapp.wistia.com/medias/f5muomyfr3https://invisionapp.wistia.com/medias/f5muomyfr3https://invisionapp.wistia.com/medias/f5muomyfr3
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“Most of our ideas are wrongheaded,” says Lean Enterprise
author and facilitator, Barry O’Reilly. “In fact, 60–90 percent
of ideas do not improve the metric they were intended to
improve. You can invest in convincing people why your idea is
the best, or you can invest that time in testing it to find out.”
Chances are your organization has lots of ideas or potential
solutions for the problems it faces. Ideas tend to be a dime a
dozen. The challenge is creating a reliable way to test ideas to
determine if they’re worth following through on. That’s what
design sprints do well.
Here are several suggestions for helping your team and
leadership buy into the design-sprint process and not get
bogged down in assumptions and opinions.
01. Start to prepare long before the sessions are scheduled.
Share info and insights about design thinking with
influencers for several weeks. That way they aren’t
surprised by your request for a workshop when the time
comes.
02. Make any design thinking workshop about them—your
leaders. Do your research and find out what they’re
working on and what’s a priority for them. Then you can
https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Enterprise-Performance-Organizations-Innovate/dp/1449368425
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include those insights into the outcomes/goals when you
request their time for a workshop or session.
03. Educate each participant about the session before they
arrive. Nobody likes to look stupid, so invest time making
them feel comfortable. You can do this with one-on-one’s
or by sharing materials on what to expect.
04. Focus the team on outcomes that are aligned with their
goals. Give them something meaningful to work towards
and don’t get too distracted by the “how.”
05. Start each session with some ‘openers’ instead of
icebreakers. Get them to open up and share some recent
embarrassing or vulnerable moments with each other.
Research shows this type of sharing helps people trust
others more and increases brainstorming creativity by up
to 26 percent. This also sets the tone for the rest of the
session by making everyone more receptive to difficult
conversations.
06. If senior leaders are reluctant to support something that
sounds like it’s only relevant to designers, then consider
changing the name of the design sprint to something that
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aligns with your organization’s culture and goals. (More on
this in the next chapter.)
Sometimes designers see themselves as the owners of the design truth. However, designers cannot work in isolation, as they need their business partners to succeed. Designers need to learn how to communicate effectively with other people and areas of the organization.
Jose Coronado — MCKINSEY & COMPANY
Greasing the wheels is not a one-and-done effort. Sharing the
value of a design sprint is an ongoing effort and can be done
informally and formally.
Paul Stonick says there’s an opportunity to further establish
design thinking at Home Depot by sharing the value of
design sprint work. “We’ve done a considerable amount of
socialization outside with the articles we’re writing, and how
we’re going to be partnering with conferences,” he says. “We’re
also going to be working closely with our internal groups,
like our HR team, in terms of internal learning, continuing
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education. So we’ve launched a new program called Degreed,
which is a learning platform, which allows people to pick
specific tracks that they might be interested in.”
Working With and Around Research Departments
Enterprise research departments are often stretched thin, a
situation that can compromise a future design sprint through a
lack of relevant data.
Renda Morton, VP of design for The New York Times, explains
how the organization deals with the situation. “The qualitative
team on its insights is struggling to keep up with the demand
across the whole product and design team, so we really have
to prioritize what type of work they can take on,” she says.
To get around this obstacle, Morton suggests a DIY approach
to qualitative research. Her team simply goes downstairs to
42nd street and talks to people on the street. Or they ask
random people in the building’s cafeteria. However, Morton
understands this type of research is limited. “You can’t really
get to the larger why questions or uncover emotional needs,
but it’s a good start.”
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Merging Design Sprints With Agile, Lean and Design ThinkingFor enterprises, knowing how a design sprint fits with waterfall,
Agile or Lean process is important. Although Agile, Lean and
design sprints are complementary, interrupting the daily
schedule to host a five-day session can be challenging. So
let’s discuss the ways these processes can blend together to
deliver value to the teams that use them.
PRO TIP — Agile and Lean
Agile and Lean coaches or consultants might give enterprises
the impression that these development methodologies are
an elixir for all problems. That is definitely not the case. The
guiding principles behind these processes are extremely
useful, but because every company is different, generic
solutions should be approached with caution.
Agile
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The primary advantage of using an Agile framework is the
confidence it gives a team in knowing what to build next. Agile
provides a way to deal with ambiguity by reducing the need to
scope and define an entire product upfront and instead deal
with the highest priorities first. Working in short bursts, or
Agile sprints gives the team an opportunity to course-correct
before it’s too late.
Design sprints work well to add another layer of confidence
to the prioritization by answering tough questions quickly
and turning assumptions into facts. Both types of sprints
are valuable, timebox elements that provide guardrails and
discipline to the work of product, design and dev teams. The
design sprint suggests what to build, while the Agile sprint
suggests how you’ll build it.
The traditional Agile sprint was the inspiration for the design
sprint, and thus the timebox of a design sprint nests into
Agile methodology with relative ease. Done at the beginning
of a project, a design sprint can provide the answers that a
delivery-centric Agile process needs to be effective.
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Design sprints in an Agile process
There is no clear answer to the question, “Should I run my
design sprint in parallel or interrupt my Agile sprints?” Design
sprints that are run in parallel to an existing Agile sprint
schedule tend to be effective when the answer you’re seeking
is discrete enough that it doesn’t need the entire team’s
attention. However, if you’re trying to solve a big problem that’s
holding up further progress on your project, then interrupt the
schedule and get the answers that are blocking your team’s
progress. This interruption will pay dividends throughout the
rest of the delivery cycle.
More reading on this topic.
Lean UX For Enterprise
https://voltagecontrol.co/friends-not-enemies-89d067db37da
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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.”
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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.
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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
https://www.designbetter.co/design-thinking
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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 LeadersHere 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
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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.
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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
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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.
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.
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Further readingFostering a Culture of Innovation
Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations
Innovate at Scale
https://medium.com/@brookecreef/fostering-a-culture-of-innovation-fe35469edd65https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Enterprise-Performance-Organizations-Innovate/dp/1449368425https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Enterprise-Performance-Organizations-Innovate/dp/1449368425
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Chapter—04
Planning Your Design SprintA team sport
by Richard Banfield
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Starting Before You StartIn 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
https://invisionapp.wistia.com/medias/v70znn3qa1https://invisionapp.wistia.com/medias/v70znn3qa1https://invisionapp.wistia.com/medias/v70znn3qa1
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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
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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.”
https://www.imaginelearning.com/https://www.imaginelearning.com/
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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
https://designsprint.newhaircut.com/problem-framing-part-2-of-3-681616fcdfee
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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.
https://designsprint.newhaircut.