What is a Design Sprint ? 

DS is a methodology developed by Google Ventures popularized by Jake Knapp. It serves to improve the design problems that affect the business

What is Design Sprint for your business?

The secret of the Design Sprint is its ability to combine strategic design, with innovation processes, mainly Design Thinking and User-Centered Design Methodology, as well as agile techniques.

The process of carrying out a Design Sprint is based on aligning needs and co-creating solutions in which all those involved in the governance of the project participate. Also, it is a process in which we rely on the team, its knowledge and tools.

Benefits of Design Sprint

If you are a startup, Design Sprint helps you define and set up an MVP with a market validation plan and know the reactions of customers. If you are a company, it aids in generating new business and save money. 

Projects like Uber or Slack have been carried out with Desing Sprint. It has served them to evaluate the viability of new businesses, make the new version of an app, design reports, define new marketing strategies to improve products with millions of users.

PROCESS

1.    Understanding phase.

The understanding phase consists of all team members being aligned and having the same knowledge about the product, the user, and the problem to be treated.

To do this, sessions of between 10 and 15 minutes will be held in which all team members present, from their perspectives and areas of expertise, what they know about the problem they are going to try to solve.

2.    Sketch phase.

All team members, regardless of their design notions, will draw their ideas on paper individually.

Although the Design Sprint is a teamwork process, this phase requires individual work in silence for each member to contribute their own ideas.

3.    Decision phase.

The team evaluates the individual ideas of each member and decides by consensus those to be prototyped.

To achieve agreement, it is useful to use methods such as; the decision matrix to assess each of the proposals objectively.

4.    Prototype phase.

This phase consists of prototyping only the solution that we want to test. We may think that one day is not enough time to make a high fidelity prototype, but the idea is to prototype only those functions of our solution that are necessary to test with real users.

5.    Testing phase.

At this stage, the entire team will have access to the results obtained. It is time to evaluate the prototype with real users. They will test and get feedback from real users.

Conclusion

It is worth noting that although design sprint borrows some concepts of agile methodologies, it is not a substitute or equivalent of a sprint in scrum since the process, roles, and deliverables are very different. Design sprint also uses design thinking concepts but with clear limits on the time and resources used to keep it agile and focused.

The most important thing about design sprint is that it helps the team work on the needs of its users and focus the collective effort on creating tangible things while reducing discussions.