Design Sprint

In 2016, Jake Knapp published a book called “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just 5 Days”. His first definition of DS was “a unique five-day process for answering crucial questions through prototyping and testing ideas with customers.” So what is design sprint, exactly? Sometimes DS is referred to as a design thinking sprint because of its fundamentals:

• Design Thinking, which focuses DS on the creation of human-centric products;
• Lean Agile as a philosophy for effective teamwork.

Design sprints shrink months of preparations and discussions thanks to the fact that they bring together cross-functional teams. Collaborative exercises, prototypes, user journey maps… DS covers a broad spectrum of topics and often brings new opportunities during the brainstorms. Thanks to that fact, businesses can make quick and informed decisions.

Design sprints are prescriptive. The process includes a set of timeboxed exercises completed in a specific order. It will take the whole book to describe them all, so if you’re interested - get in touch with our team or take your time by learning an official guide on DS by Google .

As we already know, Design Spring is a 5-dayprocess. But how to run a design sprint? Let’s find out.

First, at DataMix, we’re using our own ‘design sprint template’: Sprint 2.0 combined with some extra steps unique for software development. However, it is essential to understand that the design sprint methodology is quite flexible and can be used for various businesses across many industries. Jake Knapp even updated his own ‘classic’ design sprint planning to 4 days instead of 5 by merging some activities and moving others. In other words, it is important to follow the design sprint phases since the outputs from the previous phase are mandatory for the next one, but there are no strict rules on when or how exactly you do the job. 

Below are 6 design sprint steps. It is crucial to understand the design sprint agenda since whatever version of a design sprint is used, these steps are always followed. Here’s a brief explanation of each:

• Empathize: sometimes also called Understand. In product design sprints, this step is all about learning and understanding the target audience, their problems, existing solutions, or ways such problems are solved right now, etc. Simply put, this step usually stands for proper pre-workshop preparation but also means we are listening to stakeholders and the target audience first; only then can we move to the next step.
• Define: with a list of challenges on the table, the team should come up with some sort of design sprint storyboard. For example, it’s cool if a future SaaS platform can have various functionality, help different customer segments and support several monetization models. But you should define your focus for each Design Sprint: a proven approach is to test one idea at a time.
• Ideate: most creative part with the hottest brainstorming sessions. Design Sprint agency tries to reach the skies and bring all ideas to the table, even the craziest. Those ideas should be fixed on sticky notes or visualized in sketches. Design sprint facilitator hold an essential role here to control the flow of brainstorming within the range of the design sprint goals.
• Decide: team discusses all ideas to fully understand what every team member meant to express and to see if ideas intersect. Then, they vote to select the best ideas that are must-haves in an MVP and will be visualized in a prototype.
• Prototype: depending on the solution you want to build, prototypes can be literally anything: from business process maps to service robots. Since we are a software development company, our part
• Validate: a series of user tests in which carefully selected in-depth questions are asked.

DataMix is a digital product development company creating custom software for businesses. Our focus and philosophy is digital product development, which covers much broader expertise than just software development. We utilize methodologies like Design Sprint to quickly validate ideas, create prototypes, and plan the development to minimize risks and deliver expected results. Simply put, we’re not only helping businesses to create software. We create software that works, both tech and purpose-wise.