How to successfully adapt the Design Sprint workshop to your needs — 3 hours in our case
November and December passed in the good old spirit of wrapping things up for the passing year and planning activities for the upcoming one. On couple of occasions while trying to define the “next steps” for our pulse.eco initiative, we weren’t fully aware of what we wanted to focus on and where to go next. And with that, it seemed like a perfect opportunity for a Design Sprint workshop! With the team having limited capacity but high enthusiasm, we said okay let’s try to get together, in well, what we all could spare, that turned out to be 3 full hours on Friday afternoon!
Still, we couldn’t manage to get together all in the same room, so we decided to use Miro and do something like a semi-remote Design Sprint workshop.
Design Sprint by the book
The Design Sprint as a Design thinking method of defining and validating design solutions by including multidimensional teams, follows a structure of activities that last for 5 days:
Pre-workshop and workshop phase
First things first, looking at the workshop structure it was pretty clear that we needed to get rid of some of the activities, the ones that seemed most logical were the “Thursday” and “Friday”, or the Prototyping and Testing phases. Eventually, those activities really could be done separately so we wanted to use the time together on refining the problem and get creative with exploring possible sketch solutions.
We were quite aware that we didn’t want to explore so much the subject as we wanted to narrow down the scope and therefore decided to have a predefined Sprint Goal, Sprint Questions and a Map. For that purpose, we had the decider called upon in this pre-workshop phase. And defining them in that setting took around 1 hour. Later I would understand what we did turned out to be a technique called “Problem framing”. In our case it was not only beneficial to define them upfront but also necessary given the time constraints. Once we defined them, participants were informed about it prior to the workshop so they could have some time to think about the problem we would be solving and validating.
Next thing, we needed to shrink all 3 days activities into 3 hours!
From 5 days by the book, to 3 hours in practice
We had 3 hours, including one 15min break, so we started by roughly giving Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday activities 1 hours slot each.
Our agenda in the end looked like this:
Monday in 1 hour — Define (Expert interview + HMW + Target)
We started with the predefined SG, SQ and map and jumped directly to the experts interview and HMW notes. What we did mostly in this phase was confirming that this was the most important problem we wanted to focus on from the aspect of the sprint questions, then redefined a bit the map and circled out the most important Sprint Question we wanted to focus on.
Tuesday in 1 hour — Sketch (Inspire, Crazy 8s, Sketching)
Here we said, okay inspiration is important but it is really something each person could do on their own, so we removed the Lighting demos as such and called the first part of the sketching phase Inspire, where each person would spend 10 minutes max to inspire themselves of possible competitor ideas and products they admire in general. Crazy 8s we did as a warm-up for the sketching part that was around 30 minutes — which proved to be more than enough time.
Wednesday in 1 hour — Decide (Art museum + Straw poll, Supervote, Storyboard)
In the decide phase we ditched the heat map and went straight to the facilitator explaining the sketches (3' per sketch) while participants are already considering where would they like to put their votes on.
After the Supervote, we started with the storyboard. It turned out 30' for a storyboard was too little, but we roughly created the board with the most crucial steps of the story.
What we learned
- Each Design thinking method is adaptable to your needs.
- 3 hours Design Sprint is only possible if your problem scope is narrow compared to an unclear goal with many unknown variables.
- 3 hours Design Sprint is possible with removing Prototyping and Testing phases (in our case) and seriously reducing and removing parts of the other activities from Define, Sketch and Decide phases.
- Having a decider and dedicated team, with such a short Sprint is crucial in order to move forward with each of the activities.
- Speed is the ultimate benefit of these kind of workshops, no matter how fast you Sprint.
Thanks for reading and happy Sprinting!
