Design Sprint is How We Roll
Eric Ries, American entrepreneur, blogger and author of The Lean Startup defines a startup as a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
At Lateral View, we know about startups and we are aware that one of our main objectives is to reduce Extreme Uncertainty to a very low minimum. Many startup founders have come to us with huge (sometimes fuzzy) ideas on products to build and services to offer but we know that before taking any risks or investing any money we need to run some tests and don’t get lost in endless senseless team discussions. We don’t want to waste time nor money: we use Design Sprint.
Design Sprint is a five-phase framework created by Google Ventures that helps solving critical business questions and assumptions and test new ideas through rapid prototyping and user testing. In other words, it is a way to validate ideas and iterate through different alternatives with a really low probability of making any mistakes in a very compressed timeframe. We run it, for example, before building a minimum viable product, while trying new features on a certain product or when choosing a new target audience to aim at.
Depending on the type of idea we are dealing with, we devote 5 or 3 days to run a sprint. Why? Well, Design Sprint is basically the product between the oh-so-oftenly-mentioned Design Thinking and Lean Start Up, the methodology used to develop businesses and products that aims at shortening developing cycles.
At Lateral View, we used to work with Design Thinking to validate the users’ needs while we focused on lean methodologies to help startups validate their business models. When Google Ventures published their Design Sprint model it just mixed up both systems and gave a new terminology to the way in which we were used to working. That is why we feel comfortable modifying the rigid theory books like Sprint by Jake Knapp preach and adapt it to the real needs that come up during real life projects. Having an abridged version of the Design Sprint is useful when the idea we need to test is not that complicated and does not require to destine a full team during a whole week to just one project.
Either following the traditional sprint or deciding to work with a Lateral-View-kind-of-sprint we divide the process in 5 phases:
- Understand. The team accepts the client’s big challenge and maps out in great detail the customer journey, then invites experts to provide their input and decides which issue to focus on first.
- Sketch. Team members work individually to brainstorm creative possible solutions freely.
- Decide. Each member shares their ideas and the team votes to decide on the best approach.
- Prototype. In the context of Design Sprint, we use the word prototype in a slightly different way than in standard product development. A Design Sprint prototype is a façade of the user experience you have envisioned during the sketch phase.
- Validate. The Moment of Truth. The team will finally get to see real live humans interact with the prototype, get direct feedback from the target audience and take notes.
If the idea has any value and passes the validation phase, cool, the team is onto something great. If it doesn’t the cost is only five days and the team has learnt something. Anyway, when the sprint is over each team member compares their notes and together they boil them down to a report that includes everything that has happened during the process. The team now has customer-tested prototypes, a product roadmap and a pitch deck.
Basically, what the sprint does is: it gives teams a shortcut to learning without building, launching or spending money. It applies to any kind of project. Its success depends on choosing the right team, identifying the right challenge and setting aside the time and effort to focus on the problem. You can’t run every decision through a Design Sprint but it is extremely useful to accelerate key decisions.
