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).

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

Chapter—01

What Design Sprints Do for Enterprises Get ready to sprint By Richard Banfield

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

https://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=srch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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,

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

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.”

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

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

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

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

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…

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.

https://www.designbetter.co/workshops

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Chapter—02

When to SprintIs it time?

by Richard Banfield

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

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/

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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/

Chapter—03

Getting Senior Buy-in And SupportOn your mark...

by Richard Banfield

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.

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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.”

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

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.

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

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.”

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Chapter—04

Planning Your Design SprintA team sport

by Richard Banfield

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

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

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/

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

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.