“... I promise you that at least half of the ideas on your roadmap are not going to deliver what you hope... The really good teams assume that at least three quarters of the ideas won’t perform like they hope.”
You want to work on the most important things first, but it’s incredibly difficult to accurately predict how much a product will cost to build and how much money it will make. Especially at the quarter planning stage. It can be even harder to know why some projects fail to deliver on their original goals.
While many teams have adopted some type of Agile process, products still take a long time to make it to market and into the hands of your customers. Teams do their best to work fast but still spend months on an MVP, placing all the risk at the end — meaning you won’t know if it will sell until you’ve spent a lot of time and money on the project.
Add to this the endless meetings, long back and forth decision making between teams and departments, and last minute changes. Even ideas with potential take several iterations before they get to the point where they deliver real business value.
We use proven techniques from business strategy, design thinking, agile and lean startup to help teams get aligned on solutions that work for the customer and the business. We'll help you tackle Value, Feasibility, and Business Risks up front, and save months of time and money by knowing you are solving the right problems.
With a Design Sprint you’ll get tangible results on the value of your ideas so you can work on what really matters. Within a few days you’ll get evidence of the potential value of your product and the clarity needed to more accurately estimate cost and time of your work.
Know within days if you are going the right direction. You’ll reduce risk by getting market signals on what you should pursue or not, helping decrease the time to market for your best ideas.
Align your teams to remove wasted time and effort. You’ll work together in a focused, iterative process that will get you farther and increase the quality of your solutions – meaning quicker time to money.
How can Design Sprints help your business reach its goals? Schedule a Free 30 Minute Call to discuss how we can help you with your current challenges.
Get in touchThe Design Sprint is a four-day step by step process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. Developed by Jake Knapp at Google and Google Ventures, it’s a “Greatest Hits” of business strategy, innovation, Design Thinking, and Agile – packed into a proven process that any team can use.
"Design Sprints offer a transformative formula for testing ideas that work whether you’re at a startup or a large organization. Within five days, you’ll move from idea to prototype to decision, saving you and your team countless hours and countless dollars."
— Eric Ries, author of Lean Startup
We’ve updated and improved how we run the sprint process based on our experience of what works best for teams. We run a 4 Day Design Sprint that helps you quickly move from idea to results with your existing team. Here’s how the week will look for you:
Before the Design Sprint we work with you to understand current problems, identify the most important challenge, assemble the right team for your sprint, and identify experts and background information to bring into day 1.
On Monday we work together to define the challenges and scope of the week, understand goals, and generate tons of potential solutions.
On Tuesday we'll get aligned and decide on the right solutions to prototype and test. We'll create a storyboard that details our selected solution and defines what we will prototype.
Wednesday is all about building a high-fidelity prototype and preparing to test with users. Our team can help build this for you though we recommend collaborating with your design team for the best long term results.
The final day of the sprint we test the prototype with real users to find out what works. We use the outcomes and insights of these tests to create clear next steps for your team.
After the Design Sprint we'll create a report that includes what we've learned during the week, recaps of each day, a high-fidelity tested prototype, and recommendations for next steps for what to do after the sprint so your team can keep up the momentum
The goal for the week is to help you discover the best path forward by understanding, prototyping, and testing your idea. A successful sprint will give you a clear outcome on next steps for your product. Here are common outcomes:
You’ve gotten clear feedback that the project is worth investing in. Keep going! You may need a some adjustment on how to get there, but you're on the right track.
You’ve got clear feedback recommending you stop working on this and move on to the next most important idea. This still saves you from months of time and money building things that no one wants.
You find out there are still some big knowledge gaps and you need to do more research. Much better to know early on than farther along in the project causing your team to have to start over.
How can a Design Sprint help your business reach its goals? Schedule a Free 30 Minute Call to discuss how we can help you with your current challenges.
Get in touch