Validate ideas in five days

Design Sprint is a process in which you “solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days” as Jake Knap, the creator of the process states.

A raw idea of how the design sprint workshop should look like and its benefits appeared around 2009. At that time, a Gmail engineer named Peter Balsiger came up with the concept of automatically organizing the email inbox. Jake Knap together with another Google Engineer, Annie Chen, tested the viability of the idea in a one-month process including prototyping and testing with clients. A few months later, he took part in a similar process for what we know today as Hangouts or Google Meet. The ideation method seemed to work.

During these processes, he identified some key elements needed to test fast the viability of an idea: the process needs to be time-boxed (the less time people have to think about stuff, the faster the important ideas seem to pop up), and some people with key expertise need to participate in it.

What we know today as a five days workshop, got better defined while being part of Google Ventures, a venture capital firm created by Google to invest in promising startups. Here, Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, together with other startup experts, started to run design sprints with different startups to experiment and perfect the process. You can find out more about the process in the Sprint book.

The purpose of the design sprint is to prototype and test new ideas with your future clients in just five days to see if it’s worth investing more money in them. It’s a smarter way to invest your time and money instead of developing an MVP (minimum viable product) before you know if anyone would pay for it.

Young startups are usually on a tight budget and have only one chance to test the market and see if they’re on the right track. Basically, as a startup founder, a design sprint offers you a way to minimize the uncertainty of failing by testing your idea with real users.

Design Sprint is a process for answering key questions about the viability of an idea. It is recommended that the workshop takes place on five consecutive days, and key experts take part in it. You start by identifying the problem you want to solve, then you sketch some solutions, build a prototype and test it with potential clients.

The goal of a Design Sprint workshop is to prototype, test, and measure the outcomes quickly by validating your concept with potential clients, reducing unnecessary risks, avoiding the development of nonessential features, and maximizing your ROI (return on investment). The prototype resulting from the Design Sprint is a great tool to raise the investment needed for the next growth phase, the MVP (minimum viable product).

You can run a design sprint regardless of the size of the company or the industry. If you have a problem in your business that you want to improve or a startup idea that you want to test, you should run a design sprint.

The design sprint process works for startups, small businesses, medium-sized companies, and even corporations. It is an adaptable process that is based on creativity and problem-solving. The design sprint workshop is used by a lot of companies in the world where innovation is a core value.

The design sprint brings many benefits to the business, and the value of it is most of the time obvious, from team alignment to new ways of tackling problems, better solutions, customer-centricity. The key benefit though is the amount of money you save by testing your product before investing thousands of dollars in software development. A design sprint brings value in time, cost savings, customer satisfaction, market-fit, and an increase in revenue.

The Design Sprint has at the core design thinking principles, which are based on innovation. And we all know that validated innovation brings ROI. The design sprint is a valuable process because it brings together key stakeholders and facilitates their alignment towards future business goals. It is efficient because everyone works with full engines to solve crucial business problems while putting the customer first.

A remote design sprint is a five-day process for prototyping and testing ideas, facilitated remotely. Here, at Digitalya, we facilitate both on-site and remote design sprint workshops, and we can guarantee that both have successful outcomes. The process of building a realistic prototype and testing it with users can be done fully remote or part of it remote and part of it on site. What is important is to set the stage, prepare the right tools, and have the team fully on board for creating great results.

You can find more details about how to run a remote design sprint in this remote design sprint guide by Jackie Colburn, Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky.

The outcome of a design sprint is a clickable prototype that was tested with potential clients during interviews. It is a process that helps you set the stage for the next phase, which is the MVP development. Each sprint day has a specific outcome, from identifying the problem to sketching out ideas, building the prototype, talking to clients. During the sprint week, the UX design specialist has an important role, together with the experts from your team.

Depending on the size of the product, the outcomes from the design sprint can differ. For example, if there is a small product or just a feature from a product, the outcome can be a clickable prototype plus some sprint stories. For products that are more complex, it might require running sprints more than once for prototyping and testing ideas. Even though the sprint methodology consists of five working days, you can run them multiple times for different ideas. The outcomes from a series of sprints are detailed wireframes, and different user flows. With consecutive sprints, you can explore a complex product from different angles.

You can outsource or run a design sprint by yourself. You can find all the steps in the Sprint book. Though before starting to run it we recommend attending a design sprint training, a design sprint masterclass, and some design thinking workshops to make sure you fully understand the process. There are many innovation workshops out there, and you need to understand the process 100% in order to get the best out of it. Hop on the design thinking train and enjoy the ride.

It depends on which stage you are in. The design sprint process comes in handy at different stages in a product’s lifecycle, like:

• When you start the project
• When you want to build a new feature
• When you want to do a system rebuilt

Before running a design sprint, think about what is your long-term goal, and identify the stage in which you are with your product. These kinds of innovation workshops can answer critical business questions in just five days. Running user tests will bring you more close to what your users think about your product while working together with your team during a sprint week will create alignment.

Since John Zeratsky and Jake Knapp invented the process at Google Ventures, many companies have adopted it, from early age startups to well-known businesses. Among them, we can mention Dropbox, Medium, Uber, Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb.

After the five-day process in which you answered the sprint questions by building a realistic prototype and conducting user tests, you can say that you have validated your idea. Now you are sure that there will be demand for your product. The next step after the design sprint it’s rising investment and developing the MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

The MVP it’s the first usable version of your product – v1. It is targeted at early consumers, and it should contain a minimum set of features. By developing a minimum viable product, you can attract early users in order to learn more about your target audience and what kind of features they need in your application.

We hope that this article about the design sprint workshop answered your questions and prepared you to be part of one. Validating ideas in just five days, it’s bliss.