I pre-ordered the book, got it, read it cover to cover non stop, and I thought I was ready. I couldn’t have been more wrong 🤣
Running Design Sprints have been the most fun days for me at Belong. Here are the top 3 things I learnt from my experience.
1. Start small
The book talks about a 5 day Design Sprint and if you are doing it for the first time, it might not occur to you that you need not do a full fledged 5 day Design Sprint. The first hurdle you’ll face is in trying to convince people to do the Design Sprint. Just say the following out aloud and see how it sounds.
“I’ve never done this before and I have no idea how it’s gonna turn out but I believe this is the best use of your time. Let’s spend 5 days doing a Design Sprint. I’ve been told it’s good.”
It’s hard to sound convincing when you yourself are not convinced. Starting small worked for me.
I started by convincing 3 members of my team to spend 3 hrs per day for 3 days. I’d to adapt the format. I realized that I needed the practice.
2. Make sure it’s the right problem for a Design Sprint
There are enough great contents out on the internet which covers this in much more detail. We never got ourselves in a situation where we were not sure if we should do a Design Sprint or not. We asked a simple question.
Is it worth the time of 5 to 6 people for 5 days?
The answer has been pretty straightforward in all the cases I’ve personally faced. In some cases we decided to do 3 day sprints.
3. You don’t have to call it a Design Sprint
I realized that I do a lot of mini Design Sprints. We rarely do a 5 day Design Sprint. I frequently found myself using the first few steps of Design Sprint very frequently to approach any problem and get to a point where I can make mocks on some promising directions. While I don’t complete it like an actual Design Sprint by testing the mocks on carefully selected users, I use the mocks for internal validation and other basic validation/reactions/comments from some real users. This might sound like blasphemy to hardcore Design-Sprinters but considering all other realities like always-impending-deadlines, never-free-team-mates, five-other-things-to-do, this adaptation of the Design Sprint has done more good than bad.
