Design Sprints
Accelerate from problem to prototype in 10 days.
Rocket fuel for product teams
The Design Sprint is a process originally developed by a team at Google Ventures that adapts some of the best bits from design thinking, agile product development and user experience design. Now used by many of the world’s most innovative companies, Design Sprints can help you to create alignment across your product team, accelerate decision making and reduce risk in strategic projects.
The objective of a Sprint is to validate your concept within a dramatically reduced timeframe by building a prototype and testing it on potential customers and bringing clarity to your roadmap before you commit development resources.
Align your team around your product vision
Make concrete plans informed by user insights
Get unstuck and build momentum
Mitigate risk and build the right thing
Create buy-in with stakeholders or investors
Build a roadmap to scale your product
Brain fog to blue ocean in ten days
Originally designed as an immersive process over five intensive days, we’ve found that to be a stretch for product owners, preferring a ten day span to set up, run the sprint and willow time to recruit and test with users before co-designing a roadmap that incorporates recommendations, priorities and insights drawn directly from the process.
So how does it work?
We’ve delivered countless Design Sprints and we’ve seen evidence of this slightly longer format benefitting clients, especially during the early stages of a new project or during the early phase of a new collaboration.
A typical Design Sprint is fast-paced, deeply collaborative, sometimes scrappy but always enlightening. Expect big breakthroughs, blinding clarity and the confidence your team needs to create a next generation product.
Understand
The goal of this stage is to create shared knowledge across all participants. We invite experts from across the business or sector to articulate the problem space from a business, user, competitor and technology perspective. We add insights from the product team with desk research findings to round out a comprehensive picture of the problem.
Define
In the next stage, we’ll devote some time to evaluating the knowledge we’ve amassed in the first stage. We do this by defining a problem statement, context for the sprint and desired outcomes. This stage concludes with the selection of a specific focus area for the sprint as well as articulating goals, success metrics and signals.
Sketch
In stage three, we’ll generate and share a broad range of ideas, looking for inspiration from solutions in adjacent spaces. Each sprint participant will individually generate ideas for consideration. From here, we’ll work together to narrow the ideas to a set of well-articulated sketches of a potential solution.
Decide
In this stage, we’ll align on the direction or concept to be prototyped. Each participant will share their solution sketch and—as a team—we’ll establish consensus on a single idea through a decision-making framework. The agreed direction sets the focus for the remainder of the design sprint.
Prototype
In the Design Sprint, the term prototype is used more broadly than in traditional product development. We’ll create a facade of the solution sketch – just real enough to generate an enthusiastic response from potential users. This means mapping out the exact flow for the experience but only building the steps we want to test.
Validate
Finally, we’ll get our concept in front of users. We’ll simulate an in-depth design research study, gather feedback from users who interact with the prototype, and carry out stakeholder and technical feasibility reviews. By the end, we’ll have validated our concept, or invalidated our assumption but understand clearly what and where we need to improve. Either way, we’ll have taken a giant step forward.
Find a Sprint That Fits You
We offer a range of sprints specifically tailored to your needs and aims. Some of our most popular sprints are listed below, but whoever you are, we can design a sprint that works for you.
Digital health design sprint
For innovators working in public health or digital health entrepreneurs. Codesign an optimal healthcare solution and test it with patients in two weeks.
New product design sprint
For early stage startups or product teams at the beginning of your journey. Build a prototype in two weeks and get on the right track.
Public service design sprint
For public service leads and innovators in government. Create a future service blueprint that’s designed with and for the citizens who’ll use it.
Why Choose Design Sprints?
Design sprints give you the competitive advantage of moving forward more quickly and with more clarity, by building a realistic prototype without the need for complex code. This allows us to dramatically reduce a process that typically requires high risk and many months, into just ten days.
Together, we’ll uncover the crucial questions that can pave the way to realising inspiring ideas. Our extended design sprint ensures that we can address core challenges and align your vision with practical actionable steps. With the Design Sprint, we’ll help you build the right thing and save you time, money and frustration.
Other Services
Digital Transformation
The future belongs to organisations who anticipate and shape what happens next.
UX Design
Award-winning, usable and accessible user interfaces that support successful end-to-end user experience.
User Research
User research is central to all of our work because it provides a deep understanding of peoples' needs, preferences, and behaviours.