What are Design Sprints used for?
George Barnes
Content Marketing Manager
Published:
You’ve probably heard of Design Sprints by now. They’re quickly becoming an integral part of the innovation process used by successful businesses across the world. In fact, in our article about our approach to innovation, we talked about how we follow a very similar process when strategising and planning together as a team.
But, you might be wondering: how can a Design Sprint help me and my business? You may think you’re too small, or that you don’t do the kind of work that would require a Design Sprint. However, we’ve found that Design Sprints are useful in a huge number of situations and almost always offer benefits, no matter what your business does.
So, in this blog we’ll take a look at some of the reasons that our clients have come to us for Design Sprints, giving you an idea of just how versatile this service is.
Before we begin though, let’s do a quick recap of what Design Sprints are, for those who may not know already. (If you’re already familiar with Design Sprints, feel free to skip this next section.)
What is a Design Sprint?
A Design Sprint is a structured process for solving problems, exploring ideas, building a prototype and testing it with real users in a short period of time.
The Design Sprint methodology was developed by Jake Knapp at Google Ventures (now GV) and was designed to help teams answer important product and business questions without committing to a lengthy development cycle first.
The traditional process takes place over five days and brings together a small, cross-functional team with the knowledge and authority needed to understand the problem and make decisions.
What are the phases of a Design Sprint?
While the format can be adapted depending on the challenge, the traditional Design Sprint follows five phases:
Understand and map – Define the problem, understand the users and agree what the team needs to achieve.
Sketch – Explore potential solutions and different ways of approaching the problem.
Decide – Review the ideas and choose which solution or hypothesis to test.
Prototype – Create a realistic version of the proposed solution without investing in full product development.
Test – Put the prototype in front of real users to gather feedback and identify what works, what doesn't and what needs to change.
The aim isn't to produce a finished product in five days. It's to learn quickly. By the end of the Sprint, the team should have evidence that helps them decide whether to develop the idea further, change direction or stop before investing more time and money.
Now that you have an idea of what a Design Sprint is, let’s look into the different situations you might encounter where they could help you.
When might I need a Design Sprint?
When you need to test a new process
Let’s say you’ve got an idea for a new business process. You think it might make you more efficient and save your team a lot of time — but you’re not 100% sure. In this example, you could use a 5-day Design Sprint to really test out that idea with a focused team that represents the people who will be involved in the final process. After just 5 days you can have the process thought out, put together (in a presentation for example) and tested with users.
When you need to validate an idea before investing
Reducing risk is one of the key benefits of a Design Sprint. If you’re embarking on the development of a new product and it requires a large investment, then a Design Sprint can help to de-risk the project. By applying design thinking principles, you can quickly build a prototype of your product and test it with users. In one or two sprints you can make sure that any potential failings with the product are highlighted, as well as any UX issues. You can even repeat the sprint process throughout development to test any hypotheses that crop up during the process.
When you need to make progress quickly
Got a project that needed to be finished yesterday? We’ve all been there! When you need to accelerate a project, it’s easy to let speed be the enemy of quality. With a Design Sprint however, you can get critical thinking baked in at the start of the project, quickly allowing you to progress to the next stage more quickly and confidently.
When you need to cut through to the heart of a complex problem
One of the underrated outcomes of a Design Sprint is simplification. When you’re trying to solve a complex problem for your workplace — whether it’s operational, research or production based — the design thinking approach of a Design Sprint can help you quickly get to the heart of your challenge, and devise a usable solution, all in a short space of time.
When you understand the problem but not the solution
Formulating solutions to your business challenges isn’t easy — and sometimes pinpointing your challenges isn’t easy either! You can use Design Sprints to help clarify both your most important challenges and the solutions to those challenges. By getting critical team members together you can use a Design Sprint to look holistically at your business and identify sticking points, and which challenges would give you the highest impact, with the lowest effort to solve. Then in another 5-day sprint, you can create a prototype of an ideal solution!
When is a Design Sprint not the right approach?
Design Sprints can be useful for reducing uncertainty, but not every challenge needs one.
If the problem is already well understood, the solution has been validated and the team simply needs to implement it, running a Design Sprint may add an unnecessary step to the development process.
They're also less effective when the right people can't participate. A Sprint relies on bringing together people with different perspectives, from designers and developers to subject matter experts, stakeholders or a product manager. Crucially, someone needs the authority to make decisions and keep the process moving.
A Design Sprint is most valuable when there is something meaningful to learn: whether an idea solves the right problem, whether users understand a proposed experience or which direction a product should take.
If there isn't an important assumption or question to test, another approach may be more appropriate.
What do you get from a Design Sprint?
Running a Design Sprint should produce more than a collection of ideas or a workshop full of sticky notes. The aim is to leave with something tangible that helps the team make a better decision about what happens next.
Depending on the challenge, the outputs might include:
A clearer definition of the problem and the users affected by it
Alignment around the most important challenge to solve
A range of potential solutions explored by the team
A realistic prototype of the chosen direction
Feedback from real or representative users
Evidence that helps validate or challenge key assumptions
Clearer priorities and next steps for product development
This can be particularly valuable at the beginning of a development cycle. Instead of moving directly from an idea into months of design and engineering, teams can test the riskiest assumptions first.
The outcome isn't always confirmation that an idea should be built. Discovering that users don't understand or value a proposed solution is still useful evidence, particularly if you learn it after a few days rather than several months into development.
Need to validate an idea before you build?
Design Sprints are one way to reduce uncertainty before committing significant time and budget to development. By bringing the right people together, exploring potential solutions and testing ideas with users, you can make better-informed decisions about what to build next.
At New Icon, we help organisations turn complex ideas into testable concepts and prototypes, giving teams the evidence they need to move forward with confidence.
George Barnes
Content Marketing Manager
