Design Sprint - Definition and advantages (part2)

First of all, we're going to explain a word or two about what exactly the Design Sprint is and then we'll be moving into sharing our experiences of running Design Sprints within a corporate context and what are the common pitfalls we really see within that area. So whatever we'll be sharing there, it's mainly based on our own experience. And the next step is to really explain a word or two about what are the things that you would require up front before you'll be running a Design Sprint. So since it's really some of the things are required in order to set the stage for running a Design Sprint. And as the majority of our audience are beginners, we'll introduce mainly a high level of what Design Sprint is about without going too much into details and share a bit about why it's, what's the purpose of it and what are the desired outcomes of running a Design Sprint. Um, so as some of you already know, Design Sprint is actually a methodology that has been co developed by this guy called Jake Knep who works with Google Ventures. And the method is really well, it came from the inspiration of Lean Startup design thinking and various methodologies in order to figure out a more complex process of how we can enable startups to learn faster and cheaper in order to evaluate the value of their products and service that will bring to the market. So this is the overall process of a Design Sprint. As you can see, it's a five step process and often is being run in. Shall we just start over? So as most of the audience of our, of our, of the people watching this webinar are beginners, we ask people's profile behind it. We'll be starting off with explaining a a bit about what a Design Sprint actually is and what is it good for. And after that we'll be walking you through some of the common pitfalls we see when Corpus aims to apply or run a Design Sprint. So take into mind that whatever we'll be sharing now is mainly based on our own experiences of running these Design Sprints and our learnings and insights from these experiences. So maybe let's start first of all with the Design Sprint. Some of you probably already know, for those who don't, Design Sprint is a method that has been co developed by this guy called Jake Knapp and Jake Knapp, he works with Google Ventures and it's a method that's a result of gaining inspiration from Lean Startup, but also design thinking in order to come up with a more structured way to enable startups to learn fast and to fail Cheaply. So generally it's a process that will enable them to evaluate the value of the product and service that they bring to market. So what you see here is actually the key steps or the key stages within the Design Sprint. It's a five step process and most of the time it's run across five days. So it's one working week. And what you often use it for is really to challenge some of the business critical questions that you have and you have no really idea where exactly to start. Then if you will run through these questions through the Design Sprint, which is a very, very much a battle tested process, by the end of the five days, it will enable you to have a minimal viable product and to gain insights in order to take it forward. So the key is really about accelerating your learnings in order to develop a point of departure as soon as possible. So it's very much about going from abstract. We know that we're challenged, there's some key questions that we have to going into the more concrete and the tangible. And this will happen in only in just about five days time. And that's really a key strength of this process. It enables you to learn in a very short period of time as well. So let's dive into the five stages that we have seen. The first stage is as you can read, start with the end in mind and to pick a target. So it's really about having a long term goal. For example, you want to launch a website somewhere along the line, maybe within a couple of few months and you have to first choose what's the area that you want to focus on first and foremost. And for example, within the example of launching a website it could be how do you develop it? So it's as intuitive as possible. The second step is sketching. So it's about understanding. So you have already by mapping you already identified a key departure point of where you want to start off. Exploring first and during sketching is really about coming up with new ideas and new solutions that will enable you to meet that challenge that you have identified. And key to Design Sprint is something called analogy thinking. It's really about gaining the inspiration from across different industries and figuring out how these different industries in this meeting similar needs and how you can implement that within the context and within the challenge that you're trying to solve. On Wednesday you will decide. So by Tuesday you're probably gonna have like quite a few ideas that that will enable you to meet the challenge that you have identified on Monday. But on Wednesday it's really about shortlisting these ideas and making the decision on what are the few ideas that you would like to prototype and take forward. So from the ideas on Thursday, from those ideas on Thursday, you have decided the ideas that you want to prototype and it's really about making the the cheapest and easiest mock up as possible of these shortlisted ideas. So the aim on Thursday, yes, it's about prototyping, but it's really about focusing on the facade. So it's not just about making your product or making the prototype look as good as possible, but it's really about figuring out the key value of the prototype, which is testing the user experience. How will your user actually interact with the product? So it's not about understanding how the product will eventually work, but it's mainly about testing the interface between your user with your product or your service. So let's take for example, instead of building a completely new website, in order to test the user experience of your website, you don't even need to launch the website, you can just create a fake website using Keynote as a format and you can easily run that through with your customer. And having the right questions to address, you're able to gain the best insight, insights from these end users. And that brings us to the Friday, Friday is really about testing your prototypes with the users. Of course you have to come prepared, you have your prototype, you need to be prepared. What are the key assumptions, test scenarios that you want to validate or test with your end users? So preparing an interview guide for your testing day is highly validated, it's highly appreciated and there it's really about keeping your mind open and try to learn as much as possible from your customers because they're the people that you want to evolve, eventually sell your product or your services to and gaining their inputs and feedback to iterate your product on is key in order to come up with the best minimum viable product as possible. So one of the customers that we have worked with and have run a Design Sprint with is this media company called the Best Shop. So they were, for two years they were sitting on a really big vision and they weren't able to figure out how exactly make it happen. So they're sitting on an idea, but they have no idea where to start. So it was a perfect chance to actually apply Design Sprint into bringing that into that context. And we run the Design Sprint and in five days, just about five days, we were able to make that vision very tangible. So sitting on a vision for two years and making it tangible, coming up with clear action steps in Just five days time. It's a high difference. And I think the best troupe really also saw the value of running the design sprint since after we left they actually appointed somebody from the best trip to actually be in charge of running these design sprints for the future. So even if your company, this is not the way your company is currently working, but creating that direct experience, experience enabling people, the team to really experience how it feels like to work differently and what kind of different result it really delivers. And the pace, it's a door, like it's one step into your company to really convince them to run these design sprint on a larger scale as well. So we have now quickly described what a design sprint is about. So let me just quickly run through what it actually is good for. One of the key purposes of Design Sprint when it was designed was really about shortening the learning curve. So usually when a startup is learning and validating their product, it often takes four steps in order to complete the learning cycle. First they have the idea, then they will build it, then they're gonna launch it on market and from there they actually learn and then they iterate the ideas on. But the design Sprint is really about creating that shortcut into that learning cycle. So instead of going through the four steps, they're actually looping between idea to learning, idea to learning. And that's where the cheap, the quick mock up come into place. You don't need to necessarily develop something and launch it before you're able to gain the feedback. The key message here is gaining early customer feedback and that can already be during the early testing days of a mock up enables you to iterate and therefore create a better product or service by the end of the sprint. So besides that, what we also see as four key advantages of running design sprints that it really enables you to de risk the innovation process. You don't create expensive prototypes, you don't need to put too much time and effort in order to run it. So it's really about reducing the cost and increasing the pace of learning. Second of all is most of the time this design sprint are run in teams. It's really hard to run a design sprint if you're only just one person. So it's about enabling you to tap into the collective intelligence of the team members of the people within your company, preferably cross departmental, to really get to know each other and tap into each other's expertise and experiences and therefore build common understanding about the challenge and about the roadmap. A third key strength that we see is which is linked to the second one, which is that it really enables you to. It opens up the silo structure and really enables you to actually collaborate with people across different teams and across different departments. And last but not least, we all have struggled with meetings where we're sitting there one hour, two hours with other team members, but. But at the end of it, nobody really gets anything out of it. So Design Sprint is really about stop talking and doing more. So it's really about avoiding those unproductive meetings. And once you're stepping into the space of Design Sprint, you have to roll up your sleeve and just get going. So enough talk from our end about what we think, what a Design Sprint is and what is it good for. Now you will be hearing from one of our participants who have participated in a Design Sprint Sprint that board has organized.

It's pretty exhaustive and sometimes stressful as to work with a lot of people and sometimes want to just give your ideas and you don't want your ideas to be rejected by users and we get to compromise. And what is great is day after day, hour after hour, you build up something and you came to a concept where you strongly believe me and then you get to challenge that with the customers perspective. I think it's very nice, a nice journey and you feel very active, which is not always the case when you work in a huge environment. You really feel that, hey, I provide something and I did something and I make something else. But we did that with the team and then I think it's very brilliant. When we were invited for four days, we are, gosh, four days, all the work and we made possible to have to back up all the work. And I have had a wildcat. We don't just do that in one workshop of two hours. And in fact you realize that what you achieve in four days, it's much more than what we will achieve in more time, even in the company, because we'll have a 10, I don't know how many meetings of just one hour or two hours here and there. But at the end, you spend more than three days, or four days in total, with no prototype, with no testing, with no customer feedback and just an idea written on a sandwich at the end, it just doesn't.