I've run my first design sprint and it's been awesome: this is what I learned

An incredibly powerful tool for product design

You are at the very beginning of a new project. You feel the incredibly fast pace of change of the market. You feel overwhelmed by the quantity of variables you need to handle. You have no idea if the project will be a huge success or a complete failure. You are trying to answer a precise need, and you have to figure out what's the best way to do it.

You are in the sweet spot for running your first design sprint.

The Design Sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. This technique has been developed by Google Ventures.

These are the process steps:

Understand, Monday

- Define a long term goal

- Talk with the experts

- Define a target for the sprint Define, Tuesday

- Sketch solutions on paper Diverge, Wednesday

- Make difficult decisions

- Define a storyboard to test your hypothesis Prototype, Thursday

- Build an high-fidelity mockup Validate, Friday

- Test with real users

- Debrief

Are five days enough? Yes. If the long term goal and the target are clear you will get meaningful results from the sprint.

Why the Sprint?

Launching a new product is hard. The biggest risk is building something that your users won't use or something that they won't understand. The Sprint is a tool that empowers you to test your assumptions in five days, instead of months.

The typical path for launching a product is:

Idea Build Launch Learn

The Sprint cuts the path from the idea to the last point: learn. It jumpstarts your project with feedback from the users on the actual product instead of personal assumptions.

That information would cost you months of design and development, and it could arrive just too late.

Why building and launching if you can skip it and get the information?

I know. Just five days? I know, it sounds over-optimistic. I thought the same until I ran my first one.

Some context and my first experience

Let me introduce myself: I'm the co-founder of Belka, a product design and development company. We design and build digital products for companies and startups.

I had the opportunity to run my first sprint with Carlo Gavazzi Controls, a company that builds Power Consumption Meters. They launch several products every year, with different targets, features and specifications.

We have been working with them for a long time before the design sprint, but despite that, designing their products has always been our biggest design challenge, because of their complexity.

I collected all the information I learned regarding the sprint in this post.