Design Sprint Workshop

About

During the pandemic, I read up on using design sprints to empower teams to make better decisions. I learned about becoming a workshop facilitator from YouTube channel A&J Smart then sought out the source material; 'The design sprint' written by Jake Knapp.

After reading up on the design sprint process, I requested and obtained permission from my manager to run internal test workshops as a facilitator. These went well, however, I felt that we needed a real challenge to get true 'buy-in' from the team. Shortly after this, a project requirement was presented where I felt that the Design Sprint would work effectively and after a pitch to the Design Manager, Product Owner and Product Director, I was given the resources to design and run a fully-fledged design sprint as the facilitator.

The Challenge

Ensuring customer focus: the clients required delivery within a tight timeframe, which meant that the team needed to undertake research and deliver in a compressed timescale. There were a lot of unknown factors and assumptions to resolve. Therefore, being able to interact effectively with the customer to efficiently steer the process, was of paramount importance.

There were two key objectives in this project:

• Increase engagement in the 'check-ins' area
• Improve the way two or more individuals, usually employee and manager, could converse in regular/scheduled feedback & performance meet-ups

Preparation

Two weeks prior to the design sprint, I planned for the team to firstly try and read the sprint book and watch the videos from the AJ&Smart channel. This was to make sure we were all on the same page and had accurate expectations for the 5 days we'd be running through the sprint.

I then liaised with the Product Owner to get as many of our customers into a 1-2-1 interview with them in order to collect and collate a mass of insights. Due to COVID precautions we felt it best to do this over many days and purely online.

Once this was done I made sure to collect the previous efforts on this subject area, inform secondary stakeholders that their time would be needed and planned into our schedule a time to speak to them.

Once this was done I made sure to arrange to have a workspace for 5 days which we could lock ourselves into and unleash out creativity!

Monday: Understand

"Monday is a series of structured conversations to build a foundation—and a focus—for the sprint week. The structure allows the team to 'boot up' as much information as quickly as possible, while preventing the usual meandering conversations."
— Jake Knapp

I kept a diary of each day, these notes were then shared with the others in my team including upper management, Product Owners and the engineering teams.

Monday was a really busy day which absolutely flew by. We felt really stretched and tired at the end of it but in a good way - we were challenged and stretched mentally to ask questions which would help us get to the root of our research problem & were rewarded with multiple perspectives and view-points to enhance our understanding of our work.

Challenges:

• Keeping to time (Get a timer...)
• Equipment - what do we use/when - paper or post-its, putting up on the wall or on the whiteboard

Highlights:

• Presenting back customer research and insights
• Stakeholder engagement and buy-in
• Feeling like we have a very strong understanding of the research

Tuesday: Sketch

Day 2 is all about using the new level of understanding gained on Monday to generate goals, define the problem statement and set out a clear scope of what we want to achieve in the latter half of the week.

The day was arguably more tiring than Monday but we achieved a lot! By the end of the day, the team was now fully aligned on the problem statement and goals which enabled us to create plentiful sketches for ways to tackle the performance management area.

The ideas are secret for now, they will be shared amongst the team and voted on tomorrow!

Challenges:

• Going from open questions and abstract to a focused problem statement was not straightforward! After weeks of asking open questions and not imposing bias from existing product features, it was challenging to create a specific problem to solve with in the week. This was partly because the product has so many connections to other areas or user experiences - not all projects are as clear cut as the ideal sprint topic in the book!
• Sticky notes falling down!

Highlights:

• Crazy 8's - forced us to join up the dots & was a bit… crazy!
• Note taking, collating the ideas & creating rough visuals
• Problem statement - challenging but important

Wednesday: Decide

Now it was time to take all the demonstrations and sketches from Tuesday so the team could consider the ideas posted (somewhat) anonymously in sticky note clouds. We conducted the 'art museum' where we made notes and decided which ideas we liked ahead of voting. Voting was used to identify the top ideas and then I rapidly went through describing the journey of each of the sketches (without help), after this each of the owners of the sketches went into more detail on the idea. Once this was done we started linking the best bits together of each idea into a coherent whole journey.

Next we clarified our storyboard and made sure we were all aligned on what the solution would look like by agreeing the user journey(s).

Challenges:

• Narrowing down which ideas would be taken forward
• Having the confidence to keep moving forward
• Time
• Communication & clarity of vision between the group

Highlights:

• We no have an outline concept
• Shared understanding achieved
• Healthy, high quality debate - we all want to get it right!
• Sense of accomplishment

Thursday: Prototype

Day four was all about refining our storyboard into a prototype. We spent the day modelling in Figma, working collaboratively to establish the main concepts, journeys and features we wanted to capture. Figma was a great was to create the prototype as we could all be involved and could quickly amend, refine or re-direct the prototype together in real time. (I'm not on the Figma payroll, honest!)

When we agreed the prototype was ready, we crafted a script and ran through each journey to make sure we were all happy with the results, and were ready to present to the customer on Friday.

Challenges:

• Time management
• Making sure we had all the screens available and linked together to ensure our vision was brought to life in the right way
• Trying not to think about Friday - (big reveal day!)

Highlights:

• Being able to pivot as a group when changes were needed
• Working together seamlessly to produce an exciting concept and being on the same page
• Seeing our vision slowly come to life throughout the day
• Team all aligned now and this made it easy to communicate the vision and what we wanted to see to the engineering team
• Seeing how the design sprint process could support our ability to produce high quality designs

Friday: Test

The final day of the design sprint was all about demonstrating the prototype for feedback from internal stakeholders and customers to obtain their immediate reactions and insights. The customers contributed to the research phase before the sprint, so it was really rewarding for both the customers and the team to have everyone back together to explore the prototype.

The customer said that our solution had solved their current issues. One even said they could 'happily use this now'.

As a team we found this instant feedback which enabled rapid reactions, invaluable. The design sprint process ensured that our solution met the maximum number of requirements possible.

Challenges:

• Calendars! Not all the customers we had interviewed could be available on the day which extended our sprint a little into the next week so that we could take their perspectives on board

Highlights:

• Customer smiles!
• Spending time with the customers and observing their experience of the prototype
• Hearing real-time and unfiltered feedback on the concept
• Focusing and refining a few points and improved understanding of their ways of working
• Hearing how much everyone loved what we came up with!
• Seeing how many of the customer challenges we had managed to resolve
• Finishing the week on a high as a team

Project Reflection

Reflecting on this project, I really felt like what was achieved in such a small amount of time compared to our standard process was outstanding. We all learnt an incredible amount and utilised our experience and individual skillset to arrive at a superior solution to anything we had done prior. The amount of time saved in in this project ultimately means money and resources saved, and this is something I feel speaks for itself as a viable process.

It wasn't all sunshine however, a few challenges along the way were getting stakeholders together in a sensible timeframe which did stretch out the 5 day sprint and we had to move some of the exercises into the next day early on.

Looking back at this project I think I'd improve this by ensuring we had the time resource available to have developers and more stakeholders (no more than 7 however!). This would ensure that we are having higher level technical discussions and gaining the buy in from the development teams earlier on.