Design Sprint: Google’s formula for critical problems

The Design Sprint methodology allows startups to learn fast and make cheap mistakes.

How long does it take for a startup to understand if its solution is valid? Three months? One? Google is clear: five days is enough. If a few weeks ago we talked about Google’s secret weapon, the OKR goal management methodology, today we focus on another of the American giant’s formulas that can change the course of your company: Design Sprint.

As its name, Design Sprint, indicates, this methodology proposes the resolution of critical problems in the product development process in just five days, through a series of good practices in design thinking, business strategy, innovation and behavioral analysis, among others. The basic idea of Design Sprint is that, by squeezing cycles into a single week, the team can take an important shortcut: moving from “idea” to “learning” without having to build and bring to market the product in question.

What is the origin of Design Sprint?

The methodology was born from Jake Knapp, a former design partner at Google Ventures, who began running it at Google in 2010. Two years later, Knapp took the concept to Google Ventures, where another part of the team (Braden Kowitz, Michael Margolis, John Zeratsky and Daniel Burka) was in charge of perfecting the process to what we know today.

Companies such as Nest, Medium, Lego, Uber or Slack have carried out their own Sprints. But they are not the only ones, from universities to people with personal projects, on Medium you can access a page that brings together hundreds of case studies related to this methodology.

If we had to summarize Design Sprint in a few words, we could say that it allows startups to learn fast and make cheap mistakes. Of course, it requires a great commitment on the part of the company and the absolute interest of a large part of the team. John Zeratsky, one of the authors of the book Sprint: How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days, explains on Medium that the problems or challenges chosen should have a high priority: either because the opportunity is very good or, on the contrary, because the company is going against a curve or is stagnant. In the end, the Sprint will require a portion of the company to block its schedule completely for five days. Let’s see how it works.

Setting the stage for the Design Sprint methodology

The Design Sprint methodology includes three main phases: product design, prototyping and testing with customers. The process requires the participation of different profiles of the startup and the designation of a Sprint Master, who will be in charge of directing the process. How many people should be part of the Sprint? A team of maximum seven people is ideal.

The room in which the Sprint will take place should contain a few blank slates, post-its, sheets, healthy snacks to ensure that the team has energy, timers, stickers, adhesive tape and markers. Computers, phones or tablets are prohibited.

1,2,3… Sprint!

Once the ideal scenario is created and the team for the Sprint assembled, the real process begins:

  1. The first step to take on Monday is to understand the challenge facing the company and define the audience it will target with this new product. During the process , the long-term objective of the project and a map of the main agents involved will be defined, and experts from inside and outside the organization will be spoken to understand the context of the market and the public.
  2. On Tuesday, the team will be licensed to be creative. The objective of the second day of the Sprint is to identify different solutions to the problem/need discussed on Monday, redefining different ideas individually and starting to define the tests that will be carried out on Friday with customers.
  3. At the halfway point of the Sprint, the startup will find itself with several solutions on the table, so the time has come to sift through. On Wednesday, the group will spend the morning debating which idea is best to achieve the long-term goal it had defined. In the afternoon, it will be time to create a storyboard in which they will define a step by step of the best ideas.
  4. On Thursday it will be time to create different prototypes to test with the audiences defined on Monday and to prepare the tests on Friday (scripts for interviews, schedules, etc.).
  5. On the last day of the Sprint, Friday, the startup will have to test the prototypes developed with this target audience , which will allow it to obtain information on the viability of the product, customer perception and possible areas for improvement.