Design Sprints
An idea is only as good as its execution
Our goal is not just to build “a” product, but to build the “right” product; one which meets real people’s real needs in a meaningful way. Design sprints bring your ideas to life in days, validating their business viability and answering critical product questions before anything is built – essentially reducing risk, and saving you time and money. You can’t get to your destination without a map, right?
Meet the makers
Design sprints originate from Google Ventures’ efforts to optimise productivity and have since become an industry standard. And for good reason. Design sprints use a strict process for rapidly brainstorming, designing, prototyping, and testing the viability of any idea, product, or feature. This incredibly effective and structured process brings clients, product owners, developers and designers together to share a single vision and create a testable prototype.
Discovery and design informs everything we do. To create a great product, we first have to understand how users think and interact with the problem we’re trying to solve. We borrow and incorporate the concepts from Lean (quantitative) and Design (qualitative) thinking into our design sprints, facilitating risk reduction and meeting the needs of the user.
How we do it
Design sprints typically last five days, but this isn’t set in stone. It all depends on what problem we’re helping you solve. We invite all the stakeholders into one room – limited to 7 people, you know what they say about too many cooks – and then begin the process of developing and validating your idea. Product Design Sprints are led by an experienced facilitator (usually one of our Design Leads) and also typically involve a developer and Product Owner on our side, as well as those stakeholders we mentioned.
A design sprint has five phases to guarantee understanding, collaboration and results.
Phase 1: Understanding
This is the time to share your skills. This first kick-off phase is all about sharing knowledge and developing a common understanding of the problem, the business and the customer. Whether it’s about gaining insights from industry experts or identifying potential technical limitations from developers, we need to know where the biggest risks are so that we can make plans to reduce them.
Phase 2: Diverge
In the second phase, market differentiation is everything. We send our team off to start developing their ideas independently, undergoing rapid creative exercises which question functionality and problems, and innovate solutions.
Phase 3: Converge
This is where we show our cards. The third phase sees everyone sharing their ideas for review. We analyse the possibilities and select the most feasible options to begin creating a prototype storyboard.
Phase 4: Prototype
In case you weren’t having fun yet, things are starting to get exciting! In this phase, we build an interactive prototype, designed for testing so that we can determine specific unknowns and assumptions.
Phase 5
Test time. For the final phase, we test the prototype to determine if the product is viable.
Getting real = getting results
You’ve probably noticed that we use the phrase “problem-solving” aplenty on this page. We believe at the heart of a great product is a real problem that your target market is experiencing. It’s our job to plug into their thinking; that’s why it’s so important that everyone around the table is objective and candid during the five phases of product design. Stick to the process, stick out the process and stick up those awards when you’ve built a product that your customers love to love.
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