Looking for innovation in your company? Run a Design Sprint

A road map on why and how to start

Using the Design Thinking principles and mindset – curiosity, empathy, human centered, bias towards action, show don´t tell, immersion, radical collaboration, ideation, prototyping and testing – and leveraging the creation of a cross functional environment, Design Sprint is emerging as new way for accelerated innovation, where speed and innovation go hand in hand.

Agile? Lean Startup? Design Thinking? Design Sprint?

There is a "terminology jungle" and fatigue out there with lots of competing frameworks and processes that mainly cause fatigue and confusion in the C-suite. Top management do not care about the how (if the company uses agile, or design thinking or lean startup), but they care about outcomes and bottom line results.

Design Sprints are the quickest way to validate NEW & BIG problems AND solutions while reducing risks, because many of the business and organisational distractions are eliminated: lack of focus, lack of time, endless discussions, lack of commitment, lack of experimentation, lack of direction, lack of user feedback, misalignment ...

Agile focuses on quickly building a product and iterating from there. The old "you build, they come" paradigm.

The Lean Startup process validates many more aspects of a product, including product/market fit, MVP and of course aspects related to technically building the solution . The not so old "you build, you let them know, they come" paradigm.

Design Thinking is a mindset for approaching business and organisational challenges from a human-centered point of view, that focuses on defining the problem space and finding user-centered solutions.

When you want to find innovative solutions to unique and complex problems, both Agile, Lean and Design Thinking methods have the potential to lead to wasted development time and resources.

Design sprints is a quick and simple way to get Design Thinking going from mindset to behaviour, and start building a culture for human-centered, iterative and fast innovation. The new "you let them know, they come, you build" paradigm.

In a Design Sprint a cross-functional team prototypes, tests and validates ideas with real users before they are built or launched. The team learns first-hand from user-testing feedback and then iterate in a weeks time: no wasted time nor resources, only learning.

Design Sprint is a “greatest hits” of business strategy, innovation, behavior science, design thinking, and more, packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use.

Design Sprints give teams a shortcut to learning without building and launching. You can fast-forward into the future to see your finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitments.

The Design Sprint is definitely not only a wise booster for innovation and can bring a tremendous value to the company, but a viral way to infuse and create a bottom-up sustainable and scalable culture of innovation in organisations.

Next time you’re looking to innovate a product, process or feature, see if a Design Sprint can help you launch a more effective product or process faster.

Good sprinting and godspeed!!

Have you tried already a Design Sprint? How did it go?

Wonder how and where to start implementing Design Sprints in your company? What is stopping you?