How to Run a Successful Design Sprint

You and your employees are a gold mine of ideas, strategies, and projects just waiting to be tapped into. But how can you tap into all of these ideas without wasting resources? This is where design sprints come in. They allow your team to bypass the complex, resource-draining stages of development and jump between ideation and testing.

What Is a Design Sprint?

Design sprints are a 5-day process for testing ideas and solving problems. It combines the benefits of group work, like various levels of expertise and opinions, with individual work, like detailing solutions to a problem. It helps teams understand if an idea is actually good and useful without wasting precious time, money, and effort. The best part is that even if an idea turns out to be bad, you can learn and birth a new idea from it in just a few days.

Uses and Methodologies of Design Sprints

Originally developed for startups, design sprints are a method to start a project based on a simple concept quickly. They seek to answer questions quickly. You can probably see why this is useful for startups, as time is not always on their side. This starting procedure can be equated to research, asking a hypothesis, and quickly finding support for it. If you’re in the middle of a project, these sprints can be used to expand on the existing project. It can be used to discover a better way of implementing updates. For established projects, design sprints can be used to discover useful features or components of that project. Because the project is already live and running, you can’t put it through a full development process again just to see the usefulness of a new feature. Hence, design sprints.

5 Tips for Running a Successful Design Sprint

Running a successful sprint can be organized into 5 separate ways:

1. Understand – go through user insights and background data, reviewing and understanding as completely as possible.
2. Diverge – brainstorm solutions and concepts as farfetched or tame as you wish.
3. Converge – take the ideas you brainstormed and rank them, choosing only the top one to continue in the process.
4. Prototype – create a concept, a mockup, an early-stage usable model of that idea.
5. Test – test the model and collect data on it.

Using these five tips or methods to conduct your design sprints allow you to stay organized and focused. While many great or unique ideas are brought to the table, it’s important to focus on just one—the winning one—to continue on in the process. Otherwise, the entire concept of the the sprint is defeated.

Summary

Design sprints streamline your research and development stage with rapid conceptualizing and test. It helps you jump from idea forming to testing and back again without wasting time and resources. They can be used at any stage of project development as long as the focus remains clear.