Here at Rosberry we develop lifestyle mobile applications. We have been doing it for a long time and we do it well. But recently we received quite an nontrivial offer from one of our partners — to design urban environment decor for the city’s anniversary as Omsk, our home city, was going to celebrate its 303rd anniversary on August, 3. I guess our design guys will later come up with some interesting articles as to what we finally created and why this task was so interesting and important both for our design team and us as a company. Today I will tell you how we organized the whole process, what we managed, and what not.

So, we were given 2 weeks, 4 designers, the task “to deliver great design” and the 303rd anniversary of the city.

When the task was assigned I immediately came in on “design sprints” (this approach was developed by the UX teams from Google Ventures and Google [x], you can read more here), which I have long wanted to pilot test and implement to finally make it an integral part of our design processes. Alas, before that I didn’t have a good chance to do it as either the project was not that suitable or the team was too small.

A design sprint can be construed as a framework for the teams of any size meant to resolve and test different design-related tasks within 2 to 5 days.

This time we had a bunch of designers and a very ambitious task with a rock-solid deadline — the challenge that requires “fresh” solutions.

All our projects are usually implemented based on the SCRUM methodology, so there was no need for me to explain to the team what a sprint was. At the same time trying to introduce some new approach to organizing creative activities of our freedom-loving design guys was a kind of challenge for me personally as a Scrum Master.

Each sprint starts with one of the fundamental events — with the so called planning. And this sprint was no exception.

So, here is what we started with:

- Formulated the task.

- Set the time- and deadline.

- Built a team (released them all for a week from all other obligations within other projects).

- Booked the meeting rooms (though we have three they are always crammed full).

- Created a separate board in Jira.

- Provided for the office, boards, TV to display content, unlimited coffee and fresh cookies — these resources are always there in excess at Rosberry.

What was next? The time came to make the task more specific. During planning we made a list of media and carriers that had to be addressed, potential partners ready to use our final design as well as the target audience for whom we created it.

It is safe to say that our task met the criteria of a good task. It was:

Relevant. Aligned with with the goals of the team. Laconic. Inspiring. Focused on the target audience/target segment.

We decomposed the tasks, made them a part of the backlog, created the first sprint, START!

We can’t say that our further work was arranged in the exact same way as described in a well-known book: “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days”. The first two stages were actually completed the day before the sprint start as the guys went out to the city streets to take pictures of the facades of the buildings (potential advertising spaces), as well as to look for the city sights or places which could inspire and become the core of the design concept.

For stage 3 of the design thinking process (diverge stage) conditioned by the framework described above, we chose the following path: the design team takes the task, determines who is working on it in what direction and the next 45 minutes each of the sprinters immerses into the chosen domain as much as possible. After 45 minutes the time comes for blitz reports and the Decision making stage with regards to the intermediate results. 10 minutes for the review and heading adjustment, 5 minutes for a break and right after it the next 45-minute time-box .