The Key Tips You Need to Go from Months of Prototyping to a Single Week

A design sprint is a way to compress the time it takes to design, prototype, and test new ideas from months to a single week. Done properly, a design sprint gives organizations the ability to bypass the lengthy and expensive build and launch stages and gain customer feedback on a prototype before making any costly commitments. Here’s how to get the most out of a design sprint. Pick Your Team with Care The make up of your design sprint team will depend on the product or idea being developed, but as a general rule it’s best to build a multidisciplinary team rather than a team of people with similar skill sets. For example, a manufacturer may be tempted to fill the team with engineers. While they should certainly be in the mix, a better approach would be to have the engineer(s) joined by experts from design, marketing, sales, and other functions. A sprint team should have around seven people in total. Ensure that you include someone with deep business knowledge. This doesn’t mean a birds-eye view of enterprise-level goals and targets; it should be someone who really understands the crucial details of the business and can spot challenges and hurdles that the others may not see. Key tip: Hire a facilitator. There are countless design-sprint professionals with experience in every sector and industry. The added cost of hiring a facilitator will provide an ROI in terms of the efficiency, structure, and sprint process template they bring to the table. It can also help to have an outside voice in the team to help settle any time-consuming debates.