Reach out for a complimentary 30 min virtual work coaching session. In this exercise, take about 20 minutes for participants to meet in pairs and introduce themselves to each other and answer the question: “What big challenge do you bring to this gathering? Review the votes, see what idea has the most votes, and have a conversation around the pros and cons of the 1–3 “winners.”. Give everyone in the group 3–5 (or more!) The big idea with the Design Sprint is to build and test a prototype in just five days.You'll take a small team, clear the schedule for a week, and rapidly progress from problem to tested solution using a proven step-by-step checklist. The benefit of this exercise is that it gives everyone an equal vote or voice in decision making. The Personas. Sprint facilitator is a hard job. Get to know the "what, what, when, where, and why" of running this five-day process. Once you have a set of big ideas, you can vote as a group about what is most important to focus on. Note and Vote is another method that comes out of the Design Sprint. In the end, you have a heat map of the ideas that the group gravitates toward. ). Those are questions that are important but not critical. Another advice to better facilitate is find a partner: to bounce off ideas, help facilitate and bridge the gap of knowledge. The Design Sprint is a staple structure in the world of facilitation for solving big challenges. I put this one here only because other Sprint-related articles don’t stress it enough. It’s super-simple but effective. Create a name or theme for each group of ideas. Why? So here are 5 tips I learned from a Sprint facilitators perspective to help you run a successful Design Sprint. Unit V: Design Sprint Exercise. A weekly, ad-free newsletter that helps designers stay in the know, be productive, and think more critically about their work. Once you have your top-level journey moments or touchpoints, use your personas (see above) to go step-by-step and capture what your user is feeling, thinking, and doing at every phase. Google Ventures also has a Design Sprint site and a Sprint kit with all sorts of resources and materials. Creating personas is an effective way to focus on your user and ensure that you are designing for their top needs. Use one of these methods to kick off your next meeting. After you have a big and vague problem that your team decided to run a Sprint on, the next step is further defining the problem so that it’s concrete and manageable. On average, you create one to three personas for your project so that you can focus on different needs and inspire divergent ways of looking at a problem. Someone in the organization probably already done some research or had some ideas. You always learn something from user research, so you should always, always include research in your Sprint process. The goal of a Design Sprint is not to end up with a perfect solution after just one week, but to get feedback on one or two possible solutions. or it’s just a project that needs a small workshop or a longer whiteboarding session on. Overshoot Day: The Sprint. Not always as fun or straightforward. One of the best ways to give people hands-on experience with design thinking methods is through small exercises. Enrich your internal innovation capabilities in the only in-house, end-to-end design sprint training program on the planet. It means making design and business decisions from the perspective of the end-user or customer and truly understanding and anticipating their needs. So don’t focus too much on building exactly what you come up with in the Sprint, the result of a successful Design Sprint is better understanding of the problem, better alignment within the team and feedback on potential solutions you can further research and design on. There are tons of resources on Design Sprints: The Sprint book by Jake Knapp explains in details what a Design Sprint is and why it is awesome. For example, if your problem is “How to build a better newsletter for existing customers to increase brand loyalty”, you probably don’t need a Design Sprint since you already know the solution of better brand loyalty is a better newsletter. Here are some tips to bring in the fun: Have fun and hope these tips help you with you next Design Sprint! We are experts in virtual facilitation and can help you design and facilitate your virtual meeting, workshop, or summit. These can be added to meetings you already have on the calendar, or bundle a few together to create a design thinking workshop and tackle a problem you’ve been wrestling with. Start by identifying all of the moments that a user goes through from start to finish when interacting with your particular product, service, or experience. The current virtual Design Sprint system doesn’t model the real world, and it’s a problem for…. What is a Design Sprint? Quiz Personas. Organize a fun event. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings. It’s not only who participants in the Sprint that matters, but also who to inform before the Sprint, and who to involve after the Sprint. You need to think ways to innovate. At your next meeting, don’t dive right into logistics or action items. This might lead you to think of an expereince where Uber riders can order pizza and a car at the same time. Just create a project and follow the normal product design process. Run through the SCAMPER list and ask yourself questions based on the letters.