A Design Sprint is a step-by-step process that helps your team to solve a complex problem within just one week. Design Sprints are perfect when starting a new project of high risk, when there is a tight deadline or when a project is just plain stuck.
Assumptions are no longer good enough, you need to have a product that actually solves a problem. Design Sprints are the fastest way to validate your assumptions and see if your next project is actually worth building. Don't waste months of time. Invest one week.
Sprints are perfect for:
Together with a small team (7 persons max.) and an empty agenda for one week, we will focus on the step-by-step process from complex problem to validated solution.
The Design Sprint is a pressure cooker, it feels like a four-day hackathon. On day 1 we start mapping and sketching out the problem, and define the questions we want to answer during the week. Day 2 is decision day, and we focus on the best solutions to prototype. During day 3 we rapidly build the high-fidelity prototype, which we use to validate our assumptions on day 4.
The outcome of every Sprint is always a high-fidelity, clickable prototype, tested by real users (recorded on video) and clear steps on what to do next:
The Design Sprint method is described in the book Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days written by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky en Braden Kowitz. While working at Google Ventures they've helped startups like Slack, Savioke en Blue Bottle Coffee to become succesful by using this way of working.
Very confusing, but a Design Sprint is not the same as a Scrum Sprint and can't be used at the same time. It can be very well consecutively used though, starting with a Design Sprint.
Design Sprints are perfect for the (re)start of a project, because you will learn in only one week if your idea is worth building.
If your idea turns out to be effective, Scrum Sprints can help you to actually build the solution. In this case it is important to make a qualitative good version available as soon as possible. You will increase the risk when first trying to complete the whole project.
