How to Run Your First Design Sprint

A design sprint is a process originally developed at Google Ventures, and is a way to quickly get to the root of business and user problems through testing and prototyping.

I had been wanting to trial using a design sprint for a while but hadn’t had the opportunity. Alex, the product designer of my team, was moving on to a new role and had only 2 weeks left in the company. With moving priorities and deadlines it was my perfect opportunity to put the case forward to utilise Alex’s last 2 weeks and try a design sprint. We were hoping that using a design sprint would allow us to create a fast and effective solution for our customers’ renewal journey within our new platform. In this blog post I will share some key lessons from the process and the steps we followed, which will hopefully be useful if you are planning on doing a design sprint yourself.

Get buy-in

One thing we wanted to make sure we had from the beginning was buy-in from our leaders and key stakeholders. To make sure it was understood that the design sprint would be our priority for the week. We wanted to ensure that we weren’t dragged into other meetings and have to face lots of context switching. Being able to block out the calendar gave us that freedom to have complete focus on the problem we were trying to solve, which made a massive difference.

Prepare beforehand

Although technically the design sprint is to be run over 5 days, Alex and I had sync ups on Thursday and Friday prior to kicking off the week. This was useful to ensure we could hit the ground running on Monday morning. We lined up what users we would speak to, set up the Miro board we would be using for the week, created the calendar invites etc so not the high impact tasks that were needed for the design sprint but the admin that needed to be done to set us up in the right way. We also set up the agenda and ground rules for the following week upfront.

Service mapping

At OVO, we are big advocates of service mapping and service blueprints. If you and your product team haven’t tried this out I would highly recommend it. It allows you to have a holistic view of the problem you are trying to solve with a focus on the customer’s experience. It facilitates conversations and workshops that help cross-functional teams work together to find the solution. To find out more about service design check out this awesome blog post by Rita Cervetto Haro. We mapped out the current customer renewal journey in our legacy platform and worked through which aspects of the journey had the potential for improvements or removed completely, similar to applying the theory of constraints to a system. This also helped us identify if we were to change a part of the process, what potential knock on impacts this may have on another part of the process and system.

A well established team

Alex and I that led the design sprint had been working closely together for nearly 2 year so had a strong working relationship. This helped the process a lot as we felt comfortable to be open with opinions and challenge each other. Facilitating a design sprint with a newly formed team may be too intense early on where an understanding of different working styles has not been established. We also recruited other parts of the team to help with the process, a second designer, technical business analysts and tech leads. Making the design sprint a team sport helped us stay on track for a solution that was right for our users but also technically feasible.

It’s tiring!

We found running a design sprint rewarding, getting to the heart of our users’ problems. It gave us an opportunity to carve out focus time and be able to be in ‘flow’. As well as the ability to strengthen our working relationships through working together so intensely. However, we did find the process very tiring compared to a normal work week. I think it would work better in person with different types of formats, for example going for a walk to talk through the potential solution. If you are doing a design sprint remotely I would recommend ensuring there are enough breaks scheduled in the day and time boxing when a section of the design sprint should finish.

Here is an example of how we set up our design sprint on Miro that you can use as a basis for you and your team. Have any other tips on running a design sprint? I would love to hear them!