Case study - a Design Sprint in Silicon Valley with the startup TeraWatt Infrastructure
Starring Camilo Ramirez, Head of Product of TeraWatt Infrastructure and Steph Cruchon, Facilitator Design Sprint Ltd
⚡️ Heads up, detailed case study! A look back at a Design Sprint in Silicon Valley with the startup Terawatt Infrastructure.
Terawatt Infrastructure is a company based in San Francisco that builds electric vehicle charging infrastructure for vehicle fleets. When we say “fleets,” think dozens of big 40-ton trucks rather than Nissan Micras (we’re in America, after all). Founded in 2021 by Neha Palmer (former Head of energy strategy at Google), Terawatt raised over a billion dollars in its Series A to develop its portfolio of high-speed charging centers.
The initial challenge: Going from Excel spreadsheets to a fully customer centric Dashboard in just 5 days
Terawatt, with its ambition to revolutionize the charging infrastructure for electric vehicle fleets, faced a significant challenge. How to design, validate, and launch a complex product in a highly technical and regulated field in just a few months? The challenge was not just to think about an isolated feature but an ecosystem: a suite of tools allowing the client to track and manage charging sessions for entire fleets of electric vehicles (EVs).
The answer was found in adopting a Design Sprint, facilitated by Steph Cruchon from Design Sprint Ltd, to accelerate innovation while navigating the sector’s strict requirements.
It’s generally VERY difficult to share such detailed case studies on Design Sprints for recent projects, as everything is often protected by NDAs. The projects we work on are always highly strategic.
(In some companies, the design sprint is used as a “secret weapon” for innovation; it makes sense that we can’t show everything 🤫)
This time it’s different because the team was lightning-fast in execution. This allows us to show you such a case study without risk, just a few months after the initial sprint. (You’ll see we still had to blur some stuff!)
In this rare video, Steph Cruchon, the facilitator, meets up with Camilo Ramirez, the Head of Product at Terawatt (and former Uber), to dive deep into this design sprint. You’ll see this isn’t just a typical feedback session because Camilo didn’t come empty-handed; he presents us with the operational MVP (Minimum Viable Product) created by his team following the sprint!
You’ll see the journey taken: strategic alignment during the sprint, prototype construction, user testing results, leading to the first functional version of the product launched just 3 months later!
The Design Sprint Process
The Design Sprint was conducted 100% online. Steph, based in Switzerland, started his days at 6:30 PM, and the team, spread across multiple time zones in the USA. The challenge was to assemble a “dream team” of 7-8 people for the entirety of the sprint. Challenge completed with flying colors by Danielle (Decider) and Camilo (Head of Product and sprint organizer).
Discovery and Ideation
The first days of the sprint were dedicated to a deep understanding of the challenge posed to Terawatt. The team examined the end-users’ needs, market trends, and technological constraints. Some technical elements or data already existed but were either in databases or in dynamic Excel files.
The design sprint process MAP > SKETCH > DECIDE of the first three days gave birth to several concepts, suggesting innovative ways to develop the charging monitoring infrastructure. This stage was crucial for aligning the team on a common vision and identifying key hypotheses to test.
On day 3 at noon, the winning concept was identified.
Prototyping
The culmination of the process was the creation of a functional prototype. This phase transformed abstract ideas into a tangible model that the team could test with real users. The prototype, designed to be intuitive and suited to the specific needs of electric vehicle fleets.
A critical element for the success of this sprint was that the entire team got involved and brought their expertise, enabling our team (Design Sprint Ltd) to create the high-fidelity prototype presented to testers.
Testing and validation
The last days of the sprint were dedicated to user testing. This was a unique opportunity to gather direct feedback from potential users of the charging system. The insights obtained at this stage were invaluable for refining the product, correcting flaws, and confirming initial hypotheses.
End of Sprint.
From concept to reality
In just three months, the team managed to go from an idea to a functional MVP, ready to be deployed. This success highlights the power of the Design Sprint as an innovation tool, enabling rapid iteration, concrete user testing, and accelerated market entry.
Key Success Factors
The Crucial Role of External Facilitation
The involvement of Steph from Design Sprint Ltd as an external facilitator played a decisive role in the project’s success. His ability to guide the team through the process, encourage collaboration, and keep the focus on objectives optimized time and resources while avoiding common pitfalls in product development projects. Being external helped bring the team to success, impartially ensuring the process was followed.
Engaging the Tech Team from the Start
Another key element was involving the team’s full-stack developer (frontend + backend) throughout the sprint. From the week following the design sprint, he was able to start the actual construction of the solution, beginning with the project parts that had been validated.
The ROI of a design sprint
The journey of Terawatt is one more example of the transformative impact the Design Sprint can have on the rapid development of products (digital or services).
By enabling the team to focus intensely on the problem to solve, validate ideas with real users, and iterate quickly towards a viable product, the Design Sprint has proven its value as a “secret weapon” for innovation.
As Terawatt continues to leverage the results of this sprint to improve and expand its electric vehicle charging infrastructure, we hope this case study serves as an inspiring model for other companies seeking to accelerate their own innovation.
The speed of execution, team engagement, and openness to learning and adaptation are keys to turning complex challenges into successful innovation opportunities.
One last important thing: the MVP product isn’t perfect, and that’s precisely what makes it so good. Because it was released on time and without spending a tremendous amount of ressources.
Thanks to the design sprint, the team was able to align on priorities and execute pragmatically, getting the product into the hands of its customers, which would have taken years otherwise.
As soon as customers start to own it, everything becomes easier since they will suggest their needs. Thanks to the design sprint, we can say the hardest part has been done.
What is the Business value of Design Sprints?
A conversation with Paul van der Linden, business consultant and Design Sprint Fellow
Why is the design sprint a new way of creating business value for organizations?
Hey everyone, this is Steph. Today I wanted to experiment with a new format. For these videos, the idea is to deep dive in a very specific aspects of the design sprint. So it’s not going to be a one hour video with a crazy case study, but it’s going to be more like, you know, small chitchat with some friends, and and guests to talk about a specific topic.
And today, I have the pleasure to welcome with me, Mr. Paul Van der Linden. Paul, this is great seeing you. So today, we wanted to talk together about why the design sprint makes sense in business. You have a crazy business consulting background. And yeah, now we have you have chosen the design sprint as one of your methodology of choice.
So maybe before we start, can I just ask you to introduce yourself?
About Paul van der Linden
Sure, I can do that in very, very short time, basically, in innovation and digital innovation and marketing, or the 2025 years, worked for companies, like Procter and Gamble really transitioned from TV print into the digital area of internet and internet marketing or social networks. And then, of course, we saw that speed is key in this whole process of delighting your customer. And basically, we went through also a whole transition in methodologies in order to be as efficient as possible. And then when Design Sprint came knocking on the door, like five years ago, we adapted that quite quite fast. Of course not fully… But nowadays, I would say, this is one of the the most important tool or methodology within my toolset.
How would you like if you need to, to explain what to design sprints to someone who is really into business right now? Like, what is the business value of design sprint?
What is the business value of design sprint
Okay, I would say there is. A lot of companies, they see that there are some some issues or there are some new ways or ideas, to get new products out to improve their services to get more direct information back from from consumers. But they still think, in a traditional way.
Now with the design sprint, what we see is that you bring your top people of your company together in a very, very focused session of maximum one week, where you really go into this, this, this, this this problem statement, and all really think about solutions that you prototype and test. And that’s, I think, is one of the key elements, you have the right people in the organization, seeing directly the feedback from the end user consumer, to what you want to do. And that saves months and then sometimes even longer, have discussions.
And yes, things have been so important. Because sometimes, you know, when some some clients are coming in the they are a bit confused. They’re like, Yeah, but what’s the difference with a hackathon, for example? And there’s a giant difference. It’s just the number of people who participate. And hackathon you can have 50 or hundreds of people who participate. The design sprint, as you said, it’s a very focused team. It’s the right persons for the project. So I like to compare it you know, like, the hackathon is like the bazooka, you have hundreds of people and you try to get any results in slack short, in a lot of people and the design sprint is longer. It’s five days, but it’s the right persons.
Maybe to add to that, because I agree with you on but in the hackathon, let’s say from five, six years ago, it was all the nerds, coder, yeah, that’s we’re sitting eating pizzas, and I’m over exaggerating, of course … And then we’re showing their skills of how good they could create a technical solution. And that was fine. But all the elements that for business are important. Were not in scope. So it was technically maybe working fine. But is it also working in other countries? Does it have the right support from the internal organization, customer services, everything that goes in is more more or less not taken in consideration and with a design sprint, you are in principle, not having any coders you have a graphical designer that that creates a product type. But on the rest you have, maybe you’re a product owner, you have the head of marketing, you have the head of customer services, all people that have that really have the knowledge and of the organization and for whom you are doing this, this this exact work. Something that’s super important is like, a hackathon, for example, is like, it’s more like, Kinda for the marketing of the company it’s like, okay, let’s innovate and you make it very visible that you innovate the problem doing that, especially if you welcome some people from outside of your organization, you can’t really share with them something very secret, you can’t show numbers, you can’t show data, you can’t show something, you can’t even really show your real problems.
During the design sprint you have a very specific team, it’s seven, eight people really well chosen, it could be totally secret. And then, you know, you can really show them everything because you can trust them. And that’s really the difference between innovation theater, or showing that you innovate, versus innovating for real, because then you are able to actually achieve something if you have the right problems and the right data. Am I right? I think I think so. Although you can have a sort of business hackathon within the boundaries of the company, which I believe it could be extremely successful as well. Yeah. But it has it serves completely another purpose.
Great. The another question that I get a lot from the business people is how does this connect with Agile, you know, like, sometimes people talk about the SAFe framework and all of these agile at scale. What’s your perspective on that?
What’s your perspective on Agile at scale?
Okay, for me agile is, is extremely good if you start your development, because you are not like in the in, in the past, basically have everything defined, then you go into a dark room for for six months, and then something comes out. So the Agile methodology for me that that’s super clear, but the start of the Agile development cycle is still where to start.
So we have a problem, we maybe do some design thinking, we have to talk to a lot of stakeholders in the organization and maybe outside of the organization. And that process also takes extremely long, if you at the start of your agile development cycle. Start with a design sprint, you actually after five days of running this design sprint, you have a working tested prototype with already feedback from your consumers. So your your start is extremely good. You basically have everything that you need. And in within the next couple of months, you can really make that a product that you already with tested data could expand more to get more detailed information show for me. In principle, every agile development process should start with a design sprint to do to get you really running start.
Yeah, yeah, that’s right. And one thing really is like in Agile dev is that whole idea that you need to accept to start with something that’s not perfect. You need to start somewhere with you know, a good base a prototype and then you will iterate you will refine that prototype exit. So it’s a great way you know, even with teams, one that’s familiar with agile who don’t exactly know how to design the product, it’s a great Crash Course right? You get the right people in the room for five days. They see day one they have just big problems and lots of questions, Day 4 they have a prototype, Day 5 they test that prototype with stakeholders or clients and they learn a lot because they fill in that scorecard and that’s the really the three the beginning of Agile so you can start reading what works or you can start refining or rethinking what didn’t work.
My last question for you Paul about this is like how would you convince some very important stakeholders or maybe a C-level people or VP of sales to participate in this design sprint?
Well, I would say first of all, Google: “design sprint” and really look at for example, how companies that are disruptive companies that really changing their the way that their business models, how they are acting and you will see that many of them are using design sprints to kickstart new development. It is not strange at all this digital savvy companies are using design sprints, but also traditional ones as as Lego and I know this is maybe the too much used example. But if we take the British Museum, that’s using design sprints to really see how they can renovate and optimize their consumer experience in the coming years, that for me, that is that is really showing there is really a truth in this methodology. And it’s already there for five years. And what you see with a lot of methodologies that is coming and going. And there’s an extra version.
Yes, design sprint has also some flavors, but the base of design sprints, is there. And it’s growing. And it’s there to say, in my opinion, yeah, I totally agree. I think it’s a it’s just like scaling now in the companies like, the most of the big organizations have been through the process of like, trying to design sprint and be one or two design sprints. And now they really start to scale it across the company, which is very interesting.
And it’s not only you know, like, cool startups from from the west coast of the US, really some very, some very traditional companies that operates worldwide. So that’s very interesting. And we have a lot of case studies of Europe and Switzerland. So yeah, that’s, that’s also at least the way I convince the big stakeholders is telling them, okay, look what we did with these companies. And also and that’s an advice for anyone who is watching this video and thinks “How can I convince my boss to run a design sprint?”, show some examples, with some important executives being part of the design sprint, because we document the process, these these photos of these videos are available online, and you can show Okay, you can show other companies running design sprints, and that’s a seller. Yeah, absolutely.
Thank you so much Paul for for your time. This is great. Cheers!
More about Paul:
Case study: Yuh App, How the swiss neobank has been created during a design sprint
At the end of 2019 we ran two design sprints with Swissquote bank that resulted in the new Swiss neobank Yuh App. A radical and innovative concept that makes trading accessible to millenials and people wanting to start in finance.Let's look back at the origins of the App with Jose Rosa, Head of Product of #yuhapp
A look back at the Design Sprint used to imagine Yuh App, the new swiss neobank, with Jose Rosa Head of Product
Steph Cruchon: Hi everyone, this is Steph from Design Sprint LTD. Welcome to another Design Sprint Chapters Meetup. Today, I have the pleasure of having with us Mr. Jose Rosa, who is the new head of product at Yuh Bank.
Jose Rosa: Hi everyone!
Steph Cruchon: Extremely happy to have you here today to talk about the project, so how do you say You or Yuh?
Jose Rosa: Yuh.
Steph Cruchon: Really, really, really happy to have you. We worked together almost a year and a half ago, two years ago on a first design sprint that finally gave birth to the product you announced a few days ago, which is called Yuh App, that I have here in my hands. And here is the idea, it is to redo with you the genesis of this project and we are very happy to welcome you with us. José, you told me that Yuh App will be officially announced on June 1st?
Jose Rosa: Yes, exactly. The official announcement in La Presse, the unveiling was already two weeks ago. This is its second week, but the big announcement campaign to the general public will be on June 1st. And we are very excited and very happy to see it.
Who are you Jose Rosa?
Steph Cruchon: It’s the end of May so we’re just before the big product announcement. Super, super happy to have you. Maybe before we start José, could I ask you to introduce yourself in a few words so we can know more about you?
Jose Rosa: Okay, in a few words? Well, I’m coming. In terms of background, I’m more of a communication designer. It started like that, and then I evolved quite a bit in terms of agencies. Afterwards, I worked in-house in different places. More in the luxury sector at Audemars Piguet and finally at Swissquote and now at Yuh App. It’s a bit of a strong background that has touched on a lot of things, especially in terms of design, I’ve been included in a lot of marketing projects and that was pretty cool. You kind of saw all the spectrums of that process. I wasn’t just as a designer, in a corner, in a silo.
Steph Cruchon: Actually, what needs to be explained before you became the new head of product at Yuh App, so you were Art director at Swissquote and Yuh App was launched. It’s a partnership between the Swiss bank Swissquote, based in Switzerland, and PostFinance, also based in Switzerland.
Jose Rosa: Exactly. So, really, at Swissquote, it was the brand creation part. Everything that was linked to the brand, to the brand’s box. That was very important. So we were linked to the Web part and we had a lot of interaction with the product design team itself, to make sure that when we talked about design, that everyone had the same understanding. So I was really in the visual part, but with a lot of involvement in the product part.
Steph Cruchon: Did you know, when we launched this design sprint , you were an important person in the sprint because you were a little bit in the center of this team that was going to work on the project. But did you think you were going to be the head of product of a new bank? Finally, the new bank, if you saw the importance of the thing at the time we did it or not really?
Jose Rosa: I don’t think so because we weren’t looking that far ahead. We just wanted to find a product that was cool for people who were just starting out in finance. And I knew that this idea was great and that we wanted to do it and find that little bit extra in finance. But I had no idea that it would turn out like this. But I’m very happy.
Steph Cruchon: That’s right, yeah, it’s a great adventure. And then maybe, if you can just move over a little bit so you can see the Yuh logo. You’re in the new offices of Yuh, right?
Jose Rosa: Very fresh. We’re just setting up a little bit. We’ll have a small team to get started. But with a lot of support from Swissquote. And then also from the agencies that collaborate with us. These are the premises that are there, so they are fresh, with the DNA of the brand. But that’s how it is.
Steph Cruchon: That’s great. Well, there you go. Maybe to start, the idea is to go over the genesis of this project with you. I think that people who watch us, that’s always what they like, to discover, in fact, how we went from a first design sprint to a product that is launched on the market and that will have, I think, a lot of impact in the case of Yuh. How did you start this project?
The first design sprint with Swissquote bank
Jose Rosa: This question, there is always a need, at some point, for a business to evolve and challenge the market a little. Swissquote has always been like that. Swissquote has always tried to challenge the market, the conventions, already with Crypto, it was the first bank to launch this and Swissquote did not want to stop there. So for me, in this project, Jan de Schepper, our chief sales marketing officer, had this idea of challenging the whole market by saying: But what can we do? It’s clear that there are a lot of new banks coming in, but they don’t have the security that we can offer our customers. We are in crisis. They come to play a little in our field, these neo-banks wanted to become banks. That’s why they’re getting involved with banking licenses. They want to become banks because it gives them a certain credibility and security. Jan did a huge benchmarking. He looked at the market. He said to himself, why don’t we do that? Why can’t we challenge the market? He came to see me. He said I have some ideas. Do you think we could do something? I said, “Look, you look at this and send me all your ideas. So he sent that but it was so huge for my stuff that there was a first start of information and everything from a first architecture, maybe in my head, but then we needed help to put the right people together in a room. And that’s where Design Sprint Ltd, you came in with all the knowledge and all that part there, the moderation, the motivation with the high five.
Steph Cruchon: Now, because of the Covid, the high five is dead. We’ll look at some pictures of that sprint afterwards. I think it’s cool that we’re getting through. On my side, to make a little bit of history again, we’re contacted, I don’t remember, was it October? I think 2019 like that to work on a project related to savings, to Swissquote. How can you make people pass the investment when it’s really savers’ profiles? Then we started working on it and then maybe if you’re OK, I can show some screens of a prototype that we had created at the time as part of a design sprint .I think you should see these screens and what was interesting is that we said to ourselves, when we did this very first design sprint t, that we were going to design something really extremely simple, much younger, think a little bit more millennials, very far from the classic Swissquote interfaces, try to create a link with brands typically here, Starbucks where we had taken the Starbucks logo and things like that. And then the thought, moreover, was that it could be a launch pad, or at least a gateway for younger people to start investing. So we had these screens and so on. Then, at the end of each design sprint , we always do user testing. And here, I still remember when we did that… I still remember, so there was Marc Bürki, the CEO of Swissquote, who was in the room, watching the tests. And that was really cool to see him participate in that. He was watching the tests live. And then other people, of course, that’s important at Swissquote. I think Marc, I think Jan was there too. And then he was watching these interviews, in fact, we had done the interviews with some young Swissquote employees who were working internally. And they were there on some pretty basic concepts of finance or trading, they were lost on the terms, on the ways we had organized the thing when we thought it was super simple. I saw Marc, he was holding his head in his hands, he was like: “Wow, we have to make it much simpler and we really have to make our products and what we do much more affordable for younger people, for millenials. So, we’ve finished this sprint. It’s always a little bit of a weird feeling because at the same time, we’re learning so much. It’s great. There’s a lot of concepts that were really, I think, very interesting and had a lot of green. But at the same time, there are things that we learned, we were too complex, that it wasn’t going to be the gateway that we were hoping for at the end of this sprint. Then I go home. And I think that as soon as I got home, I received a second email: well, Steph, we want to do a second design sprint . This time it’s going to be a little bit different. We have a product idea in mind because we hadn’t talked about that. And then, it was really this second design sprint that we did for a project that was going to become Yuh afterwards.
The second Design Sprint which will lead to the creation of Yuh
So, if you want, maybe I’ll show some pictures of that sprint and we can do a little bit of the scrapbook together. I’ll just open it up. So, it’s really the pictures that come out of my album. There’s no selection. We all have some not-so-great faces, but that’s kind of the story I’m reading here. The famous high five we used to do back in the day that we’ll do again, but when the Covid is over. And then, what is important for people who know Swissquote bank, we see here some important faces of the bank. Here is Jan who is the head of marketing. We have in the foreground. So we’ll see them better afterwards. But the famous José, who is with us today and who was of course at the center of all this product and the sprint. And then here is Paolo Buzzi and Marc Bürki who are respectively CEO and CTO of the Swissquote bank and who participated in the sprint. This is really something that is important to understand: when you do a design sprint, if you want to get the best and most potential out of it, it’s extremely important to have the right people and to have important people at the hierarchical levels who will participate in these efforts and who will also give impact to what you do. Well, it’s not just that we spend a week, but that we really solve real problems together.
The role of leadership (CEO, CTO)
Jose Rosa: So it’s clear in there, it’s exactly that. It’s that these people and these important people in the company, they were there to give the impetus and their vision in the end, you can’t translate, do a design sprint just to do it. There is still a certain vision of something that will become a product, as if they had had this idea of product and in the end, the importance of Marc and Paolo, Paolo was there, really, in the sprint at the end before we close, for the ideation part and after, but it was very important that he could vote, that he could give his green light to this great idea that we took back then the project to transform it.
Steph Cruchon: Absolutely, absolutely. It’s very clear, you can see right away in the dynamics, you make teams when you lead sprints, if there are supports, CEOs for example, who are there, it will change the importance of the sprint a little bit. And then also, I think something super important to understand at Swissquote. But it’s ultimately Marc and Paolo, it’s at the core. They’re like makers, they’re people who got to where they are now because they got their hands dirty, because they were engineers who created a website where they put stock prices. And all that eventually became a bank. But these are people who, at the base, like to make products, which is very important to understand. You find profiles like that, it’s Elon Musk or people like that, who are basically people who like to manufacture, who like to make. And then? Well, the thing explodes. They become more important, but I think it’s fundamental to understand and it was a big part of the success of Sprint, that these people wanted to be there and participate, not just to be in their role as decision-makers, delegates, etc.
Jose Rosa: You’re totally right. Because even today, they’re still in the action and they’re not behind anything and they’re very involved. And since we launched the product, for example, Mark came to me: Ah there’s a problem there, it’s someone who told me something. And that, you know, they’re really in love with the product, they take a lot of care, they come to us and again the custom Marker part, that comes from them as well. They have this whole network of people who want to use their products and so they have a vested interest in being there, validating the ideas and giving more impetus and even more vision for the future. And that’s really nice to have people involved like that.
The sprint Team
Maybe if I go down a little bit in this album, what’s interesting in the design sprint too, is that we’re going to give importance to everybody. So everyone will be able to express themselves, give their vision. And then maybe, I’m looking for a picture where we see a little bit of everyone, tell us a little bit about who is in the room here, in this famous sprint.
Jose Rosa: So, in this famous format, you have Paolo sitting in the yellow couch, you have Mark talking, Julien, he’s a business analyst project manager. Céline is our director who is in charge of all the project management. Marlèna, our product designer who is sitting there, you who is there at the back, observing and the director of development Alexandro with long hair. And then Nicolas, our person who is responsible for the mobile team and me in the foreground. And this is really the moment when they were throwing out ideas and we had just done an analysis of the market as it was. Julien, he had done a presentation, I remember well a little bit so that we knew where the people were, how do I put it? Not the people, but our competitors. At a certain point, he had Cedric, who was very important for the back office part as well. Fabio Project Manager and Yann, so he’s the crypto expert. So he was the one who was there to push the game. He’s still there because he really believes in it. He’s a good expert in the subject.
Steph Cruchon: I remember that he was super precise on the Lightning Demo keywords part to bring out a lot of crypto products that existed and especially, how to get inspired by the good things, because there are very good and very bad in this industry. So, to tell us what would be reassuring. And so, yes, it’s very, very interesting.
Jose Rosa: That’s Jan.
Steph Cruchon: With my photos, there are no filters. You really see everything absolutely raw. And then there is José, the boss.
Jose Rosa: You see, I presented the 5 apps and how they inspired social change. In the end, the idea was to say how these apps, all the apps that are there in terms of behavior, because that was what was interesting, not to make a financial product but a product that changes behavior. Because in the main idea, how do you get people to go from saving to investing? In fact, you are trying to change a behavior, do we really want it? So it must be in a broader framework in your everyday behavior. And how you see finance.
The Sprint Challenge: millennials, a new target audience
Steph Cruchon : To understand the context, we’re talking to each other, it’s 2021, etc. When I was a kid, people used to tell me that you put money in a savings account and then your money will grow. And then you’re going to get rich from it. Then, because at the time, there were also interest rates. Now, as we speak, there are no longer any interest rates that are worthwhile, so if you want to hope, etc., you’d better be a little more dynamic. It’s better to be a little more dynamic in the way you save or invest. And it’s clear that there is a general movement towards neo-banks. But in fact, it’s complicated to find because you have to reassure. That’s what’s very, very important. You have to reassure. So yes, I think Swissquote had the advantage of being a Swiss bank. And then all that experience, of course. But you still have to create the right product behind it that will bring the right value, and not be just another revolute like, but bring something a little more differentiated, so it’s really hard to get in. I remember those days, day 1 where we managed to understand and we spent a lot of time exchanging on our personal perspectives. So there you have it, everyone expresses themselves, it’s really important.
Giving a role to developers and engineers during the design sprint
So we can see that there are also people from the technical field who will speak. Yann, the crypto expert, but also the experts, developers, engineers. And that’s super important. I see so many tech projects where engineers are never involved. They only come in at the end of the chain months later, when everything has been decided, they just come in to implement and that’s a huge mistake because these are often people who have an extremely good knowledge of what is possible or not in the market, of how to use the best APIs and the best ways to build. And that’s really a trick, it can really save months on the development of a product if you have engineers and developers who have participated in this, because right away, they’re going to avoid pitfalls and offer you a technology, because they’ve thought it all out in their heads from the start. How are you going to build that?
Jose Rosa: That’s right, Swissquote, we have that engineering strength. We have 300 and something, almost 400 engineers, so developers who know the products well, how the infrastructure is organized and they can tell you that, it may not be a good solution, but they are not the type of people who are going to say no, but who are going to direct you to what is the most efficient, the least efficient. Are you going to put videos in your app, is that enough? Are you going to use in a native app? It will respond well to behaviors. They will know exactly what to do to make your app perform well, last, and so on.
The war room, the importance of having a space for creativity
Steph Cruchon: A successful design sprint will also depend on the space. We do it a lot online because of Covid, we do design sprint online and it works pretty well. But in a more traditional configuration, we’ll come back to that, it’s that you need a creative space that is adapted to bring people and teams together. I think Swissquote made a good investment by saying: we’re going to have a space dedicated to creation. What’s the name again?
Jose Rosa: The design studio.
Steph Cruchon: Exactly. What’s cool for a designer is that you go in and you have the whiteboards like this. The whole wall, you can draw on the whole wall. I think it’s even magnetic. That’s great. It’s not just to look pretty or to decorate or to look innovative. It’s really useful to do this kind of workshop, to bring a lot of people together and it creates an energy, I think, in this place that is cool.
Day 1 - the experience map
There’s a really interesting part here, which is that we did an exercise called the note and map, everything that was the mapping. Then we asked people to describe their first experiences with neo-banking, which was typically a long time ago, and Tamara, who was quite important I found during this sprint because she really represented the persona of someone who was completely millennial, not very finance-oriented, but who had an interest in it anyway, who wanted to understand and who explained to us in her own words, her understanding of how it should work, according to her. And it was very rich, in fact. We also see Marlena, who is about the same generation. It’s very, very important when you’re doing a sprint, to integrate people close to the persona in the team or the right generation. Then, sometimes, I see workshops that are done with people, very high level decision makers, but who are all 50 years old. It’s complicated to design a product for people who are 22 years old.
Jose Rosa: Exactly, the target. If you don’t have the right people to help you understand the target, they will also say: Oh yes, that’s a very cool idea. But I’m not as excited about it. And then you have to ask yourself why they are less excited at this stage.
Day 2 - Lightning Demo, Crazy 8 and Solution Sketches
Steph Cruchon: we also did a big search during Sprint in the form of Lightning demos, existing products, existing features, things that we found interesting, so we captured them in that form. Now, it’s more like a board on a wall where we would stick the references, but it’s interesting. Now we’re getting into the hard part, which is that we had to imagine our concepts and then we see José, who starts this creative process. And here is maybe if you can comment on the famous crazy 8?
Jose Rosa: How long ago was Crazy 8?
Steph Cruchon: You have 8 minutes.
Jose Rosa: At this point, putting all these ideas in 8 minutes in the 8 screens, it’s quite difficult. But as there are many, many exchanges and we said to ourselves: can it really become something? There, I had already started to think about the idea of spending. How to put your money. Where to put it ? How can I put my money on the left and on the right, but it was very difficult. I think I didn’t even do the 8 screens…
Steph Cruchon: But at the same time, it’s funny because you’ve done 4 or 5 of them, but in the end, they end up in the app, those famous 3 tabs that are at the heart of Yuh App, that’s what’s cool.
Jose Rosa: Yeah, it’s cool, but it gives the right idea. At first it was Now, because it was now what are you doing with your money…in this financial behavior, we know we have to do certain things. The idea was do I really need to invest? Do I spend? What do I do and do I plan, do I save, so it was a bit broad. Fortunately we were able to understand the idea.
Steph Cruchon: Yeah, but actually, I think that’s really part of the heart of it. In the design sprint, we go fast, but it’s not to just go fast. It’s also a way to simplify things. If you have too much time, if you spend months on a project, you will tend to overcomplicate it, add, add things and in the end, you lose this simplicity and immediacy. I think that here, really, we feel it very, very strongly. You had 8 minutes to sketch something and in the end, we find this simplicity in this view that we have in Yuh App. If I show you down here, we really have these 3 tabs here and we find here in terms of sketching. So sometimes it’s very, very good to not overcomplicate it.
Day 3 - Deciding and aligning on the best concepts
So, once we have each imagined these solutions, we find ourselves in day 3 with all the solutions that are displayed on the wall that we see here. I try to find a picture that is not too bad. So, do you remember this part here? These flashy words and skits?
Jose Rosa: Yes, there were. There were some really good ideas that we wanted to do. But the main thing we wanted to find was this kind of killer feature, so everyone was trying to find the killer features, there were so many good ideas that in the end, we found ourselves with a panoply of ideas that we could perhaps use for the next step. It’s really a generator of ideas and good ideas, not just ideas but really good ideas because everybody was involved. They understood exactly what it was doing.
Steph Cruchon: Yes, that’s right, it’s not fair, putting ideas on a post-it note, it’s still pretty advanced stuff. At this point, we had two days to think about our concepts. I think what’s also important to understand is that we’re not going to consult each other when we create ideas. Each person in his own thing and there may be a little different vision, but in the end, it brings richness. There, we see the wall. Indeed, it’s all that. It’s ideas that can become features. And that’s what I think makes the quality of design sprint so great. It’s the quality of what can come out of these ideas. So here we see Paolo extremely convinced, he was enthusiastic. Now we come to the process. Finally, we discover everyone’s ideas, but then we vote. This is also quite important. And this is what you see here, with these green and red dots. And here, we see that we’re coming up with concepts that have been retained and validated.
The Storyboard, the foundations of the prototype
And so, this is what we prototyped afterwards. And then, the last photos were the Sprint of the workshop, and here we arrive at what I would call a little… Here, we are really in a war room. We were almost at NASA, explains José José what we see here.
Jose Rosa: So, in fact, that’s what you’re saying, it’s the war room? Why? Because we’ve already made the pitch. The concept had been validated, the main concepts. And now it was time to go into the details. So if you really want to do it the way you do it, we have to convince the person who is there on the technical side, to say: listen to this idea, it’s very good. So how are we going to do the part? I don’t know how to do it, but you help me and you have to explain it and the sketching part, how to make the first screens and then move on to the computer part. So we must not leave this room without it being clear that this is a feasible idea. Otherwise, we won’t be able to move forward at all.
Steph Cruchon: This is called the story board in a design sprint . It’s a complicated part in general to conduct. And then, there are a lot of people who are in decision-making positions, who are used to working in PowerPoint, putting bullet points, validating figures or things like that. But here, we are really in the concrete, in the hard. That is to say that we have to go from a vision to a tangible product, a product that will then be developed. It’s a very, very complicated part and here, I think that once again, we see that space helped us a lot because you can draw what you have in mind on a whiteboard. I remember there were profiles in the room that were much more critical, so we would draw something and then 2 seconds later they would take the rag and erase. Now you have to do it like that. That’s what’s great about it. It’s this really iterative work that goes very, very fast. Actually, at first, you’re there. You’re kind of lost. You can see the thing starting to take shape. We were three groups. You, I think on the home page. I was on another group, etc. Then since we were in the same space, we went to see what the other groups had. There was some crazy energy, really in that room. I really think that’s where the app was born and we started putting all the pieces together. And then, it’s great because you work with people who are product people or there we see Nicolas, he’s a developer. We all have a pretty good level of abstraction, even if it was drawn in three strokes of a pencil on a whiteboard. Since we’ve been together for several days, we know how it’s going to be done, etc. We can really talk about very precise things with very simple drawings. I really think that’s the power of the thing. By the way, we can say that José you literally finished on your knees.
Jose Rosa: It’s clear, we had to convince the two big guys, Jan and Fabio, who was the person who was really going to take care of the feasibility, the infrastructure part. I had to describe how you were going to do that. And there, I had to get down on my knees to explain the idea and make this pitch.
Steph Cruchon: This is a nice picture. You can really see the whole war room at the end of the Sprint with all the post-it notes, etc. And finally, the final result is in this, in these few screens that are very, very well thought out. And finally, the final result is in this, in these few screens that are very, very well thought out and frankly, when we came out of this, we already had a very, very good idea of what the product looked like.
Prototype and test on the target audience
So maybe I’ll close my slides and then José, if you’d like to explain the rest. How did you get back on track and how did it go these months after this first sprint? And above all, what led to the creation of Yuh App in the end? Because at the time, we didn’t have the name. We really worked on a product.
Jose Rosa: Exactly, the name came after the suite, it was after the design sprint , we would have another 5 days to put it into a prototype. So there, we worked hand in hand with Marina and Young, so the three of us were in a room. I was in charge of the branding part, the UI and the link between the idea I had and what she was developing because there were many things. First of all, they were great designers who were very quick to design. So we had to answer their questions and at the same time, be in the process of making the future of this product.
We built quickly, we were also validated the ideas with the users, we were in Zurich, for these key screens, we had a lot of feedback and as we went along, our main stakeholders, we gave them presentations. So, we said to ourselves that this investment part is going well or it was working, the overview part, what is complex? What is not complex? Is the general idea good? And when we finished this first prototype, when we went to Zurich, I think there were already 6 or 7 people, there were people who were asking themselves: Is this really true? Is it going to exist? So it was really cool.
The weeks following the design sprint
So we were like: “There’s already a good feeling, so we took that and we worked on the name. We worked together with Jan and there were a lot of discussions. Because what was Yuh App? It was really an app for the person. So, it’s for you. So you get to use it. There was this idea of Tone of Voice, which would be closer to the target. You can do it, you can use it, anyone can use it. And then we worked with two big agencies to see. We made a pitch because resources are finite in a company and we have lots of projects. There was not just this one, but we worked with a great agency called Nomenta to really help us take User Experience and UI to the next level. And so we developed the branding for that part. The logo came from me, the logo, the design of the card, the idea of handibooking, so it was really, really, really good. And then there was everyone who worked on L’infra. And that was an amazing job.
Scaling the project and the team, while keeping the energy
Steph Cruchon: That’s what’s crazy. Because when you start a project and then you’re in a design sprint , you start with a few people. It’s all very fragile. It’s your project, all it takes is one person saying a bad comment during the user test and then your project, you’re going to stop it or you’re going to rotate it, all that, it’s hyper fragile, and then when we hand over the project, it’s still a few smoldering embers, but afterwards, we had to blow on this fire and afterwards, it’s crazy the extent that it takes. Because how many of you worked on this project, on this product?
Jose Rosa: I think more than 100 people is 100 people.
Steph Cruchon: That’s what we really understand. Impact is what is decided in a room, etc. In the end, it’s developed by 100 people.
Jose Rosa: Yeah, you have to motivate people to give them a little bit of a vision of where they are at a certain point in the project and already, just the developers are saying, we’re going to make a great app that will probably grow. We’ve always been able to do that because we weren’t in the mode: We’re just going to do this. No, it was: we believe in this product and we think it’s good. It’s great, we were always excited and still today we’re super excited. So it got a lot of people excited and a lot of people also tired because it’s a project that pulled everyone and all the sources to get a specific release date and every time, we would add one thing or take one thing away. So, still to this day and I think people dream about Yuh at night. And it just started.
Steph Cruchon: That’s cool, that’s amazing. In fact, if you think about it, how did you manage this transition after the design sprint ? Did you have the path mapped out in your head? Did you know a little bit about the milestones and the timing, how it was going to happen? Or did you just let it happen? Did you just make sure that you went fast with the execution? How did you plan for that?
Jose Rosa: To be honest, we did it quickly, to get straight to the execution. We knew that we needed to find an agency to help us with the UI part and to support the team in terms of product design. So we got together to do this and we knew that the first big stone was what the UI would really look like. And that was three very intense days where I went to Bristol. I got up really early to go to Bristol and we had sessions… I don’t know if you can call it a maxi sprint but it was in three days every two hours we worked hard and presented and worked two hours and presented to get a really good pitch. And at the end of the first day, we had to reassure the stakeholders. So, Jan already, and then Paolo and pictures all the time Whatsapp really in, total flexibility, everything that came out, it was like that.
Steph Cruchon: Right. But I think to develop a product now, you have to be hyper fast, of course, but also hyper transparent about the whole process. Showing, showing, and showing things all the time, that’s also kind of the power of the design sprint, is that you get out of the thing. You already have mock-ups, prototypes to show. Because in fact, if you’re just reassuring people all the time that yes, it’s going somewhere. Yes, we’re making progress. Yes, the money is well invested and it’s interesting to see that you have kept this logic throughout the project. But it was necessary because otherwise, the product doesn’t come out. All it takes is one person coming in and giving negative reviews or saying yes, but you’re sure the budget is well invested and all that, it can stop very, very, very, very quickly. It’s much easier to stop a project than to continue it. So that’s really, really great.
What was the impact of the design sprint?
Steph Cruchon: Where do you think the project would be right now if you hadn’t done the Design Sprint?
Jose Rosa: So, I think it would have been very difficult to get everybody in a room and to have access to the initial buying, I think it would have been very long, I guess, because the power of the design sprint was that everybody was in that place, in the same place and explaining their vision and how they wanted to move forward. And as you say, to reassure and I think that without the design sprint , at that particular moment, because it’s like all the constellations were saying to themselves that this product should be there that day, they were there. Because they had also already seen the value of another design sprint that day, the first one spoke and they saw that it could go quickly. Today, I think we might still be feeling our way around.
Steph Cruchon: Yeah, in the process of analyzing Revolute… how they do…
The role of Postfinance
We didn’t talk about Postfinance’s role, so they weren’t with us in that first sprint. They came in later. How did it go, exactly? The integration of Postfinance into this project. How did you come to co-create this product together?
Jose Rosa: Afterwards, with PostFinance, what was interesting was when we presented the project to them and they already had an idea of wanting to challenge the market. So, when Mark went to see the CEO of La Poste, they were seduced by the project and then there was a lot of back and forth, discussions with people who were going to join the project afterwards.
What is the future of Yuh?
Steph Cruchon: Great. So, what’s the future of Yuh App? Can you already tell us some of the ideas you’re working on or how it’s going to evolve?
Jose Rosa: So Yuh App is going to evolve in a way, where the product has to be very useful for people all the time. So that’s the basis of the product. That’s when you want it to be useful and to be adopted. That’s everyone’s dream. But we’re really going to work in that direction. And for that, we already have a large customer care team in place to respond to everything that happens, that doesn’t happen. And then, as Swissquote likes to explore technology, we’re going to work in a direction where onboarding, we really want it to be secure, but at the same time simple and efficient. The banks that is behind Yuh App, so to vision of things that are very specific and It must follow the regulations. However, we can work with the regulator to see what is possible and show when and how.
Steph Cruchon: I have to say that onboarding, it’s already pretty amazing. I reinstalled revolute a few weeks ago, and Yuh App, I installed it now a week ago. And frankly, it’s as fast as revolute, which is no small thing.
Jose Rosa: The whole process is super fast, but then there are things, for example your first Cashing, you have to make a deposit from a bank that guarantees it’s from a bank, but at some point? If yUH wants to be the first bank that you deposit your money from, that’s the question. So, we really need to see how this process can be as simplified as possible, but secure at the same time. You have to remember security and transparency. And that’s where we’re going. Then, in terms of investment, there is the whole world of investment. We have the big stocks, the big brands, we don’t think there is a name in it. After the brands or small brands that have speculated in it, we didn’t want to give that right away because that wasn’t the goal. So we had to be in it.
Steph Cruchon: That’s what’s cool about Yuh App. It’s that you can actually trade well-known brands. Typically, if I’m looking for Nike, I’m going to be able to trade Nike, with the little logo, etc. Something really reassuring. We know what we’re trading, I really think compared to a lot of other apps, even Swissquote, sometimes it’s certificates with strange names. Here, it’s all very, very clear. It’s great. Well, I think we’re at the end of this hour together, it was great. Great to have you. Thank you so much. I really wish long life to Yuh App.
How did the launch of Yuh go?
Are you happy with the reception? So far, in terms of the launch, it’s gone the way you want?
Jose Rosa: So it went very, very, very, very well. And I can tell you that in terms of onboarding, we passed 10,000 subscribers in less than two weeks, so… And because I think that’s exactly it. The press was expecting it, we got really good press and so far, there’s nothing negative. There are points to improve, that’s clear, it’s not to say that the app is perfect and that’s never the goal, it’s that the app is out there, that people use it and that they give us feedback. But right now, we’re at the top.
Steph Cruchon: Great. Where do we find the product or do we install Yuh App?
Jose Rosa: Appstore, you look for Yuh App, go find it. You can also go to Yuh.com and there, you have all the information about the product, how it works and all that. And then on Android as well, you can go to Google Play and go search and download because it’s great and it has referrals in it. That saves you a lot of stuff.
Steph Cruchon: That’s true, I must say. One thing too, the pricing I really like is that it’s super transparent. It’s super clear. You know what you’re buying, you have conditions and all that. So, in any case, congratulations. Really from the bottom of my heart to see what you’ve managed to do with this product, with all the teams, of course and all that. But it’s really nice to see where you’ve come from and I really wish you long life and good luck.
Jose Rosa: Thank you so much, Steph, thank you so much. And see you soon.
- www.yuh.com #yuhapp
What is the role of the Decider during a Design Sprint and who to choose?
Understanding the role of the Decider during a design sprint, and why is it important?
Hey everyone, it’s Steph. I just wanted to record a very short video about the role of the decider on a design sprint. Because actually a couple of minutes ago, I received an email from a client asking about exactly that.
Who should be the decider? Is it really important to have one? Was the role of the decider in the sprint? Who should be the decider? And basically, you know, as I think to answer a very long email with all the information and I was like, wait, I’m just going to record a video also because I’m a bit lazy. So I’m just going to record that video, send it to the client.
But also I’m going to post it on YouTube so you guys get all the information about that because, yeah, it’s a super important, critical question during a design sprint and you need to get that right.
So the decider, It’s super important to have one. I know that the temptation is like not to have one because, you know, we want to be agile. We don’t like hierarchy. Everyone is equal. Yes. The design sprint is really democratic and agile but you need to have someone who is accountable for the decision and can actually take the important decision at a very specific time of the sprint. Basically, it’s the decider.
He will decide what is going to be prototyped day 4 of the sprint. What you can see here is called the art museum, it’s when you discover all the nice concepts from all the participants. And as you can see, there are some green, there’s some red dots and it’s like all the votes from all the participants, the concept they really liked.
It’s a bit scattered and some people like this one, some people like this one and what’s really made the call was the decider. She actually chose to use two concepts. These are the stars. Basically these two concepts have been prototyped on day 4.
Now, the way it works is on day three, that’s an important day for the decider:
- At 10:00 a.m., the decider with the whole team is going to discover all the concepts from the whole team and that are anonymous at the time. People discover them, they vote on the most interesting ones for them.
- Then at 11:00 a.m., we each establish a shortlist. So the decider is not voting for this round of votes. He or she will listen to everyone’s opinion about what are the best concepts, the strongest one.
- And it’s only at 12, just before lunch break that the decider will actually validate which concepts will be prototyped on day 4.
Knowing that, we have just one day to present the strongest concepts. We can’t prototype all of them and we really need to be able to choose. And that’s the role of the decider.
So who should be the decider?
If you read the book, it’s very symbolic. In the sprint book, Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky will tell you that it has to be the CEO of the company. Well, you know what? It’s very simple. If you work with a startup because you might have access to the CEO and the CEO was part of the sprint the whole time.
But in most companies we are working with, usually the decider of the sprint is probably a project manager, product owner or maybe a vice president, someone very important for the company, important for the project but it’s not the CEO.
Who to choose?
The rules really to have the right decide on the sprint is that that person needs to participate the whole time. So during the whole sprint, you have the decider on board, it’s super important.
Second rule is that that person is in charge of you know, he’s kind of accountable about the decisions. And also it’s the person in charge of pushing the project after. So it’s like, you know, what’s going to come after the sprint needs to be the person who has some kind of power to maybe get some budgets, to assign some people or a team to that project.
So it’s super key to have the right person and it has to be the person who is going to sponsor the project after the sprint.
And the person who wrote me is actually from a very large company and the situation they are in is that, you know, for some also political reason, they need to invite a lot of people on the sprint and it’s fine. So in here, you will also keep the same Decider. It could be a project manager or VP, someone important.
But these people are actually more important. They are the head of something or, you know, the president of something or maybe someone from the C level too. They won’t be here the whole time, so they won’t be deciders but you can invite them basically on day three. And they are kind of guest consultants, they will consult just the decider to actually take the right decision on what to do, what to prototype.
So the way we’re going to do it for that sprint is here at like 10:00 a.m. the whole team discovers the concept, but with the guests who are coming on the sprint, the beginning of day three, to discover the concept that have been created on day two.
Then at 11:00, the team plus the guests will vote on their favorite ideas and kind of shortlist, the strongest idea and, you know, they’re going to have to discuss them and maybe defend them too and the decider is not voting. Then at 12, that’s a new step.
Basically, if we’re going to add for the design sprint, the decider will kind of consult with the guests, like the big stakeholders. So this could be done in front of the team if you feel comfortable, you want to be very transparent about the whole process, maybe they should do it in front of the team. I think that we should do that or maybe we should do that and then finally the Decider is going to take the decision or maybe it could be done in private.
During the lunch break, only these guests, important stakeholders and the decider to discuss together and what are the strongest ideas. And then it’s very important that at 1 p.m. it’s the decider of the sprint, not one of these people, but it’s the actual decider who was here the whole time, who will make the call, take the decision and actually explain to the team what concept was chosen and why.
So, yeah, that’s it for the role of the decider during a design sprint. I hope it was useful and if you have any questions, just write them in comments right here. And please subscribe to our channel if you want to learn more about the design sprint.
A full remote Design Sprint fast forward
This is what a REAL Design Sprint looks like in 2020.
This Sprint was facilitated by Steph Cruchon from Design Sprint Ltd. design-sprint.com/remote-virtual-design-sprint/ In October 2020, we were trying to navigate the uncertainty of the second wave of Covid-19 in Europe and ran this 100% remote virtual Design Sprint to rethink our physical event “Innovation Today Masterclasses” in February 2021 at the Swiss Tech Convention Center. www.itoday.ch
How I launched Design Sprint Ltd five years ago
Hi everyone it’s Steph, today we are September 11, 2020. So yeah you’ll say “yes September 11, okay we know it’s a special day”. But it is also a special day for me because looking at my agenda today I remembered something: is that there are actually exactly five years, i.e. September 11, 2015 I decided to found my company Design Sprint Ltd.
And here we are and Design Sprint is already five years old and I wanted to tell you a little bit about the genesis of Design Sprint Ltd. How do we launched it and why. And then I have rediscovered something in my library which is this: and I wanted to open it again and share it with you.
I think it is now almost 2-3 years I didn’t open it. This was, in fact, the document which launched Design Sprint Ltd. So I’m going to show it to you, because I have a lot of people who comes to me with questions about starting their own business, who are entrepreneurs. They ask me questions and questions about how I started my company, what did I do before launching and so on.
I will show you this document, because, in fact, it is important and still relevant for me and for Design Sprint Ltd. So five years ago, it was 2015, in the middle of summer I’m starting a new job in a very large company as a Lead UX designer. It’s well paid, it’s comfortable and the projects are interesting. And then I say to myself “here we go, we have great things to do.”
I join the company and then very quickly I realize that it’s not at all what I expected and wanted. It just didn’t work. It was far from the way I thought this job will be. I was looking for some freedom and when I started working in this company, right away I told to myself that “it’s not for me, I must quickly find my freedom”.
I had the project inn my head for a very long time. I wanted to start workshops of fast design, so design sprint. I had already stumbled upon the concept, but at that time it was simply a name “design sprint”. And then it’s at this moment when I discovered, in fact, the blog of Jake Knapp of Google ventures and then I cantacted Jake.
So five years ago I was doing a school called SAWI, which is marketing and communication school in Switzerland in Lausanne. They have courses – federal diplomas – which give professional Master degree in Switzerland. In this school at this time I was doing a Master of Web Project Manager.
It is just the best diploma you can have in Switzerland if you’re really interested in Digital. It was called “Web project manager”. and now “Digital project manager” and as part of this diploma they wanted a final w: it was necessary to make a “Master thesis”, a big, solid document on a web project, a digital project etc…
I told them I had the idea to start my own business, and asked them if I could use this idea ffor this Master thesis.
-It resulted in this- finally they agreed, so I’ve been able to fully commit to this work. It took me several months to finish this document. We’ll go through it together. The goal of my thesis was to set up my business.
It’s funny, it was 5 years ago and I had already defined the typeface, which is Proxima Nova, the color codes they are all there. It’s funny I had a kind of funny logo in don’t remember anymore they were the pillars of Lean design. I had a kind of theory about that… and the logo obviously changed since then.
So I wrote this thesis between mid-summer 2015 and I had it by the end of 2015. It’s written 2016 because the oral exams were in 2016. The photos you see are some pictures of my first Design Sprint. Because I needed to run a Design Sprint to have some photos to illustrate my concept and I had to quickly conduct my first Design Sprint. I created the company on January 1, 2016
Here are some pictures of my first Design Sprint. You can recognize the color codes etc. It is an academic so he you see all these boring tables of contents, but which explains everything I want to say one thing already before starting and going further is that this paper has helped me enormously.
Clearly it’s a big one, it took me a lot of time and energy to write this. I don’t know, it’s like sixty pages … 80 pages, wow! That’s a lot but this actually really helped me enormously to have the structure to launch the company.
I had to do it, it was a diploma work and at the same time all the work I’ve put in it, it’s not lost. So here we’re talking about context, we’re talking about the base of the idea, the process of the Design Sprint, the pricing policy at the time, business model canvas and VP canvas.
We’ll see after why this is really interesting. Here is a comparison with the competition a little bit benchmark, project team etc. The marketing strategy, the website because this was a web project so I needed to talk about the website.
Here is a part which was a bit of a pain for me at the time- I needed to make a financial analysis. I really sucked at this part, in calculating and projecting. But this is a part that helped me a lot.
So executive summary: when you do this kind of thesis it is interesting to summarize in fact everything in two pages. Here I explained basically what the concept was, the structure. I sell my vision and my mission: “lead the way and become a must in the field of digital prototyping and become a leader in Design Sprints in French-speaking Switzerland.” Funny…
You can see the ambitions: BOOM french speaking part of Switzerland! It was five years ago, I couldn’t even imagine at that time that we could one day work with people all over the world. I was quite modest.
Mission “to help startups and large companies in Switzerland to bring together their ideas and create the digital prototype of their future website or application in a few days” that’s really funny because at the time Design Sprint was really focused on digital. It was really a workshop purely for digital products, even when we read Jake’s book.
It has been changed a lot since then. Now we have run Design Sprints for so many fields and more and more of them are about strategy. It’s funny to see how it has evolved, the photos here were taken even before Jake’s book was released.
Here are some tricks, a little weird to see this- why did I do this exercise.
In short, the context… so here comes the generation Y, Swisslicon Valley – my goodness – this is to explain the interest of Silicon Valley in Switzerland, I’m launching in 2016 so there you go and then I had judged that it was the right time and it’s true it was a good time, maybe I was a little bit in advance to start running Design Sprints in Switzerland.
Here we see the pictures at the beginning. I already had my business cards. I was at least a little bit professional. Defining the needs of the companies, with a fairly comprehensive study I had numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers. It was quite advanced calculations, it took me several months.
Anyway, here we see a tool that I really recommend I had done a search on “UX Design” in Google Trend, it’s a tool I still use. You could see that there was a global trend of UX Design at this time in Switzerland for several years. That it was rising steadily, so it seemed to be a fairly safe trend. Here is an analysis of the costs of development of an application etc. there were several studies and then I came across this figure of $150’000 USD which was the average cost of launch of an app in version 1, at the time.
Therefore, it was five years, maybe the costs have decreased a little bit now but to create an application remains anyway extremely expensive. So there was and still is an interest to run a Design Sprint or this type of workshop at launching an App was interesting.
Here I was showing how my potential customers could lose their money and time and here is a proposition of the service. This was actually a very interesting study about when adn what time and money was lost during large and small projects. We could see very clearly that big projects were problematic in the digital industry. Hence the importance of runnning Design Sprints for large projects- so it’s always interesting when you throw something from the backer with numbers.
That’s really key, I’d say.
So we come to this page which is quite important “what do my future customers want?”. In fact two years ago it was still relevant. It is still the same now in 2020… 1) ensure the survival and profitability of their business it’s funny because in 2020 with COVID, God knows there are a little challenge, we’re still there 2) stand out from the competition and gain new market share then yes at the time there was a lot of competition on the same products now with COVID things are moving quickly so maybe there is less competition on the same products but on the other hand there is always a speed problem 3) ensure the success of their future products – obviously 4) maximize their return on investment, ok 5) find quick solutions to complex issues, not changed. I already had it five years ago and 2020, same thing.
Quote of Ash Maurya: “life is too short to build something nobody wants.” The idea therefore to explain what design sprint is.
These were already concepts in the air of course- design thinking, lean start up, agile… The design sprint being something new. It’s a graph that I have often brought out in my slides later, for my Masterclasses, customers like to see this because it allows them explain what it is.
This was all about how to integrate design sprint in project. Waterfall or with agile methods. I did a search anyway on how we can integrate design sprint into the workflow, in the process of creating a product. It’s funny i forgot i put it here, i saw that AJ&Smart, another design sprint agency in berlin they published the same quote the other day: “the only way to start is to stop talking about start doing” it is from Walt Disney.
That’s the interest of the design sprint. It’s really about being able start something, quickly and to execute quickly. There, the promise “your digital prototype in five days” yes it’s always a bit like that but… Ahh here is the triangle “imagine -> prototype -> and learn” – Wow the concept! Bravo Steph…
This I had in the document and then yeah so that’s a trick that I’ve come across again. You see the trick? “What problem does the design sprint solve” that’s what it’s all about. Something what is very important: eft column-problems, bullet points and the right column what it solves.
It’s really quite a format to sell an idea to the client. You see, I had been working! There was work to do! ” it is estimated that a modification costs 100 times cheaper when it’s made before starting to code” – thoroughly, one could replace “to code” by “to build” .
We can see that at the beginning the costs are not very high you start small but the costs go up very quickly as soon as you start to build and code. In fact this image makes me realize that I don’t use it at all anymore. The pricing policy… that was five years ago… so that was before I started in this business, in this profession.
I was the first, so I wanted propose start up design sprints that last three days- bad idea. Don’t do 3-day design sprints! I priced it 5 years ago at 6000 Swiss francs, well I was all alone… 2000 CHF per day and sprints five-day company to 10’000 CHF also 2k the day. So we’re a little bit more expensive but also we are now a team.
Now, when we run a Design Sprint, we come two persons. One facilitator and one co-facilitator – prototyper. Now we are stronger. At the time I was facilitating alone so I was clearly a good deal – well, we’re still a really good deal. It’s kind of fun to see the difference between the price of launching the idea when you are freelancer, and then to adjust the pricing to real life cost and value. Of course, we also work now in a slightly different context.
Our price for a Design Sprint is around 20 and 25 thousand Swiss francs. I am talking about the sprints that includes everything: preparation, facilitation + co-facilitation, recruitment for user tests and so on… Back then, at that time I was quite naive, I thought a sprint was going to last just five days and that’s it.
But there is a lot of preparation done in advance and also after the design sprint.
What’s funny to see here is that I had in fact three offers the mini design sprint of three days – really bad idea – I do not advise you to do so. (You can’t deliver same quality results in 3 days), the five-day Google Venture Design Sprint, ok it’s always what we do now, and then the Custom design sprint of X days.
So in fact the Design Sprint X, I say that to my friend Paul, who thinks he has imagined this concept: design sprint X – I already had it before you!
The geographical perimeter- so at that time I was only aiming french-speaking switzerland. My clients, back then, all spoke French. Now more and more we work with english speaking customers.
I talk a lot about start-ups, but I was already considering the big companies as my future clients. We see it here. I also considered working with the government, public institutions… Swiss government- we are still waiting for you…
We run more design sprints with large companies and start-ups than with institutions, but we’ll get there!
What you are looking at is an 80-page document and we’re right in the middle of it. My Goal in fact was, that by opening the file in the center you’ll find a bright pink page that I had at that time imagined to grab the attention. This is still relevant. This page was and is the heart of the document and my business- it’s business model and the value proposition canvas.
Personally, I believed this helped me a lot. Now I advise to every start up or an entrepreneur to do a business model canvas and then a value proposition canvas. This can really be useful for your business concept.
Where it really helped me a lot is on the part … (search) partners… Here are the key partners. Actually, I think it was really interesting: when you imagine a business you shouldn’t launch alone. You must have people around you.
At this time I was really very very modest, I was a freelancer, but I had already put the developers with whom I was working with at the time. Who I am still working. Hello MDM they have changed their name to Troisdeuxun now. I put a lawyer- a friend too, to help me on legal stuff. For finances, I’ve noted down my teacher who also helped me a lot on this part. Then we also had a translator friend etc .
And then Arnaud had made photos of the Design sprint so actually I had already some people who helped me to start- it was very modest – now it would be rather entities, companies around us, but in fact it is still very relevant and very very important.
Do not launch your business – and I look at you in the eyes when I say this- don’t throw yourself there, your business without surrounding yourself with partners or friends or allies…
We’re not going anywhere alone and that’s really the core of launching your business.
Something important- income flows: how do you earns money and this is the key. There are some people who say “ah no, but this is not going to make any money for four years” – bad idea. You need to know how you will simply live.
And then the resources: what are your resources, so I had put myself as key resource, it’s true. I put what I knew how to do. So at that time I note down that I’m going to do the UX design, prototyping, front-end, therefore html css, digital strategy of graphic design. I was lucky enough to be able to have several very useful skills to start my business. I had listed my skills.
It’s very clear that if you lack some skills for your project, you will have to get the right people for it and you will have to integrate them.
So it is really the value proposition which actually makes your product worthy of buying. And it’s what will interest your customers. So you list here the user and the benefits, the hopes to achieve as well as the problems. Then on the other side, you are going to explain the solutions, so how does your product integrate solutions.
We see here that they hope to limit the risk -> they do a prototype they hope to validate choices -> user tests are made for validation… It’s a very simple way to explain how your product will help the client.
These are two pages comparing the competition (benchmark). It is important to identify the competitors, who were in fact very local at that time. I imagined myself launching only on the UX design market in French-speaking Switzerland, so it is very very niche. Some of them are going to recognize themselves by the way. It’s funny, now my competitors are really not the same at all, because we work internationally. So ffor real our competitors are other agencies, who are based worldwide…
Some of the competitors I mentioned in this document are more like friends in fact. But here it is: these competitors in the Swiss scene have almost all become – or were already – partners or friends. It’s kind of funny to see that.
Here I even did a “ranking” rather a mapping of competitors on two axes “are they working on short or long duration”. So here are freelancers or very small agencies compared to very large agencies, then the other it is “are they more using waterfall in their approach, or agile”. This was important to me.
I placed myself in the agile and it was one of my added values with the design sprint. There weren’t that many people who were really agile at that time in Switzerland.
The SWOT analysis: hyper classic -> strengths, weaknesses, threats… Threats, I wrote: “other design agencies, resistance to change”, – it’s always the problem – and “the time”… time? – … I don’t know what I meant back then…
Here are legal aspects etc – Get help from a lawyer if you have a lawyer friend, it can be really usefful. This really helped me a lot. When you launch a business you will need help for everything what is linked with the paperwork, the creation of contracts etc. You need a strong base to start. These things are really really expensive so it’s interesting to look for a win-win deal. My deal was- I had created a website for my friend and in exchange he created the contracts for me. It saved me, frankly talking, a lot of money.
When you start your business you get a lot of surprises, especially when you reallize how extremely expensive it is to create your company, there is a lot of paperwork, a lot, fees of notary or lawyer, accountant…
This is a picture of one of my first Design Sprint. I needed to put a photo for my Risk analysis: that’s what it’s all about. It’s funny because now we use this in our evaluation grid at the end of the design sprint (scorecard). You see the risks low with a green or red light for more serious risks.
Five years ago it was a lack of financial issues after the first year, well yeah… I had planned to launch my business only with my personal savings. I could go about a year without having a job at that time, but then it’s expensive to live in switzerland. I had planned to empty my savings and therefore the risk was that if I couldn’t find any warrants or work after a year I was in danger of burning all my personal saving.
Luckily it went better than that. I have found clients not right away, it took a little bit of time, but I got my first customers fairly quickly. At the beginning I think at the end of the first five six months I have started to be able to pay myself a salary. This was 5 years agowhen I started.
Now with COVID, if you start now it’s a very particular context and very difficult. So probably having enough of resources for one year could be really useful.
What else do I have: yeah the Health issues: I put it as a risk. I think it’s important. I’m still in good health and I touch the wood, but we never know what can happen. When you are the sole contractor it can really be problematic. Because you don’t get paid when you don’t work, so that can be a problem. Loneliness at work, lack of interest from the public, bad business…
These were things that were important but less important than my own personal health or risk running out money.
Key factors of success, so time-to-market I was the first in the game. I knew that. I started even before the book of Jake Knapp- Sprint come out… So on this I really had a big advantage, so I called it a blue ocean.
Now there are other people who run design sprints, but I was the first, at least in Switzerland.
Marketing: the color codes are still the same. This pink and this blue and then this is very interesting: since I had actually not run too many workshops myself, I didn’t have too many things to show. So I tried to use metaphors, an analogy to design sprint. I thought it was interesting, and in fact the analog I found was in the archives of beginning of aviation. Launch something that seems impossible or very difficult.
I was looking for how I could illustrate it. and I found this whole bank of image is the National Bookstore of the U.S. Congress where images are free of rights, that can be used free of charge and which are magnificent. And the Wright brothers were the first inventors the first planes. I found that it was super cool to go digging into it.
I kept this identity, these images for few years. After, we had enough of real photos from real Design Sprints to illustrate our services, but in anyway it was good enough for the launch.
I had prepared my website at the time www.design-sprint.com it is still the same site, I wanted to impress the experts. I wanted to be cool and I put some QR codes so this is a special dedication to my friend Orlane who never believed in the power of the QR codes.
Well, we are five years later. And now you can see them everywhere… I was right! The QR codes were useful, but, well, for this one if I remmember well, no one had scanned to access the website…
In short, all that I want to specify I had done all this before the launch of the design sprint ltd. People say five years after “Oh, yeah, you got lucky.” Yes, I may have been lucky to be at the right time with the right idea, but this is not enough to launch the company.
I don’t say that you need to write an 80 page document, i don’t say that everyone should do it before starting their business. I needed to do it to graduate- but this was a huge help for me.
So I really advise you to do your homework, to do it before you launch anything. To keep you from crashing. I had also made a persona and a user journey map (experience map) on how I was going to sell design sprint. It is UX techniques finally that I had used at this time and I still use this sometimes. It’s super useful .i
The sales part- one really funny thing you see – I have my persona from five years ago. Back then I noted down as my persona hobby: running! So that’s something I’ve noticed among the people/ my customers who are in the Innovation field or who love design sprint is that there are a lot of them who are great sportsmen: triathletes runners etc.
I’m not very athletic, but in fact many of my customers that I have in front of me when we discuss the design sprints love running. So I don’t know why: do they get better by running? Maybe these ones were looking something about marathon or sprint on Google an by accident found my services. I don’t know, but there’s something about this.
Here you see the navigation of the website, the pages… yeah it was made five years ago, and my website so so much better and we have reworked it a lot, but the fundamentals were already there. And we can still see it the technology of the site… But who cares? It was made in Wordpress, if you ever want to hack me, know that it is made in Wordpress here
It’s important for me to launch the company on January 1st with the website ready in January so I had actually done a whole retroplanning. I wanted to launch on January 1st. It was a weekend so I had a little delay on the site. So I officially launched the 6 or 7 January, but here we are… and to finish the the “finance” part – I think that’s the heart of the thing.
Ha!! I used a tool: the Google Ad Keyword planner I completely forgot about this thing, you can add keywords and then we see in fact the level of research during the year, wow cool is that.
So that was made for the Swiss or the french-speaking switzerland. You could see the search rate for “web design”, “web designer” and “UX”. With the search curve of the year, so I could plan my future income: this curve is the one that it shows the income in the year so the peak moments and the low moments…
Here is the summer vacations… funny is probably fair enough It’s been 5 years. I completely forgot about it.
It can be a very good strategy to use a tool of this type. To understannd and evaluate the market. Here is the big numbers part, financial, all these figures are well sure false because they are invented: I can show them to you now, and I don’t care about that.
This was the turnover of the first year, that’s it … sorry: it was the charges, all my costs, and that was the the expected turnover of the first, 2nd and 3rd year in CHF (Swiss Francs). It’s fun to see this financial part. It is very very difficult to do this, it took me so much off time and energy and two or three white hairs (that you see here).
But it’s still it’s extremely useful, when you launch to imagine sales and therefore revenues you are going to do year 1 2 and 3. It is important to have some visibility so I think all accountants and specialists died laughing while seeing my thing, but I still feel like it was pretty serious.
The revenue part- you never really know how much you can expect to make and when. What I can tell you looking at these numbers now is that I have earned more. I don’t know if I was rather optimistic or pessimistic at that time as freelancer.
In short this document gave me energy to launch my company 5 years ago. I realize that I was quite naive. but here I am still there at the end of five years, we’re still here because now we are a bigger team, we’re in the middle of COVID, but we’re on the way of getting out of it. They say normally the start-ups who don’t die at the end of first 4 years, well, we’re 5 years old! And it’s going pretty well for us. And to finish I had this image of one of the first aviators who greeted a general I don’t know why. The aunch of the company was the January 1! So Design Sprint Ltd is five years old and I am super happy for making this video and for introducing you to my diploma work Tchaw tchaw
Invincible Innovation Podcast - Itoday Innovation Summit
The Invincible Innovation podcast with Adi Mazor Kario and Steph Cruchon
Hey, that’s a good start everyone hi how are you i’m very happy to see you and today the question is what is the biggest insight from the eye today summit 2020 and i’m so happy to see you welcome to invincible innovation live i’m Adi Mazior Kario innovation value creation expert and i’ll be your host and i have with me today a very special episode and i have Steph Cruchon with me everyone and you’ll tell your because it’s like french and i don’t know how to pronounce it oh very good very good so i’m so happy to have you here with me and just a month ago even less than a month ago you had a very interesting and important summit for innovation and we heard today in a special episode to to have some secrets and insights of what you had there it’s very exciting and i know is that we met in google in san francisco in their offices and we had um a a workshop together with jake jake knapp and the design sprint creator and it was a very very like lots of fun and very interesting and i remember steph it was very impressive for me that you brought him this chocolate that looks like a time timer yeah yeah yeah yeah i can tell that story i think it’s fun it was in 2017 i was a huge fan of jake knapp the the author of the book sprints and i never met him in in real at that time so i knew that coming to google i will meet him for the first time so you see the time timer just behind me here i made a chocolate version because i’m swiss so yeah it costed a lot of money to create it it was very impressive it was a lot of massive chocolate you know very heavy and i i gave it to jake he loved it and yeah and ate it yeah and it’s it’s all eight it’s all within the family you know they are crazy chocolate eaters so but that was the that’s the way i i uh yeah yeah and and it was lots of fun to meet you there and him and um and today are gonna tell tell us who was like why did you create this i today summit who is it for who came to this yes yes it’s such a long story and such a cool story and exciting one um so i’m steph from design sprint ltd we are a company based in switzerland in europe and uh we do design sprints uh as a living so we are specialized in this workshop it’s like five years uh i’m running design sprints which is a long time now right i’ve done a lot of these sprints but we are still you know uh it still reaches you know kind of a niche of people who are designers or uxers or into products very deep people into product or innovation and uh still we we need to evangelize to explain what this is all about what is design sprint but also what is design thinking what is design also you know what is the power of design and there is a lot of things to tell about this and you know we came up with that realization that the way to get interesting and powerful people to even care about design in business and the way to to kind of attract these business people into the conversation is to organize something for them so not an event so events is great because it’s a great way to meet and to connect with people and we’ve realized that if it’s design conference if it’s too designed these people don’t come or don’t care so really from the beginning with i2d innovation today is to talk not about design or design screen but about innovation as a whole and to bring together business tech design and also ecology that’s important yeah it’s very important i think that in general when you’re thinking about design most people think about the tangible result of what we’re creating like what is the colors in the end or the fonts yeah and but design is much more than that and i think that as we perceive like understanding what’s the meaning of design and we have business results from design thinking and design processes it gets closer to the business and and not like into them less like marketing even uh think point of view of design right yeah we aren’t you know in in 2020 and the world is like you know upside down with that whole covet situation and more than ever design is important because we need to redesign everything about our life all the ways we used to to live to work to socialize to you know everything needs to be designed when you think you go to the theater it’s not the same like it was before you organize and even it’s not the same you go to the restaurant it’s not the same and that’s just a little part the most visible part you have so many products interfaces systems that needs heavy redesign and that’s why we’re here today right so what we decided to do is to take three talks that you decided like were most insightful or maybe surprising for you and we’re going to talk like t t dlr you know just to summarize what are the essence of the three and the first that we uh said we were gonna talk about is jake’s jake’s nap right so that’s that’s his talk so so tell us yeah exactly so uh if you are interested about i today so the summit event is past but we have the physical master classes in february in switzerland uh with jake and alex also walden eve premier so it’s gonna be the actual master classes and the summit was uh three weeks one month ago but you know it was so fast yeah and the website it’s i2day.ch chb meaning that it’s a swiss website absolutely um yeah um and so yeah the first talk of course it’s jake knapp so just to understand about that today we really wanted to have top-notch speakers like the best in the world about innovation and you know i kind of made my selfish list of people i was dreaming to have on our summit it was supposed to be a physical conference and i think it’s important to understand that first it was supposed to be physical in person in switzerland and because of kovid we had pivot and make it virtual so jake was already scheduled to be in the physical event of course and give him as the class and then it was a no-brainer of course to ask him do you want to come as a as a on the virtual event uh problem with jake is that he’s super famous uh and he has been you know uh he’s always invited uh there and there and you know chad talk about design screen he gave a lot of crazy keynotes about design screen so he’s becoming very very famous people have read the book they know by heart all the pages of the book so it’s kind of hard to to come up with something new uh and to give some new content and it’s kind of the challenge that uh jake had he really took it seriously that event he was like okay i will come with something really new and so he didn’t invent a new sprint no but he he talked about uh the title of his talk was the innovation cookbook and it was how any business or company can basically learn from recipes from innovation recipes telling that if you start innovating just starting on your own and not reading and not trying anything pre-existing you will lose a lot of time and the sprint is one of these recipes and he he gave that great analogy about him cooking scrambled eggs having no idea how to cook it for real it looks simple so he was doing it but he was doing it wrong and today he read a recipe he understood how powerful it is so really cool talk about of course design sprint but more about the power of recipes and innovation and also he made everyone dance and you can go and yeah that’s there’s a replay uh replay section you can watch the topic and people were dancing like crazy which was really cool yeah one thing i i really want to mention like jake when you see usually see this picture i think it’s even part of the book if i’m not mistaken he’s really really tall i i’m almost here in when i i stand next to him and and i guess that the the physicality of somebody’s who is talking is very powerful so when he stands in front of of audience so it’s really impressive to see him and and i guess that one thing that you could do in order to make it more dynamic and interesting is to make people move and not like be stable and and start when they see it so exactly it’s uh you’re right jake is super charismatic uh in general of course in person you see him the guy is a giant and you know he has a deep voice and everything and you know he you know he he’s really uh yeah he has a lot of charisma and it’s always tricky it’s like is it gonna work online you know because like we we had an event that was physical and then it was fully online and you know what he’s so good at this he manages to keep that same intensity even online uh and yeah i’m very uh i’m very impressed by this actually yeah maybe can you just click if you can if you can show the website and click on replays yeah sure uh because i think it’s kind of cool to to show there is a little viewer oh now it’s it’s uh there is a sound uh yeah if you can remove the sound maybe it’s gonna yeah because the video is quite great you can see jake then dancing he looks like a giant pogo stick the way he dances if i press this uh this part just a minute if i press his so we can see the video of his of him that’s right yeah exactly exactly like we’re here and i should press no no just go to up on the top yeah on the top yeah this one yeah and this video yeah yeah okay yeah we saw that you’re right he’s not that a good dancer though because he’s giant so you know he looks good yeah he’s very tall okay so now we’re gonna go to the second talk captain watson oh my god one yeah so impressive for us it was key to have a top-notch speaker in sustainability uh it was really key to have someone who is hyper credible um because i’m just i think it’s such an important topic okay we talk only about kovid in 2020 but the real issue of the world is climate warming it’s uh what’s coming on our generation but also in the next generations and as a designer and as a thinker or innovator you need to think about the next 30 uh 50 years because we are the people who can make a change now and yeah that’s why it’s so important for me and i hate all that green washing you can see sometimes you know like company or changing the logo for something green or anybody or whatever but tell us in like in a few words who maybe doesn’t know who is paul what exactly we wanted someone who is not shallow and who is deep in sustainability and who has really a cause and paul watson he’s the founder and creator of sea shepherd conservation society so it’s these guys you know who are uh fighting the the whale poachers uh so uh paulo watson is actually one of the creators of greenpeace in the 70s and night yeah yeah he he co-created a green piece and he was um he was experienced from greenpeace in the 70s too because he was too hardcore about his uh but the way he was he you know was getting attached to uh to a boat he was like uh yeah he he dared to do absolutely everything he was pumping boats he was attacking he was never violent that’s the the key thing to understand about him but he behaves like a pirate his idea really is to to stop poachers and by all the means without being actually violent and yeah he’s like he’s such a character it’s 50 years so impressive to have people that have they have their own vision of how the world should be and they’re acting upon it and it’s like i really love it and and i think that in general i had one talk in this in this show about sustainability and i’ll have more because i think it’s really important and i think that it’s going to be more in the in the middle of the what people are focusing on in the upcoming years and in general i’m really for them you know i’m vegan so it’s like that’s good for me yeah yeah you see and and uh so sea shepherd on the boats they are also uh strictly vegan on the boats meaning that you that you can’t eat meat you they they are not all vegan but at least on the boat they are and what i love with that guy is like with paulo watson for the last 50 years he was an activist and he was on the ocean on the boat and he was actively fighting whale poachers and protecting the oceans and so having him uh was um was a great highlight for us of course because he’s so inspiring you know he’s i don’t know his age like 70 something uh he looks really impressive yeah he is he’s an actual pirate you know like for real um and he has been uh uh tracked by interpol uh all these things he had like his life is a movie basically yeah actually there was a whole tv show made around him uh called whale wars on discovery channel so and there are there are movies made after him so it was amazing to be able to talk live with someone who is a real ecological hero and it was really empowering i would say he talked also about our responsibility as innovators so of course him he’s an activist in ecology is very hardcore but there are things that we can do or choices we can make as designers or as innovators that will have a real impact on the future so sometimes you need to choose between do i take the well-paid job that the horrible company or do i accept to have less money but actually having a purpose or meaning in my job yeah yeah i understand that you know like sometimes uh when some of the startups they call me and they talk to me and sometimes it’s not right for me so like you know like in israel we have lots of like a binary options you know all these stuff and it’s like yeah it’s not for me so no thank you and all the things once like it reminds me like years they go a startup came up to me and they say we have a billion dollar idea we can make kids watch ads [Laughter] yeah freaky i said okay maybe it’s a million dollar but it’s not for me so it’s good that people are acting on their beliefs yeah it’s exactly that i think it’s the it’s key that as innovators we understand that our actions have an impact uh when you work on a product that’s used by thousands or millions of people depending where you work your choices and your actions will have an impact on the future and yeah you have the short term money you can earn making that doing that job but think about the consequences always always so paul watson was really uh so inspiring and basically we talked about that the other day any sentence he said during that talk it’s 45 minutes long you can watch it for free actually online 45 minutes long you can take any sentence he said you can make a t-shirt out of it because wow because it’s so inspiring and it’s 50 years it’s like repeating different ways yeah by heart he’s the best so some of the um talks are free and some of the talks are for replay or why is it online yeah so what are you excited about so so the way the way it worked for i today there were several tickets one was like the all access meaning that you could ask yourself the question to the speakers one was just watching the live stream and one was actually replaced for people who missed everything but still want to catch up they can watch the video so the talks are online they are not free it’s not expensive it’s 50 bucks for the whole 10 hours of content but you can watch because we are generous and nice people you can watch books two talks for free and the waterfall watson is free anyway but yeah you can watch two for free yeah so i really encourage you to do it it’s it’s i saw some of them it’s like wow it’s really worth it it’s great because okay we are not specialists of uh media we’re not a tv company we are just designers you know but i think we we managed to have great great interactions live interaction with the people who were uh in the audience they were interacting live asking the question live and it’s something you don’t see too often and that was really really cool yeah it’s really important you know like you’re saying we’re just designers and i just want to take the just from it it’s like we are designers and we can do lots lots of things that others can do and i think that the fact that we’re designers that we can just act upon our thoughts we can do something tangible so you created something and you designed it and you designed all the materials and the website and the marketing and the event itself and it’s something that most people don’t have the ability to to do that actually lots of work and talent so you you’re right we were actually uh for the whole event we were three working uh on it we had a help from the from a partner who made the the nice videos you see the marketing videos uh but it was a very very small team and we had uh three more volunteers the day of the event uh to help us this was such a small team and in very scrappy way you know we didn’t have crazy softwares gears uh technique it was all holding on my on my own computer you know at home it was made from home uh but i think it’s also it was part of the success of the event that it it was feeling a bit homemade but at the same time very exciting and not seen also it was something else and it was great to have something homemade but with huge stars being part of the show i think that in general we see that in the past we needed like a studio and and like a tv camera and everything and now it’s like you can take a good camera and it’s good enough for what you’re doing and you have a microphone and that’s it you have the software to get to anyone and to get to the speakers and to the attendees and you don’t need more than that yeah and it’s it’s wonderful to think about the the the knowledge sharing you could do this way so yeah all the networking there is one thing i i’ve really understood organizing this event and leaving it it’s uh it’s not really about the quality of the camera you have or the sound or whatever it’s about feeling that you are together in the instant it’s you know we work together in something even if we were spread all around the world and believing the same experience at the same time that was amazing and maybe i want to talk about the next speaker um about thomas i just want to add him on the list um because you can find him yeah yeah the comedian i think it’s something we we that was really wonderful to have him so thomas iselle he’s uh he’s a huge toy in switzerland it’s probably the most famous stand-up comedian in switzerland and he’s like he’s like you know he’s like a razor blade he’s like really sharp and he’s uh he’s very good at reacting live on on something and so we had him the two days of i today so he was kind of um having kind of a stand-up act at the beginning of the of each day which was uh scripted and written and everything but also he was live on our slack on our private slack and he was reacting to all the talks live and you know publishing jokes and images and memes and this was amazing because he is the best of the best and that was really really amazing and so there is a horrible sketch he can watch online he’s making fun of my mustache for example i love when you say mustache it sounds much better than when i say mustache yeah sorry it’s because i don’t know how to say it in english but you know it sounds it sounds like very french it’s like it is it sounds like you say it the right way yeah when we think about the um the event itself as something that we do together and you know when we laugh together and we have the same ideas and we have the same thoughts we are together in the same domain like spiritual domain so it’s it’s kind of together that we’re getting used to like working from home and doing things from home and having like shows together on home so it’s like it’s really important before organizing the event i read a lot online about online events fully online and i was very afraid that it will my fear was like it will look just watching a boring uh netflix show or boring video you know that you feel that uh yeah it’s just watching something that happened but uh you don’t feel part of it and we i loved the fact having a comedian part of the part of the event in life because anything could happen happen anytime and also we had a system like when he was publishing something on the slack we could show it on screen at the right moment so yeah all of this worked really well and that was cool yeah so we have a question and i want to uh we really recommend everyone who’s watching us to to take part of the of the talk and we have on calp i hope that i really said they were there so thank you for a question and he has he asked about how do you think where are we heading like people would they prefer to have something together in a physical space or to do it virtually like samsung and asus launching an event virtually what what do you think about that what do you think yeah it’s very interesting i think um virtual events is where i want to be as a designer and innovator myself because it’s way more risky there is so much to create you know when you think that you have web summit for example web submits they have demonstrated the quality of a physical event it’s huge but you have you can’t beat them you can create a new event and beat web summit they’re already here they are massive and they have a trade area which is very important so exactly so so this is a model that works physical events like except between kobe but that works and you won’t be able to to really improve them or to make them better virtual events everything is to create basically what we have created is probably one of the first i like to say the first cool one in the way that we really try to think well about the experience as deep as we could even having something very small but still the tools they are very you know it’s that kind of stone age you know about virtual events and i dream that you know we have all these vr things we don’t know what what to do with right now all these tech are existing it’s just we don’t have oh i think about that now i just i read it while we were talking and he think if he asked about the vr keynote recently samsung had yeah i think he asked that actually i think it already exists of course it has been done uh in some areas the problem is like not everyone at home has a crazy vr headset or you know it has to be part of a showroom or something and i think what’s gonna be the key differentiator is when you can bring this kind of technology to a mass audience or mass public uh i’m thinking about the music festivals i see a lot of people saying uh are you gonna come to that music festival in 2021 i’m like i don’t think it’s gonna happen it’s gonna be very hard to have big massive music festival but i think now these music festivals they have the opportunity right now to to rethink the format and create a very cool virtual experience because i think there is there are things to do yeah i totally agree i think that there are some advantages first you can reach so many people it’s so easy they don’t fly anywhere it’s much easier it costs less for you it’s risk risk for the organizers and it’s much easier to just go in your own office or in your wherever it’s comfortable for you and to see what you need there the part of mingling should be addressed so you need to think about how to create this connection because people when they go to to some kind of a business event or to a conference and i’ve done like i think hundreds of them in the last few years the most important part are the breaks because in the breaks you could go and talk yeah the speaker to other people and to connect with them yeah yeah it’s it’s it’s so important so we need to really solve this one but you know we’re resolving problems together so we we’ve used the interesting tools for helping networking you know that is it was kind of looking like a a map of a venue and you have different tables and people could jump from table to table so they were free to go to kind of private chats video chats this worked really well actually but still yeah this is not replacing the actual uh physical even that’s why actually i today we we did the conferences all online and we’re gonna have the master classes full day physical with less people more vip with masks everything but we think that’s the right approach yeah and it’s to do hands-on stuff it’s it’s really connected it’s important i totally agree okay so we’re gonna go to the last one and if if we’ll see like people really interested maybe we’ll do part two and and you will see so lila von evans i’m struggling too actually leila alvin’s living so she’s swiss actually uh and she’s from the the italian part of switzerland and but she has a german name and it turns out that she’s the the head of culture and collaboration at muro so mural i guess some of you guys know what this is it’s a software of wide boarding virtual whiteboarding that we use during our design sprint and um what’s interesting is that mural they they totally exploded during kovid so it was it was a software just before covered and it became a massive software community during kovid i think actually my first episode is with jim caldwell okay so it’s my first time you know so you can go back and listen to jim jobs to be done and he works in moon url too exactly i think they have 15 times more customers than before covida i know that they’re increased we talked about that in the first episode and he said that it’s a good time for them so it really makes sense to have a collaboration tool this way so exactly and we wanted to have uh to have someone who was a true expert at remote work and that’s exactly what leila does at mural that’s her role to be leading the culture but also the whole remote collaboration of the team because they they are from argentina but they have offices in san francisco but otherwise they are all distributed worldwide across time zones across continents and they need to make it work and to be efficient and to work fast and to be resilient and to to scale up very fast and grow during kobe times because the clients are here so it was amazing to to have her on to share her experience because it’s really some content that you don’t see anywhere basically because she’s right into the action right now yeah at mirror and she shared with us like the tools they are using uh the way they are uh they are dealing with their schedules um you know like creatures that they are having and it’s really like kind of the backstage of how mirror works and i would recommend that talk to any company organization that is willing to you know to go to go more remote and to use the power of remote i will i will advise them to look at this talk it’s going to give you so many ideas on what you can do i know it’s complex sometimes with regulations and how you can hire people in different countries but obviously you’re already dealt with that too but they have so many great ideas on how you can collaborate tribally that’s what’s really really great yeah okay so we’re almost done i want you to give me like the most like surprising thing you learned from these talks that we talk about like what could you take from them i mean the surprising me thing for me that we managed to make to make it that event you know when when the whole world is falling apart uh like the world’s upside down and you managed to bring these brilliant people together and they all committed one or two days to be with us and because they felt that it was important and so so that’s really something i i i really appreciate it is that i could also mention of course kai haley from google who was here so yeah so yeah who had such a great talk about the power of design and watch it it’s amazing so all these people who are who are stars and to be frank they don’t need us so they don’t need this kind of events uh uh to uh to to be visible and they wanted to be there and to come and they just wanted to you know to network and socialize even some some people said it was the highlight of 2020 well it’s not very hard to it’s not hard to be a highlighter yeah exactly it’s the worst time of the history but that’s you know i think everyone was genuinely happy to be there to and to to network and to chat uh like with all friends even if we were from the comfort of our homes but uh we were together in the same instant and uh i know we won’t have the same conditions again probably in our lives it was very special and i think this first edition of i today is is going to stain our memories for that yeah first edition so like next time we’re gonna meet and and and we’re gonna do that together i don’t know we we’re gonna have the master classes for sure in february and then then we’ll see from there the idea behind today is innovation two days to talk about what’s going on in innovation right now in the present so the concept is of course scalable and we’ll see over time but yeah it’s massive to organize something like that it’s it’s yeah so sure thank you for doing that so tell us like in a few words what’s going to be in february who’s going to come to the workshops sure so uh it’s a two days event uh one day it’s jake knapp for the design sprint master class uh the the official one with i assume a lot of updates because now we are using way more remote tools and tools like mural or others so um the idea is like to get to really give an updated version of the the master class hopefully is going to be able to fly in europe at that time it’s in five months so finger cross if not we are clever and we have some ideas you will see yeah um yeah maybe virtually i i i could say it could be maybe partly we’ll see we’ll see but we have some concepts um so that’s that that will be the first day february 8th it’s jake february 9th it’s uh alex osterwalder and eve pinger they are huge stars they’re the creators of the i don’t have the book anymore here they’re the creators of the business model canvas and value proposition canvas it’s a you have seen it’s agreed with nine boxes you have seen it all around uh it was created ten years ago it’s used by millions of people uh startups companies and they are the creators of that tool turns out that they are swiss they live not too far from uh from from here and yeah they’re gonna they’re gonna run the the master class which is amazing and it’s gonna be the second day so it’s gonna be a very business day the business day uh and day one is more about design oh nice nice so i want to thank you for your time it’s been a pleasure i think we should have another episode it was so much fun for me and another other than that i have like 10 questions that we didn’t get to so maybe next time we can say like like the main question that i had in the beginning like how could that affect your daily life as designer and design sprint but we can we can maybe do it like next time right next time you’re gonna have to invite me again yeah we should we should do it and i want to thank you first that you woke up so early in the morning i felt like i took you in in the middle of the morning and you’re like all awake just for me it’s okay it’s nine now it’s okay it’s fine and i want to thank everyone who joined us and asked questions and said hi on on on our live show thank you and and thank you for listening and viewing this episode and if you’d like to to know more you’re welcome to uh visit invisibleinnovation.com and we have the show and the podcast really soon so visit us have a great day thank you bye bye
Should the whole Team book 5 days for a Design Sprint?
Hi everyone, it’s Steph,
I wanted to make a video today to answer the question we hear all the time before each Design Sprint: “Do team members have to participate in all five days of the Design Sprint? “It’s a very legitimate question because sprinting is really far from the classic work habits where you come in the morning.
We multi-task on a lot of projects and send each other emails etc. we go from meeting to meeting.
Well, in fact we’re going to ask you to focus
five days on a single project.
Actually it makes complete sense and in the end you save a lot of time by doing this compared to working on a routine, but it’s true that for some people it seems to be a lot to ask to participate for five days.
So how does it work?
How do we manage to organise sprints?
It’s been five years now being done in all types of businesses of all sizes and we always manage to find solutions because we always manage to find solutions
to adapt even the busiest agendas.
What you need to understand is that the Sprint is approached in two parts: the workshop part, which is days 1, 2 and 3, and then the second part is the Prototypes and tests.
Prototypes and tests can be done by a slightly smaller team, there’s no need to have everyone on days 4 and 5, so Thursday and Friday we can free them, but we have
really need to have all the core, team all the team so days 1 2 and 3 Monday Tuesday Wednesday. Why do we need to have the whole team? Because that’s where we’ll decide on the strategy, we’ll align ourselves with the challenges, the objectives, we’ll imagine creative solutions, we’ll really go through a process of deciding on what will be prototyped and so these are really stages.
absolutely strategic and we need to work with the team now a question that comes up all the time is in fact “how do you integrate the CEO of a company? »
They are extremely hurried people and they don’t have the time and even asking them for one or two days is just not possible so in fact what we do is that we don’t give them a role as a member of the permanent team, -the core team- but we ask them to be experts invited to the Sprint on the morning of day 1 on Monday morning we
can indeed have guests who come for 20 minutes, half an hour etc…
To share their knowledge, share figures, share objectives etc. this is what will actually propel the rest of the team during the week they will be setting the pace and giving direction so that we know exactly what to work on and what to focus on.
So it would typically be the role of the CEO or an important member of the hierarchy to come in any case at that moment the first hour of the Sprint to really share on the Vision. After what we have often seen in sprints, CEOs are people who like this kind of exercise and then they stay much longer than expected they
are supposed to come just for an hour but in the end they make or two days with us in the sprint so here we are:
short answer:
Try to get people to commit for all five days,
longer answer: The first three days are very important and days 4 and 5 can be done with less participants
I hope this answered that question. If you have any other questions or comments, please put them below. Subscribe to the channel and we’ll answer all your questions and we look forward to making a new video for you soon.
Tchaw tchaw
Creating future-ready cross-functional teams at Google
STEPH CRUCHON: Hello everyone, We are so happy to welcome Kai Haley. Kai she’s the head of ux methods and processes at google. Her job is to create and scale programs to enable the culture and mindsets that improve google’s product quality.
She’s one of the founders and lead of the google Design Sprintmaster academy and she has trained hundreds of sprintmasters at Google. To drive innovation across google’s diverse products or areas. But google has also been impacted by COVID like just like you just like me and in this toolkit she will share with us how google has quickly adapted the collaboration and innovation approach during these last month.
Shifting from working totally on site at google and they went totally remote. So please welcome from San Francisco Kai Haley.
KAI HALEY :I am so honoured to be following such incredibly inspiring talks. Particularly Suryas who just came before me and you know what an incredible lineup of speakers! So thank you all for being here, thank you so much Steph Cruchon for putting this on and having me here today. Steph is driving my slide so just as a note for folks.
i wanted to talk to you all today about you know how we’ve been fostering future-ready cross-functional teams. The team that I work on right now supports and grows the discipline of ux across the company. So when I first started at google almost nine years ago now I was a visual designer on the search ads team. And I really struggled when I first joined Google, because the UX team was working very much in a silo and this was the same for the engineering teams and the product management teams. I will give you guys all a little context.
When I was working on the search ads team we really did struggle to collaborate.I didn’t have much access to my engineers we didn’t sit in the same building,I didn’t have visibility into the strategy that my product managers were setting or the goal setting that they were doing. And it’s really hard to be effective at driving great products when you’re working in a silo and working alone.
So I was lucky enough at that time to participate in what was our first innovation week which then evolved to become our annual sprint week, where we started trying on design sprint methods that we were developing at that time. And I discovered what an incredible framework this was for breaking down these silos and bringing together you know all of these perspectives getting to the heart of what is desirable, what is feasible and what is profitable for the company.
This really was the beginning of a transformation in the way that I worked as well as the way that many Googlers were working at the time.I became very inspired by this framework and methodology and started training Googlers after. What does it mean to be future ready and how does this relate to cross-functional collaboration. Yes, we all know cross-front control collaboration is amazing it does unlock lots of great opportunities and potential when you’re able to get teams to work together, but being future ready it’s not about having a magic crystal ball that will allow you to see into the future. imagine my magic crystal ball on this slide it’s really a way of being an approach to working.
So I think about it as building organizations that are adaptable and agile creating the teams that are able to pivot quickly and adapt to changing circumstances, being able to identify when you need to pivot as well as creating an environment that is safe for experimentation. Being experimentation oriented and that also then leads you to resilience. When you run these experiments and they don’t work to be able to pick yourself back up to embrace that failure and learn from it as you go and then of course inherent in all of this is navigating complexity and we’re in ever more complicated times these days .
And you know that navigating complexity is its own discipline that you can you know. There are lots of great experts who speak about this but in order to be able to design experiments that we’re going to learn from we really have to have strong systems thinking and understand the factors that are involved that we’re dealing with. Many of these can be considered characteristics of a learning organization and this is not a new concept peter’s saying popularized the concept of learning organizations back in 1990 and a lot of these he picked out five characteristics six systems: thinking personal, mastery mental models, shared vision and team learning. These are all things that are you know really part and parcel of being future ready.
Our sprint master academy program and our design sprints program really focuses on building these capabilities, these characteristics and infusing them in to our product development process. So for example we help sprint masters with building their own personal mastery and deep expertise. They work hands-on with product teams to help them create shared visions to help them learn as they go so all of these characteristics are really infused into our product development process.
Through the design sprint process and through these critical sprint masters that we train to help
lead teams through the process. One example Surya also shared an example of having to pivot and change due to these very unprecedented times when we were all literally grounded back in march we really had to pivot quickly we had critical sprints that were in flight that sprint masters were you know ready to get on a plane to Australia, ready to get on on a plane to Singapore.
To work in person on you know really important projects and we tended to think up until this point very much about design sprints as an in-person activity. We would rely on getting everyone in a room together and having all of the benefits that come with working in person so we didn’t have that much expertise in this are. We had deep mastery at design sprints as I mentioned and since 2014. When we started the academy we trained thousands of uxers and we have an incredibly engaged community of 400 expert sprint masters who are running sprints across all of google’s product areas.
But remote design sprint was pretty new to us. We looked across the organization and we said hey who is anybody doing this? I’d run a couple out of necessity in general we kind of saw them as like last resort. But we realized this was something we were going to have to learn really quickly. We’re going to have to pivot our practice and then scale our learnings as fast as we could. So in order to do this we took one small step. It was a small experiment and we said hey let’s get everyone together you know with our first week in which we were required to work from home.
And you know surfaced and invited the sprint masters who had been running remote sprints to share their expertise to share their learnings and this quickly turned into a platform and a weekly session where we could bring in experts from outside and share as people were learning inside the resources and tools and templates. That they were building as they were rapidly transitioning their practice from in person to virtual.
So we were able to amplify the knowledge that we were creating and scale it you know across our 4 000 person organization and one of the things that we discovered through this process was that we couldn’t just take our traditional full day multi-day design sprint whether we were running three days or four days or five days. we couldn’t just translate this into the virtual environment and just hold a video a collaboration session for eight hours a day. This just wasn’t handy possible a couple sprint masters actually did do it initially and found that it was not the most effective way to work.
Not just for the distribution of time but also for all the other demands on people’s lives and what they were going through and still are continuing to juggle these days. So we were doing and we still are doing some where we distribute over time zones in shorter time sessions. Looking at how can we you know set this up to be possible and to to combat video conference fatigue.
But what we really discovered is that it’s about more than just distributing the time. Time is operating really differently has been operating really differently for all of us. We’re you know having to shift the way that we live and work into our homes and juggling things like homeschooling and caregiving so we have less time but in the virtual environment we actually were discovering that it was taking more time to do everything than we would do in person.
So a very interesting contraction of time happening and we had to go kind of back to the beginning and think about you know what is the design sprint afforded us and in the past it was really this container this brand a calling card that would get us in the door and allow us to get everybody together in a room. And then you know we could work it out once we got in the room we would do a lot of advanced planning user research, problem framing, you know talking with our stakeholders, making sure that we’re using everyone’s time really effectively.
But sometimes we would find that actually this is what we were doing when we got into the room. We did similar to some of Surya’s wonderful illustrations a lot of the process ends up you know being pivoting on in the moment while you’ve got all the important and the right people in the room to do the workshop. We actually had to to step we had to look at what are our real goals and our very very crisp goals for every session that we’re holding.
And I’ve been thinking about this as this concept of atomizing the sprint. What are the goals of each of the activities in the sprint and how is that getting us towards a larger goal. Can we break down that larger goal in a way that we can make progress more effectively with people’s time. So this means really crisply focusing on the goals for each sprint per session and that’s not always about product outcomes a lot of times it is but we would get benefits from getting everyone in a room together. Like shared vocabulary knowledge, sharing increased collaboration, and sometimes you wouldn’t set that out as the goal for the session but now we had to be even more intentional about designing these sessions for the needs of not just the product but also the people.
We also had to get the tech and the tools right so the sessions would go smoothly. There’s always going to be something that goes wrong but we need to build the confidence in the technology and a lot of that was getting comfortable. What are the different tools I know a lot of folks have had many discussions about what are the tools to be used and what tools are available. But you know this was something that we had to onboard ourselves to very quickly.
And as I mentioned designing for that we’re bringing into the sprint. Because really it is all about the people co-creating together building relationships and connections together so that they can be more creative and collaborate and problem solve together. Recognising when sometimes we really need that sprint to improve, that the conversation to improve the collaboration not just for the outcomes so this is something that maybe in the past we kind of got for free.
When we would get together in person and now we’d have to spend more time planning and prepping for it. So the outcomes from our quick pivot earlier this year was we developed these really quick reusable templates and tools for everyone across the company to use and we allowed folks like the cloud ux team to better identify opportunities. To meet their customers needs with sessions focused on empathy mapping and aligning a team on the product mvp. So not running the whole sprint all the way to the prototype and user test but really narrowing in on what we need right now.
To define those critical user journeys together collaboratively and the google health team did this earlier this year. Mapping assumptions to find gaps and understand what we don’t know. the google classroom team used this sprint to help you know the identify these gaps so they would know where to invest their resources.
There were teams even setting long-term visions and road maps in longer sessions over multiple days and really looking at you know who needs to be involved in these conversations. How do we spread these out to get the outcomes that we need and even some of these more softer benefits such as helping a team form helping a team create a shared vision or a shared understanding of their value proposition.
And doing fun activities in tools like Mural. Yes so with all this we were able to keep our team sprinting. We were able to keep our velocity and we had over 60 percent of our teams actually continued to run design sprints and participate in sprints.
One of the the questions in the chat is you know how could we be focused on not in person on only in-person collaboration and I will say- We have many different forms of collaboration across the company. Design sprints are a specific type in which we really got the value out of bringing people together synchronously. But we use many different techniques for asynchronous collaboration. So I just want to make sure people get the picture that it’s not like we’re this was the only method that we had or do continue to have.
We use lots of amazing google tools for this asynchronous collaboration across the globe but one of the
things that I mean we did end up finding some great benefits. To build on what Surya was saying about this being a real opportunity time we found that this did allow us to have even more engagement from engineering and product because this became a relief from their daily activities that they were doing an opportunity to work in a different way.
We were able to include people that maybe couldn’t get on a plane and fly so folks that have other restrictions in their lives and weren’t able to actually participate in person. So this really made it more inclusive as well as this did working digitally.
You know we could also becomes a levelling ground and creating space for more quieter voices. We found this to be a big benefit that people are able to contribute more broadly across and then of course the sprint documents itself. When you’re working in a digital tool and our sprint masters are have been pretty happy about that there’s a lot of upfront work even more upfront work to design our sessions but in the end we save some of that when we have to share and document and spread the learnings from the sprint afterwards in addition to design sprint spreading and scaling this across google.
Many sprint masters have also been contributing back to the go back one more back to the community running sprints for things like the california public school system. We ran a five-team sprint to help the california schools determine, figure out how to go back to school with distance learning this fall. We worked with the new york city public services group of non-profits to increase access to employment opportunities and public services. And we’ve had teams working with focused on equity health research to improve access to health opportunities.
So lots of great impact from the increase in our skills remotely and virtually to be able to reach out beyond the the confines of our own locales and to pivot and continue to learn and grow as an organization.
Steph Cruchon: one person asked about the soft benefits of in-person sprints.
KAI HALEY: I’m not sure if soft is the right word but it’s what happens when we do have time and we make time and space for conversations that don’t happen because you’re not always in the same office. Or you don’t have a chance to run into each other in the kitchen or you know the water cooler as they say so we get that space and time for people to share their perspectives and the collaboration methods. Really make room for those conversations as well. c
Steph: Can I ask a question about i’m sure it’s secret but what are the topics of these sprints? Are they about products are they about the way you work now because of covid? Can you disclose a little bit about what kind of challenges you have?
KAI HALEY : I mean historically we’ve used design sprints for all kinds of things right. We’ll use them to improve our products and make our products more user-centered but we also use them to improve processes. So in terms of you know in this time people have definitely turned to this methodology to help them figure out how do we better support our employees at home. How do we better communicate. You can use that process to problem solver to co-create together solutions as well as defining product vision. Improving your critical user journeys and things like that.
In virtual sprints now we’ve been using a variety of tools including mural as well as google slides and google drawing and of course google meets. And that’s you know for the collaboration we need a collaboration canvas for prototyping. We have all the standard prototyping tools that teams will use for digital products. So it really is dependent on the the the problem space that you’re working
in.
If you’re designing a digital product versus a process versus a physical product.
Sabrina: I would have a question- are other remote design sprints have impact to your solutions and products? Do you already have an evidence about that?
Kai Haley: So it’s an interesting question, because you know we always talk about the impact of design sprints and how long does it take to see the evidence. And so we are you know five or six months into this right now. Our launch timelines are you know relatively longer than that but what I will say is the evidence that we’re seeing is around being able to maintain our velocity, maintain the speed at which we’re working. Which is one of the things that we rely on design sprints for alignment and shared
vision.
But we also rely on it as a way a method to make a a way to make decisions faster. To get evidence and data to support you know or to make sure that we’re investing in the right products so we are still able with remote testing and remote design sprints. To continue working in the way we would normally you know on the the similar timelines.
The evidence is coming the projects are being launched. On shorter timelines it takes time to really measure because you have what you get at the end of the week, but there is what you get after a month or years.
Jeroen: I had the outside in question as an outsider. Let’s say we look at google as let’s say digital first digital only in everything and you gave us the impression a little bit that google had to handle let’s say the reality of going from all in-person sprinting and collaboration to a more virtual style. Was that a surprise was it a wake-up call how is google looking back at let’s say the notion of having to change that way of working and being so in-person oriented being such a digital and virtual company?
KAI HALEY: well, I think it’s less about being digital and virtual and more about being global because as we can see here we’re all operating on different time zones and when you fly somewhere you normalize your time zone. We’re all there together we’re all working right now. We can’t ask people to work all night long so we actually have to converge at space or I mean time, right? So we have to converge time and that was really where we found the big challenge. Less around you know having the right tools because we were able to getup to speed and have the right tools and have the processes to do the work. And more comes down to the hands where we have people who have lives in different places around the world and to bring them together in a way that it is respectful of you know their work-life balance. All of these are the things that I think are are much more challenging to resolve than the the digital aspect or the the technology aspect of it.
It just comes down to the fact that in order for me to you know get to be on for the first speaker this morning I had to wake up at like 6am where it’s dark out. I’m just saying that it’s a moment where you you realize you know we can overcome space but we can’t always overcome time.
Michael: my question is more about how you manage your try to influence the difference in motivation from or the implication of the participants during the sprints especially now that they are going to remote. I know, some people are not really sometimes motivated at the beginning and how do you manage people’s motivations in the sprint to get them to be engaged and influence their participation. Sometimes you have people that are very motivated and they have control remote or through a screen and some others really prefer the in person so you notice different motivation between the two people. Do you have tips to manage this?
KAI HALEY: yes actually, that was one of the areas that we really did spend some time leaning into which is how do you create a sense of connection and safe space virtually. Which is a different than when you’re doing it in person. So we’ve been training our sprint masters in virtual facilitation methods mindfulness improv even to try to, you know, set the space virtually.
That creates a sense of safety for people to participate. We also rely on each person’s participation because in that’s one of the best things about the sprint process is it’s very clear when you don’t contribute so each person has their turn. So we don’t actually struggle so much with that participation once you set those ground rules.
But you know there are folks who are less engaged that can be less engaged if they don’t have a really strong connection to the context of the sprint. So the other thing that we’ll do is make sure that everyone who’s participating and attending is really critical to the outcomes. Or you know really
understands what their role is. And a lot of times that is helping to define their role for them and
let them know what the expectations of them are.
When you invite them to the sprint and I will often do that in advance, when we invite people in.
Kate: hello thank you kai for a great talk, appreciate your time and your expertise. So my question is how do design sprints fit into the rest of your team’s road maps. When you’re getting these cross functional people together like developers and data people they all have their different road maps and plans so getting everybody to align to a sprint. How do you go about doing that?
KAI HALEY: it’s a great question and I think over time we have gotten a better approach to it which is I think really something to be thought of at a cultural level across the company. There are specific times in the year where people will say what we need to do is spread a sprint now. Because we’re going to be doing our resourcing, or we’re going to be doing our road mapping. So we’ll actually find an increase in requests for sprints usually towards fall planning when people are thinking about the next year and they’ll bring everyone together to align on you know what is our vision going to be for next year.
So we’ll set the sprints specifically in the calendar to influence those roadmaps so rather than say randomly holding a sprint and then being like oh sorry the roadmap’s already set and this is actually one of the things that we advise in our training. Is to always have a conversation with the product team and understand the road maps already in place. And make sure that sprint is going to be pushing those goals forward and is being held at a time when the outcomes will be actionable, so we usually find at least in the beginning of the year and towards the end of the year are kind of the hot spots for when people decide to run bigger sprints.
But there are teams that work in more regular design sprints that are maybe more iterative rather than vision long term, vision setting or roadmap setting. So it again depends on the type of sprint that you’re running and what the end goal of it is.
I could just repeatedly see if there’s I could address a topic from different angle is my sort of like my well concern with design sprint is the goal setting. I’ve been in those design sprint workshops that clients didn’t properly address the goal that we want to achieve. And it was absolutely a waste of time. So how do you avoid such situation? I know it’s a big topic, maybe like if you have hard-earned tips to share very concert defining goals for the design experience that would be really valuable.
Kai Haley: one of my favourite relatively new tools is problem framing so even running a shorter session in advance, using some problem framing methods. Jay mMalone has a nice one from new haircut and setting the time in advance of a longer sprint to bring together a couple of higher level stakeholders to really frame the problem. Because I have certainly as you mentioned been in a sprint where we didn’t do enough of that in advance. And we didn’t have the right people in the conversation when we started the sprint because we hadn’t narrowed the focus down early enough.
So if you aren’t able to get a really clearly defined problem through stakeholder interviews and conversations with your with your team actually hosting a short session. It can be really valuable before you launch into a bigger sprint.
Jackie: thanks for your time today. I’m just wondering do the sprint masters sit as a centralized resource or are they embedded in the product teams?
KAI HALEY: so they’re it’s an interesting model they’re embedded in the product teams but they are encouraged and very frequently do run sprints for other product teams. So acting kind of like a centralized volunteer crew and one of the principles of google which I really love is embracing mobility. So people do move from one product to the next. You spend a couple years working on photos and then feel like you know you’re really interested about math on maps or something like that so our sprint masters are you know experts that get a lot of value from working with other product teams.
This helps to build your relationships it helps to cross pollinate ideas across the the organization and so it kind of becomes this added benefit to both the Sprintmaster and the product teams that they work with. Because they can be an outside they can bring an outside perspective to the challenge. Often it can actually be quite hard to be a facilitator for your own product area.
And I think I see one about facilitating and taking part. I’ll just jump onto that. we highly recommend that facilitators do not also act as sprinters in the sprint. Personally I have done it myself and we have a number of sprint masters who are say the only ux designer on their team and they’re asked you know to fill in for that resource. It’s unfortunately it’s really hard to be a good facilitator and a good participant at the same time. So we generally recommend you don’t do that and if you can recruit somebody to be that essential ux resource or if it’s your team to recruit another facilitator and that’s where our volunteer group really comes in handy. If I need a design sprint, I can just email the group and say can somebody come help.
You kind of recruit the right profile at google like is it making designers or people excited to be on sprints, or engineers? Is it a help for you?
KAI HALEY: let me just make sure I understand- do people enjoy being on sprints is that contribute to their job satisfaction? If it helps you to find the right profile that people want to join google because they can be part of sprints. I think ultimately it is a better way of working which is part of why i’m talking to all of you guys today. Because it’s really to change the way that I work. So having that as a way of working and having people understand it as a way of working helps when people come to google.
Because they’ll know that you have really great ways of collaborating and we do encourage those relationships across those silos that I was mentioning. Like 11 years ago we had really much more challenging silos than we do now. We have really strong ux support, we have strong relationships with our engine product team. So my hope is that is something that other people also look for and benefit from. So the design sprint process enables that and makes it a great place to work.
Design Sprint & The Innovation Cookbook
STEPH CRUCHON: Hello everyone so this is our last talk of the day and i’m so happy and so proud to welcome Mr Jake Knapp. Who is the inventor of the design sprint, he’s a New York Times Bestselling author. Jake spent actually 10 years at google where he designed products like google hangout, he also designed products like gmail and he was part of google venture. And as part of google venture he designed a process that’s called the design sprint.
I was talking about that just before and he’s of course the writer of our bible- the sprint book that is the blue book that everyone has seen already. And it’s one of the most influential book in UX.
Jake Knapp has been coaching teams in places like Slack, Lego, Ideo, Harvard, Nasa and i’m so jealous he has been a guest instructor at the MIT and the Harvard Business School. And he’s currently among the world’s tallest designer and this joke doesn’t get old, right?
So please welcome from Seattle USA, my friend Jake Knapp.
JAKE KNAPP: Thank you so much Steph. Well, I’m going to share my screen and just to break the illusion of me knowing what I’m doing here. You will have to watch me slowly share my screen.
Thank you so much everyone for getting up early, staying up late, or just being on your computer at a normal time, depending on what time zone you’re in. I appreciate it and I’m so psyched to be here. Although I was more hoping it was going to be in Switzerland.
When we first started talking about this I was really imagining being in Switzerland, in August, right now. But you know this is still quite lovely.
I want to talk to you guys about the design sprint. And about how you can use it as sort of an innovation cookbook.
DANCE BREAK
But I also know that you may have been sitting in front of your computer all day. So I want to give you the chance first for a bit of something different, a dance break. I think dance breaks are important during quarantine, so I am a hundred percent serious. I’m gonna play some music, Steph and Julien, they’re gonna stream it over and you’re gonna hear it. I’m gonna dance, and I hope that the folks who are on zoom will dance. We should all dance for like 60 seconds just to kind of get the cobwebs out. So if you all are ready. Let’s do it!
By the way I’m not a good dancer, I only started dancing in the privacy of my home since quarantine. So you can’t embarrass yourself.
Thank you for those of you who danced! A warning before I get started with the talk itself, it’s a sales pitch for the design sprint okay?
THE STORY OF THE DESIGN SPRINT
I’ll just be upfront about that. I’m going to try to convince you to run design sprints. Im not going to apologize for that, that’s just kind of how I roll. But first before I pitch you on design sprints I want to talk about breakfast.
This is me in my kitchen, and I can see my dog. Here this is me in my kitchen and I am not a good cook, okay? I’m not, I’ll be honest with you about the only thing I know how to make is scrambled eggs. I don’t make them very well. Part of my philosophy in the kitchen is to just get things done as quickly as possible, get out of there, so I don’t use a lot of extra utensils.
When it comes to scrambled eggs I’m just breaking the eggs right in the frying pan and mixing them right in there with the spatula. Because then, you know, you save on cleanup afterwards, and these eggs are kind of gross. But that’s just how I do it, okay? How I do it -is a problem. And i’ll get back to this. Before I tell you the rest of that story about scrambled eggs.
It brings to mind this whole topic of problems and I have problems, personal problems, scrambled egg problems, also product problems. I’ve had problems building products for a long time because I’ve been building products for a long time. I’ve been interested in making things, and all the way back to when I was a kid.
If we go back in time all the way to 1989, when I was maybe 11-12 years old. It’s a picture of me from that time working on a computer. I used to use this program called hypercard to make computer games. There’s a computer game that I made when I was a kid moved the mouse around the maze and this was great.
My only customers at this time were my friends and I was working by myself so I didn’t have to negotiate with anybody. If I could figure out how to do it, I could just do it. And then if my friends liked the game, then that was a success. So this was sort of perfect no problems really at this time.
About 10 years later I was starting to be more of a grown up. I got my first job working at a company, doing design work. And I worked at Oakley– the sunglasses company. My job there was to make animated gifs. That were ads this back in the old days. You wouldn’t go to google, you’d go to yahoo and there were these banner ads, animated gifs. So I was making these animated gif ads for sunglasses.
It was kind of weird, I’d come up with a bunch of different ideas for different ads. And my boss would come by my desk and he’d sit down by my desk. He’d push up the sleeve of his shirt and he’d put his arm right up next to my face.
Then he would ask me to flip through the different ads that I had made, and he would say: if the hair on my arm stands up then we’ll use it. So I just go through all the ideas I had and he’d say no no no. And then he’d be like yeah.
It was weird, right? That was weird. But over time, I started to get the hang of what made the hair on his arm stand up. I kind of figured it out, but you know it was weird. It this weird boss was sort of my first work problem with making products.
A couple years later, I got a job working at Microsoft. And some of the same problems, were there some weird bosses there. Well, actually, my direct bosses were pretty good. But there was this other problem of like the boss who comes in and swoops and kind of poops on what you’re working on.
So it’s like you think you’ve got the plan all figured out with your team or as an individual. And somebody just sort of comes in, and there’s a boss. You know because the organization is really big, there’s some super big boss from like another department or whatever who comes in, and changes things. This was really frustrating.
It’s also hard working with a group of people. I had only worked on my own before, and so now so much talking when you work with people. So much talking and I don’t know if you’ve ever been in meetings that kind of go like this. But this was like every meeting.
It was just back and forth, back and forth people jumping into brainstorming, people arguing, and it’s frustrating man. It’s so frustrating, hard to get things done.
But despite all of that I have to say I was lucky I had a good team. We worked on a really cool project called the Encarta encyclopedia. There was a an encyclopedia on cd-rom that microsoft had been making all through the 1990s. It was a real successful product. And you know that’s what we were working on, it was cool.
The way that we built it, every year we’d come out with a new version of it. The product development process was a well-oiled machine. We would build build build build build and we’d launch every fall at the time for kids to go back to school. So there’d be a new version of the encyclopedia for them. We really knew how to do this well.
The team had been doing it forever before I got there. It was cool until 2001. Now in 2001 this website came out called wikipedia. At first we thought it was kind of funny as you can see they didn’t even have their name above the fold of the website.
But as time went on this became less funny because pretty soon they had more articles than in encarta. And people weren’t going to yahoo anymore, they were going to google, they’re running searches. Wikipedia results were showing up right at the top. This was really really bad for us.
So we we’re trying to figure out what to do. And we thought, we argued, and we discussed with people. And you know, we did the same thing we got bosses coming in. We had to negotiate with different bosses. We’ve had to negotiate with one another. And this new problem cropped up which was risk aversion. We were afraid of messing things up.
So we knew we were making some money by selling our current product, and because we were protective of that money, we didn’t want to try giving our product away for free online. And that aversion to risk ended up tanking our product.
Because our sales they just kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller, and finally since we weren’t competing effectively with wikipedia online in this new free space. There was no justification to keep the product alive at all. And then Encarta got shut down.
So in 2005 I was still working at Microsoft. I went to work on a new project. Now this was a cool idea. We had this idea that we’re going to make a touch screen device with an app store which time will tell was like a really good idea. But you might have noticed that most of the touch screen devices with app stores in them you use are not by Microsoft.
The reasons for that were the same things that have been troubling me elsewhere where I had worked. Boss swooping and pooping, too much talking, risk aversion. We argued, we argued, we tried to convince different leaders in the company to support our plan. Eventually after a year and a half this project was killed. Before we ever even created a product. So frustrating!
So frustrating! I thought it’s got to be a better way to build things. I quit my job at Microsoft I went to go work at Google.
Because I’m a traitor, and at Google I was working on Gmail. And on the gmail team I found a lot of the same problems just in a different form. We had upper bosses you know you try to figure it out what’s Larry or Sergey or Eric Schmidt thinking. And we would have heard things secondhand. You’d finally get into meeting with them and they’d come up with some new thing in the room that they wanted you to do. It was crazy, so this was kind of tough.
But there was a new problem I found- distraction. At Google everyone was so motivated to do great things. They were so empowered and excited and trying to take on so much. That man there was just so much going on. I started in the beginning to add it on my calendar. It was clear and I was stoked. I was like: let’s do this thing, and I start meeting with people you know, and getting to know folks which is cool.
I get in the flow of the team but pretty soon my calendar is just packed and everybody’s calendars packed and you’re working on many projects at a time you’re juggling them switching contacts every 30 to 60 minutes. And it is impossible to do big important work when you’re constantly switching contacts and constantly in meetings you can’t do it.
So these problems were tough. They were very tough. To give an example of this in 2007 I had started working on this project. It’s a 20% project that me and a couple of other engineers started up. We called it Google Meeting. Our idea was to do multi-way video chat in the web browser and we thought that would be useful for people in businesses.
And so we worked on this for a few years. This whole time we were working on it. We’re you know arguing we’re trying to find some executive to support it. We’re encountering all these same problems of distraction. As I watched this happen, I realized that oh my god I’ve seen this happen before. This is like really similar to what happened at Microsoft. So we’ve got to do something about it.
In 2009 I went to Stockholm, where the other two folks worked. In january and I spent a week together with them.
We cleared our calendars and we decided we’re just going to make a prototype of this thing.
We agreed on what it might look like. Big video on the top, small video feeds on the bottom we thought a little bit about how to market and explain what this Google Meeting thing was and then the engineer built a prototype of it.
We started using it on our gmail team, we started using it around the company, and eventually this thing launched as Ggoogle Hangouts and eventually as Google Meet.
The pandemic has been great for their business I think. But this project I thought when I looked back on it was pretty cool. We had gone from this really bad path that was plagued by the worst of the big organization problems. Instead we had built a prototype in a week and once we built the prototype, everything changed.
Because we had confidence then that this is something valuable this is something we should build and we roughly know a form of it that will work. We can stop arguing, we can start just building it.
I started thinking about this first moment of a big project and I thought. Man I’ve been inside a few companies now and i’ve never seen a great practice for starting of big projects. I’ve never seen teams do anything other than kind of be chaotic and kind of struggle at the beginning. Because it’s hard when you have a big idea. It’s hard it could be paralyzed trying to figure out where to start.
So I was thinking about this beginning part of projects. And I was thinking about it at the time and you know I’m thinking and I’m thinking and I’m thinking and and finally I kind of go back in time in my mind and I’m going all the way back to 2007.
ABOUT CHECKLISTS
2007 I had read this article in the New Yorker magazine and this article was called- The Checklist. You can look it up now it’s free to read online if you search for the checklist i’ll have a link to it at the end.
It’s fascinating Atul Gawande, great writer, he would go on to write a book about this called the Checklist Manifesto. What he’s talking about with checklists is this idea that like if you get in an airplane they have followed a checklist before they take off. Right, they’ve made sure they’ve got fuel, they’ve checked all these different systems and they use a literal checklist. They’re fine making sure everything is in order before they take off.
Gawande was proposing like we should be doing the same thing in hospitals. Medical care has gotten so complex that we can’t just assume we’ll remember all the steps each time.
That we’ll know all the best practices we should follow a checklist. It’s a great idea and he challenged the reader to think about how checklists could be applied elsewhere in the world.
And when I read this I was like wow this is a really really interesting idea.
So in 2007 I’m like I’m going to use checklists for whatever I can in my work. I’m going to have a checklist for my email for before I make a presentation, before I do design work. I’m gonna have a checklist to keep track of my different checklists. I was super super stoked about this this whole idea.
Now three years later I started to think what if a checklist could be used for the beginning of projects. What if I started to put together a way that that we could sort of pre-flight make sure we had done the things we needed to do to be confident to start things off. And this I thought was a really cool idea.
I thought there is something here. If I can just figure out what goes in it. So the big project checklist. What should go in it? I wasn’t sure, that was part of the problem. I really did not know.
I had a sense that in my own career there were bright spots there were times when my own process had worked really well. And I kind of had a sense of that for my own like design checklist that i’d created over the last few years.
I also had a sense of the projects that had worked really well. Like Google Meet, and at the beginning of that project that one week, where we all got together. That changed everything. That was really great and there were moments like that when I worked on Gmail. There were moments like that at Microsoft and Encarta. There were these bright spots that had worked well. I had seen teams who were really effective seeing things that they did, that were really effective.
And I thought, okay, some of those things are good and I can also maybe, if I’m using a checklist, it’s a way to put in some new ideas so I can put a new idea in there, if I read about something that I think is cool I can put it in. I can try it out to see how it goes. If I keep track of it on a checklist and I can maybe see what works what doesn’t work. Make it better over time.
So I decided to call this a design sprint. In 2010 working at Google I ran the first design sprint on the Gmail team. And over the next couple of years I’d run about 25 of these with different teams at Google.
Then I went to go work at Google Ventures where I started doing design sprints with startups and together with my colleagues. There were so many companies in our portfolio that we were able to do 20 25 30 design sprints a year. And by 2016 we’d run well over 100 of them and really perfected this checklist.
KEY CONCEPTS
All the while that I was doing these sprints I was kind of keeping track of what works and what doesn’t work. Taking notes, putting down ideas, notting things down and tracking this checklist.
You probably want to know what a design sprint is. Let’s talk about that super fast. You have a big challenge and you get together a team of people. It should be five to seven. I’ve found more than seven slows things down too much. You kind of want five so you have diverse opinions, although you can do it with fewer or more if you have to.
But five to seven’s the sweet spot. They’ve got to have diverse perspectives and you’ve got to have a decision maker involved in the room. That’s key! You got to get that boss in there. You take one week of time, you clear the calendar and then instead of the normal meetings. Instead of all those normal emails and slacks, all the defaults that are that drive us crazy we run a checklist.
The high level view of how that checklist works. It’s super granular and super specific. But the high level view is:
On Monday the team makes a map. We take this problem of distraction and we get the team focused on one key moment by sharing information, mapping it out on the whiteboard and then at the end of the day choosing one target customer type. And one key moment that we’re going to focus on.
Now the whole week becomes about this customer in this moment. We’ll recruit five of these target customers to join us on the friday at the end of the sprint. Snd we’ll spend the rest of the week trying to come up with solutions. So that we can simulate what that moment will be like for those target customers and watch them as they experience it.
On Tuesday we sketch solutions. So there’s this problem of too much talking, and I found the best way to get around that to level the playing field and bring ideas from every person on the team forward in a high quality manner. Is to work alone together in the same room. So we’ve got everybody working in silence. Coming up with their own solutions in detail. So these solutions have a lot of detail behind them. We can then have a healthy competition between different solutions from each person.
On Wednesday we have to decide among these different solutions. Instead of the boss swooping and pooping on things, the boss is actually going to be in the room deciding up front. Which is super super helpful. So we actually take a look at all those solutions. We can do it in silence without sales pitches because they’ve been sketched out. We do a quick critique, we hear from every person on the team, being able to hear their perspective.
But in the end the decider the boss makes the call choosing two or three solutions that she or he that they want to see prototyped.
On Thursday we build that prototype so we’re really able to tackle risk aversion head on by getting people into this frame of mind. If we’re going to build something realistic and then we’re going to throw it away. We’re going to create a simulation, not a real product. We’re just going to simulate what it might look like when it was finished.
If we go all in on one of these ideas here’s an example of a simulated ipad app. Simulated down to the point of it looks like it’s in the app store but these are all just screenshots and animations. It’s very easy to create a realistic prototype like this in a day.
And on Friday we run the test on our prototype so we’re bringing in customers now to simulate what that moment is going to be like. Instead of arguing about what might happen in the future which I found was really at the heart of most of the problems i’ve experienced building products.
And i’ve seen teams experience building products comes down to uncertainty. We want things to go well, so we argue about them. We don’t want to waste time, we don’t want to waste the opportunity of this cool idea we have, so we argue.
But instead we can watch it happen right now and then learn from it. That’s the idea with what happens on friday. One-on-one interviews one person from the team watching one target customer, as they use the prototype. And then while these five interviews are going on one after another, after another, the team is watching from another room and taking notes.
We’re able to make mistakes early in this way so a bunch of things will go wrong in every design sprint. That’s expected that’s welcome that’s exactly what we want. We want to screw up early we want to learn the hard way. In a way that’s not so hard. Then in this way we’re able to build confidence before building the product. So we can repeat the sprint, fix the things that are broken test it until we’re sure – yeah this idea is right.
People do want this product. There’s a fit for this in the market. We can execute instead of going through this long winding road. We do a simulation up front then we have the confidence to go ahead and execute and launch and build that thing the right way.
So that’s how the design sprint works map sketch decide prototype and test.
We take those problems we get rid of them because we’re clearing the calendar. We’re restructuring everything using the checklist and in the design sprint the team’s focused they’re opinionated they’re decisive. This is a whole different way of looking at product solving.
It puts us in a frame of mind where we can take risks. We can be bold and we won’t be punished by our colleagues, we won’t be punished by the market in the long term. If we’re wrong we can find out up front.
DESIGN SPRINT CASE STUDIES
In 2016 feeling pretty good about this process I wrote a book with my colleagues called -Sprint. The book has the checklist in the back, 14 page long super detailed checklist. And in the time since, so it’s been four years now, the process really spread from those first few sprints. You know with those startups that we were working with with Google and then to around the world.
It’s been used in all kinds of different contexts. Design sprints have been used at big tech companies, so certainly it’s been used a lot. At Google these are the first few teams that I worked with way back in 2010 11 and 12 at Google. But you heard from Kai earlier she’s trained over 800 sprint facilitators, she’s got a veritable army of people who are able to run design sprints all around the company with all kinds of products.
But not just on products again as you heard from Kai. It can be applied to different kinds of challenges including things like the hiring process, things that are totally about a system or a service that you’re running inside of a company. Design sprints also work at big tech companies who hate Google. I’ve heard stories of design sprints that companies like Apple, Amazon and even Microsoft and Facebook. Facebook who probably hates Google more than anyone used design sprints to redesign their app and wrote about it publicly.
So it must be because it works I assume and not because they like Google. Design Sprints definitely work at startups. My experience working with companies it was super powerful and in different kinds of contexts we ran sprints with a coffee company who was using design sprints to test a coffee delivery service.
We use design sprints with Flatiron health a company who was building oncology software. With One Medical– a company, who was building health clinics. With Uber who used it to test new features and new services that they might offer. With Slack who use design sprints to develop their marketing, when they were very first growing out of their initial audience of tech companies into the large sort of global company.
These companies have been successful business-wise too. You know a couple of these have been acquired actually by Swiss companies and some of the others have gone public. It’s been a you know something that has proven to build products that work well in the marketplace.
Design sprints work at traditional organizations as well. A cool story out there on about Save The Children and non-profit in the UK using design sprints to improve early language development for children. The British Museum using design sprints to improve way finding within the museum itself.
3m with help from Kai’s team at google running design sprints actually on post-it notes which is just mind-boggling because of course you use a lot of post-it notes in a sprint, so this is cool. Deutsche Telekom use design sprints to reorganize Deutsche Telekom. So kind of a meta self thing there.
I’ve heard about that, they ran 12 design sprints at once working on that project and the New York Times not to be outdone 13 design sprints at once.
Lego 80 design sprints in eight weeks, testing new ideas for products.
Design sprints work for all kinds of challenges and you know I’ve heard stories from pretty much any kind of thing I can imagine now. Which is sort of it’s really cool. It’s far more than I imagined it would do originally. And it’s reaching the point now where folks are teaching it at universities: London School of Economics teaches design sprints to MBA students. I’ve taught at MIT to MBA students at the Harvard business school to MBA students. Who are these are folks. At MIT and Harvard who are starting startups actually and using their school process and using design sprints to test those new ideas.
Reykjavik University in Iceland has run 96 design sprints at once a couple years ago. Last year they ran 100 design sprints at once. And this year they ran 100 design sprints at once online. All the same time online.
Of course in the pandemic there’s a different story. You can’t get five to seven folks together in the same room. But it turns out you can run design sprints effectively online.
And here’s some photos from Iceland from that sprint. If you of course you’re running a sprint at home cats will get involved and as well zoom backgrounds.
But design sprints work in a pandemic. This idea of a remote design sprint is something that a lot of folks have thousands of teams around the world have been doing and writing about now. Sharing awesome best practices. So here is a video of a sprint that actually Steph did with the United Nations and Terre des Hommes.
I’m gonna really try to sort of skip over that very quickly because french is not my my native language or even a language that’s anywhere on my list.
But you can see here in this time lapse what happened. They’ve got three parallel Design Sprints with folks from all around the world. Something that’s actually quite powerful about doing this over video. You can have people who are in countries all around the world participating at the same time together. Super cool! And this is all sort of mceed by Steph and using a template. The team has one sort of shared room, one is for shared whiteboard. A lot of different tools that make this possible Mural, Miro. So there’s a remote sprint template Steph has created and again I’ll link to that as well at the end of the talk.
And we put together with my co-author John Zeratsky and our friend Jackie Colburn a Remote Design Sprint guide to kind of detail through how to run a remote sprint. So you can find all of that at the end it’s totally doable.
I would say now is actually a pretty interesting time to think about remote sprints because design sprints definitely work. They help you waste less time, they help you take more risks, get closer to your customers and closer to your team.
But it is hard to try something new. I realize that I know how hard it can be to try something new. I I’ll take you back to my kitchen. You know and this idea of cooking scrambled eggs in a different way to me was very daunting.
My wife saw me do this day after day after day. She saw the expression on my face and she said you know, why don’t you use a whisk. Why don’t you mix the eggs before you put them in to the pan. I said I’m not going to use a whisk I don’t want to get another thing dirty. It’s probably not going to be any better, why bother.
So year after year after year I did it my way, I said it was fine. And finally after 20 years of this in quarantine I had to make breakfast almost every day for my two boys. And they did not like my eggs. Because they’re home because they don’t go off to school I hear about it all day long.
Finally I looked around to make sure that my wife wasn’t around, and I took down some cookbooks and I looked up how to make scrambled eggs. These cookbooks and they all said the same thing they all said you should use a whisk. So I got out the whisk and I mixed the eggs together. And you know what it turns out that they’re pretty good. So the lesson of all this it’s not that I should have listened to my wife 20 years ago okay. I just want to be really clear about that, this is not the lesson.
The lesson is that recipes work and 2020 is a great year to try something new. So I encourage you to try the design sprint recipe. Give it a shot, you know, see how it works. Try it as an experiment and you can find out more about this at jakenapp.com/itoday
I’ve got links to the remote sprint guide with Steph’s template the checklist story which I think is kind of cool and more resources on design sprints.
Q&A Session
I’ll take some questions now but first before I do you guys have listened to me talk for a while I think that you’ve earned another dance break so we’ll take another 60 second dance break before we do the questions.
HOW TO GUARANTEE EXECUTION AFTER THE DESIGN SPRINT
REMI: I was just wondering, you know as design sprint is several years old now, and getting more and more popular. We see more and more people who are unfamiliar with the design and products world who are more keen to use it. I’ve noticed a particular kind of challenge which is, these are pretty okay for a week in order to test brand new ideas. You had interesting feedback about how to process it and how to build something thanks to design sprint.
But what we observe most of the time suddenly when it’s back to normal, clients are unprepared and there’s lack of the right people in the organization. Would you have tips for them or for us to capture efficiently the feedback and everything what comes out of the sprint so we can maximize opportunities? You know for it to becoming something real, not something what is going to be forgotten in a couple of weeks when we get back to normal?
JAKE KNAPP: That’s a great question. One of the big challenges I heard Kai mentioned the importance of lining up the design sprint with the time when the team is ready to execute. I mean one of the things that I’ve seen, it’s very frustrating. It’s not exactly what you’re talking about, but it’s losing momentum afterwards because the team doesn’t start building right away. When that happens you know you see this great idea, you see the team feeling like all right we’ve got it figured out we’ve got the confidence. And if there isn’t sort of a train track to get that train on right away then that momentum has nowhere to go. So if the team is ready that’s step one. You have to know that the team is going to be ready before you run a design sprint. That they’re going to be able to to build as soon as you have confidence.
But one of the things I’ve found to be really helpful, especially when a team’s taking on an ambitious project is to follow up that first design sprint with another one. And where you improve on what you learned and you get to the point where the prototype that you’ve created for your design sprint is already as sort of an artifact of what you’re going to build in the future.
It shows people what it can look like when you get done. And I think that when people see something that’s realistic that’s exciting. That is proven in customer testing in this way. This can change the way the team operates. People can get behind something and understand something that looks real.
They usually you know, i’ve seen a lot of times, where people can be satisfied with giving up on an abstract idea. But it’s hard to give up on an idea that you’ve seen and you’ve experienced you’ve clicked through it or tapped through it or whatever you’ve used the thing yourself. If it’s a physical prototype you’ve held it in your hands. You know how good it could be. And once you know how good it could be it’s very hard to walk away.
So I think that can be powerful actually the prototype pushing the prototype a bit farther until it answers all those questions that you have. You have confidence in it and it’s cool enough to excite the team.
But another part of the sprint is telling the story of the sprint. I’ve found that if I take photos during the week of the sprint or screenshots as the case might be and you know for the next hopefully just for the next few months. If I have pictures of what happened in the sprint and I can talk about this story. There’s a story behind every sprint that follows a similar story arc. The details are different but the the story arc is the same. And it’s we had a big problem a big question to answer, we got a group of people together you know. It’s like the lord of the rings, who got to the fellowship of the ring together. We set out to answer this question we made a map again just like the beginning of every great adventure story there’s like a map. Then we decided this was where we were going to focus we came up with these solutions. We built this prototype, we could show that prototype to people and then we can talk about. We’ve got pictures of the people doing the interviews I could show the key questions we asked and show what the answers were which ones were green which ones were red.
Then I can talk about what we decided afterwards to do and that story that sort of mystery that’s created about what’s going to happen when we do the test. And then we do the test and it’s answered. I think it can help to take the rest of the team if you’ve got a small team doing the sprint and then they’ve got to go and sort of spread this idea to others.
It can help people feel as though they understand the origin story of the project and it doesn’t feel like something that this other you know this outsiders brought. Just kind of dumped on us to do but instead it feels like something that outsider brought, kind of dumped on us. But instead it feels like something we can understand. We know why things are the way they are and as humans we just want to know why. We’re skeptical. And I think that can help as well.
Question: Just about what you said about being sure that the client is actually ready to go into sprints. I know you’re very fun you’re very keen on checklist yourself. Would you have specific key questions which comes to your mind about how can you check that the client’s actually is ready to perform?
JAKE KNAPP: I do have key questions and I do kind of have a checklist for before the sprint and it’s pretty simple actually. One of the questions is- will the decide be there, who’s the decision maker. Can you be certain can you commit that that person will be in the room. So if the decider if that boss won’t be in the room that’s already a really bad sign. That’s a sign that they’re not invested, that this project isn’t as important as we thought it was. That’s crutial. That’s a go no-go thing. The decider got to be in the room.
Is the team able to completely clear their calendars and be involved in the whole sprint? Again, that’s a pretty basic question. But it also tells me something about whether this project is right, whether it’s ready. And then the last one is it’s just very on the nose- it’s like are you ready to build right after the sprint is done. When will this project start. And if the project won’t start soon after the design sprint is over then you should be worried about whether it’ll start at all.
CAN YOU TELL US MORE ABOUT YOUR NEXT BOOK?
SABRINA: Hi Jake thanks for your talk. I would like to shift a bit the perspective.I know that you are writing a new book and it’s about science fiction if I’m right? So if the design sprints would be a part of this book, what problems are you solving with it.
JAKE KNAPP: How do I use the design sprint in a writing process? That’s yeah, the problem is partly that I want to write a science fiction book. But I think that what I’m trying to accomplish with the book is I want to help myself. Writing is kind of how I think it helps me think.
If I write something I it allows me to organize my thoughts in a different way. And so this book is a way for me to organize thoughts about my childhood, about the experience of being a kid. About memory and consciousness what makes humans aware. And about technology that I think is really interesting which is artificial intelligence and how I can try to understand better what it will mean for us all in the future.
So it’s a very selfish problem I guess it’s for me to try to think through those things. But I think that it’s a long shot that I can do that properly because I’m a business book writer. And barely that and not a not a science fiction writer but if I could do that in a way that works well for me maybe it’ll be interesting to other people too. And we’ll see that, time will tell. But that’s sort of the idea behind it.
HOW WE CAN GET A BETTER COMMITMENT BEFORE THE SPRINT
STEPH: I’m going to ask it for you. So the question from Mittali. I have challenges getting time from stakeholders. So my design sprint ends up breaking into two three weeks efforts. Does that sound like a familiar problem to you?
JAKE KNAPP: It definitely sounds like a familiar problem. You know, if you can get their time and that’s the only way to do it. Then you split the design sprint over. Two weeks is doable, three weeks I can imagine it gets tough.
It’s tough to keep rebooting people on all the contexts. The part of what works so well about the design sprint is that each day when people come back they still have in their mind all of the context that we’ve built together. All the information that was shared from the day before. So we’re like ready to rock and we’re ready to do more with it. It means that by the end of the week what the team is capable of doing and how quick they’re able to make complex decisions is remarkable.
Something you never see in the 30 to 60 minute meetings we normally have. So you’ll lose some of that when you have to break it up and spread it out. But if that’s what you gotta do to get the key people involved it is it is doable.
I would try hard to make it split over two weeks not over three, just because this is going to get harder the more it’s spread out. I’d also say if you can figure out whether there’s a way to split the team into two parts so you’ve got a core team who is there. There is a way to get a core team who’s there for the whole week and some of these key stakeholders who you mentioned maybe they’re only there on monday and, you know, tuesday or monday and part of wednesday . But the core team keeps running the whole way so your stakeholders come in to ask the experts interviews which is one of the steps on monday.
Maybe they come in to help with the decision making process and maybe that’s it. Maybe your core team actually can be there for more of a block of time and maybe that’s a way to to get it done. In a way that maximizes the sort of the results and the benefits of sprinting without sacrificing the involvement you need from a lot of people on your team.
DESIGN SPRINT FOR GOVERNMENTS
STEPH: I have a personal question. I know that Denmark for example have found a way to kind of finance sprints at governmental level. Can you tell us if you know if this exists in other countries, how it worked, how did they manage to achieve this.
JAKE: I know only a very little bit about what they do in Denmark I don’t know any other country who has done this. And it’s kind of a remarkable program. But in fact I’ll say that the folks who I i’ve spoken to in Denmark. Who work in this program who are awesome actually themselves were not a hundred percent sure what this genesis was in the in the danish government but the program was basically grants for small businesses.
And so this the organization who runs it now from the Danish government they will match a design agency with a small business really of any kind to help them do a design sprint for their business. They’ll help to pay the the agency for for the work running that design sprint. In that way as you can imagine they’re able to really like bring the idea up to businesses like you know maybe like a restaurant or something. Who might not be already thinking a design sprint is the thing for us. The tool for us and and and you know sort of normalize it and give them a very clear path to getting it done.
Here are a bunch of you’re a bunch of people who can help you do it who we have worked, we know they’re good and we’ll help you pay for it. So it’s totally awesome. And I think man from my standpoint what an awesome thing to do for your economy too. Because i’ve seen the power of design sprints and helping people to you know save wasted effort on the wrong ideas. Help to embolden people to take the right kinds of risks. It’s great! Great for the dynamic, the workplace dynamics so many good things.
But it’s hard, like I’m not going to tell you it’s not complicated and that you know the checklist at the back of this book is daunting and when you look at it like oh god like what a what a pain in the ass. So I think anything that can be done to help make it easier is great and that program is super inspiring. Unfortunately very unique and special so far.
DESIGN SPRINT AND UX RESEARCH
Bettina: How do we manage a design sprint when the company doesn’t have a research. I mean I use a persona or a user journey because it’s very common here in Argentina.
JAKE KNAPP: You know to tell you the truth I don’t really use personas and or user journeys in the sprint. If a team has them. Personas have always been tough for me. I know that there are ways to do personas that that work well but in my first hand experience with them it’s been a real mixed bag and so I don’t make any special effort to get personas in.
When teams have them and share them I always want to try to like you know really ask questions about what’s the real what’s the real customer, direct customer insight behind them. Because I think when personas are not done well they become this kind of what feels maybe to the team like a phony facsimile of who our customer might be. Instead of like this direct relationship with the customer that I want to create with a design sprint.
So I wouldn’t worry about not having personas certainly that’s not part of the program and if you don’t have a user journey too again like it’s not part of the sprint process. And to tell you the truth again. I don’t even know how to make a user journey. I’ve heard that term a bunch and i’ve seen them. But if you said Jake could you sit down right now and make a user journey I actually wouldn’t. I’d have to google it so um so it’s fine.
What you do on monday making this sort of really simple zoomed out map is is kind of like the user journey. It’s like here’s how customers and but also how it partners and also how just how the system works and how it all sort of flows through. Like a really zoomed out story. And that will be all you need so the design sprint is meant to provide you with all you need. In the checklist itself.
WHAT’S NEXT FOR DESIGN SPRINTS
Lynn: Design sprints were very innovative, is there a trend or anything that you’re seeing as the next wave of innovation and design?
JAKE KNAPP: I’ll be honest with you I’m really fixated on design sprints still. And for me I see like such it’s so promising and exciting that it’s been used as much as it has and you know you’ve heard me like bragging about all the places that it’s been used. But the reality is that it’s hardly been used at all. The world is so big.
And there are so many teams and so many places that it could be that it could be tried out and and I mean even I think you know if we were to ask Kai about it’s constant work for her. I know it would be to just keep spreading it within google. The place where it started, you know. Because there’s a lot of people there. So from my standpoint but this is me right.
From my standpoint the most exciting thing is actually still trying to help people do the design sprint. As the world changes and obviously the world has changed a lot in the last year just to try to help people do that is pretty powerful. But I do think there’s this again like through my like tunnel vision on the sprint something that’s pretty exciting that is happening and coming is this idea that you can design time.
So with the design sprint you’re saying we’re gonna apply this idea of designing products or designing systems to designing time and the way we work is actually the focal point of the way we design and i’ve seen people start to create sprints for other sorts of things and then you know experiment on those new processes and I think that’s super exciting.
So creating recipes creating this idea of like we have a cookbook for innovation and we find the things that need to go in there. Tomorrow you hear from from Alex Osterwalder and you’ll hear about the you know. They’ve created all kinds of sort of cookbooks or recipes for people for innovation. I think there’s a lot of room to do more like that and make design more predictable in its outcomes. Because sometimes design goes great but a lot of times design doesn’t work out. Or we have to sort of make it up as we go and and a checklist or a recipe can help with that.
I also think that there is tremendous opportunity with this time we’re in now, where we’re working over video to create new processes. Because everything’s messed up anyway. So to create new processes try them out. And there’s a huge opportunity for these processes to help with on a day-to-day level. The way we interact with each other the way we treat each other as colleagues as humans. And to make some of those things more more equitable and more more fair. As we do that as we bring more people’s voices in and we can actually get the best of our colleagues. We can make sure that whose voice is heard isn’t just the person who like me will just keep talking and talking and talking that that’s good for that’s good for everyone.
And we get better results in the end. So I think there I think when I think of design and the future of it in my tunnel vision. Just think how can we make better processes and how can we use those processes to bring forth the best of our human efforts. So that our work time isn’t wasted and there are plenty of ways to answer that question beyond design sprints
HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT CHALLENGE FOR THE SPRINT
Kate: I’m curious what your suggestions are around choosing a challenge topic for design sprints. Is it feature specific, is it only for new projects. I’ve seen a scale and some of the aj and smart stuff around like a very specific versus broad challenge statement. How to find that sweet spot. I wasn’t sure if you had any feedback on that.
JAKE KNAPP: to pull it up, so this is from a presentation that my co-author John Zeratsky gives and he has this matrix. Let’s see if I can effectively pull it up, my computer’s like struggling to do all the things that I’m asking it to do right now.
So basically while the computer works on that i’ll tell you that the way I think about this is that you’ve got like some projects are just you know so small that you should just do them. One of the first tests for that is whether the team is willing to take the week to do the design sprint. You know if it feels like something where we’re like good, you know.
Actually spending one week focused on this will help us in the long run, it’s worth the investment. That feeling is actually, to me, that’s a really powerful indicator. It’s not always right there are times when that’s wrong. There are times when people really should stop and not to spend a week. And they don’t think that they’re going to save time. By not taking the week away from the sprint and actually we end up wasting time in the long run.
There are times when we want to do the Design sprints and it sounds super exciting and the project really wasn’t big enough to warrant it. Certainly that happens, but I think that the gut feeling is pretty powerful. This um this matrix that John Zeratsky uses.
I’ll try sharing my screen here let’s see if I can manage to do this. So here’s this way of thinking about what makes a good design sprint project and the way John Zeratsky talks about it. He talks about the sort of matrix. Where on one axis you’ve got difficulty and on the other you’ve got uncertainty, and if a project is like pretty easy to do like maybe you should just do it.
And then if a project is difficult, but the uncertainty is low, so like yeah it’s gonna be a lot of work but we’re sure that when we do this it’s gonna be better. I’ll give an example of like revising our website for the sprint book which is something that i’ve been working on with John.
We know it’s a lot of work to do it but we know we just kind of need to do the work. We just kind of need to decide whether we’re going to do it or not and then we decided and we do it. But it’s out here where things are difficult and there’s uncertainty about what’s going to happen. That’s usually the best part to do a sprint. I think about the beginnings of big projects as being a key time to do sprints.
I think about anything that’s going to take longer than six weeks to execute as a candidate for a sprint. I would only work on something that was going to take less than six weeks to execute but only do it in a sprint if the opportunity cost of doing the thing was like really high.
So if I’m going to be risking our brand reputation. If I only have one shot at this thing you know and it’s really high stakes. This launch or whatever. Sometimes a marketing page can be really high stakes.
We did a design sprint with slack that I talk about in the book and it was really high stakes for them because they were spending a ton of money that they had just raised as an early startup. They were going to spend that money on a big ad campaign and they wanted to make sure that when people came from that ad campaign and actually went to slack.com that they had a really clear compelling experience explaining what slack was.
So for them a marketing page which wasn’t all that hard to execute was was very high risk and potentially high reward. And it was worth doing a design sprint on that project so that’s kind of the way I i think about it.
DESIGN SPRINTS IN BIG WATERFALL PROJECTS
Ellen: So my question is basically about the format of design sprints that we usually see them to test new ideas. And it seems like you know like to test short concepts. But in the case for example where the company has set a project. Everything is set for the long run, more the waterfall approach. Would you recommend using a design sprint to re-align the teams on the objectives and maybe be able to go more efficiently about it. Will you like break the normal set of things to present the design sprint and make sure we move on more efficiently in this kind of big projects. And do you have examples as well of this work?
JAKE KNAPP: yeah absolutely. So my first examples of this are like counter examples. There were many things that made me want to try the design sprint and one of those kinds of bad experience that made me think the design sprint was important. It was times when I was working at Microsoft on Encarta where we did definitely a waterfall process. And actually google the teams I worked on were more or less waterfall in the sense that we would like we weren’t so like you know structured. We would come up with a plan and then execute on it.
We were maybe a bit more flexible as we were executing but more or less it was like come up with a plan and execute on it and in both of those cases at microsoft and at google working on Encarta and gmail or what became google meet. I would as a designer I would have all the responsibility to come up with how the thing looked and worked and functioned and i’d come up with it and then engineers would start building it.
And somewhere down the line an engineer would come up to me and say- hey i’ve been thinking about this and I think that this solution this design or this approach would work better for this part of the product. And they would be right. I would i’d be sitting at my desk realizing that we were months down. They had invested already and building it my way and because I hadn’t considered competing approaches in the beginning I now had to admit your way is much better.
In fact we kind of have to do it your way it’s like that much better and now I have to ask you to throw away your work and go back and like cost us time rebuilding the thing. And the alternative for me was to pretend that I was right because I had said I was right in the first place and be a dick and you know we’re on schedule still but then they hate me and or they’re going to argue with me. Or maybe they’re fine with it but the product is just isn’t as good. It’s definitely powerful in a waterfall situation to do this in the beginning and then execute on it.
I’d actually say that although like a lot of companies who i’ve worked with even if they’re startups they do work in I mean this notion of waterfall. It as this like sort of old-fashioned terrible way to work I think is a bit misguided, because a lot of the best executed projects they need time and you need to have a lot of ambition up front. And then spend time executing on them and that’s more or less sort of the spirit of of waterfall.
I’ve definitely seen it with startups who you know take their time executing. Hardware companies like nest who would take their time executing on something and doing a design sprint up front to make sure you’re right in the direction you’re heading is super powerful. But in terms of how to do that, how to actually make that work. Well I would point you to a resource that actually comes from Steph Cruchon.
It’s called the design sprint quarter and he’s put together a kind of a template for how you can. And quarters quarterly is a great way to think about design sprints because a lot of times teams will decide what they’re going to do. Especially if they use okrs. They’ll sort of think about what they’re going to do in a sort of quarter by quarter.
The design sprint quarter gives you a map for how to go from a design sprint into what’s eventually going to be either an agile or I think it’s pretty easily adaptable for thinking about waterfall approach.
So maybe we could put a link to that in the chat but that’s you can also search online for design sprint quarter. And you’l find kind of a how-to guide for that but definitely think that’s a good that’s a good idea.
PARTICIPANTS WITH PRE-CONCIEVED IDEAS
Kayla: how do you mitigate participants that arrive with a preconceived notion about what the outcome/ solution should be. Versus trusting the process of the sprint. How do you manage that dynamic.
JAKE KNAPP: you know to tell you the truth I love having people come in with a preconceived notion of what the outcome should be. Because if somebody has been thinking about the solution for days weeks months years you know before we get into the sprint. They’ve had more time to think about it their solution may be much more sophisticated than what we’ll be able to generate. We’ll spend a long time thinking about the solution in the sprint you know. We’ll spend over a day before we sketch and we’ll spend a lot of time putting those sketches together and considering them, but I welcome people bringing in old ideas.
And in fact I i ask people to try to dig them up, if you’ve got old ideas, we want to see them. Or if you’re coming to the solution sketch and you’re ready to put your idea on paper, please put your old idea on there. Your old idea is likely better than the thing we just came up with in the room. And I think all too often we want to you know the new idea gets more credit. A lot of times there’s a great solution that it came along at the wrong time you know. The team wasn’t ready to execute and so when somebody had that idea it just wasn’t the right time to bring it up. Or they had an idea that was great but they weren’t able to convince the team.
In the context of the design sprint they may be able to convince the team because now it’s not about what your job title is. It’s not about you know how you dress or it’s not about how you make the sales pitch for your solution. It’s about what you can put down on paper that we can understand about the solution and so actually old ideas preconceived outcomes. They’re great. Now a lot of times what you know I think the question gets that is somebody who doesn’t want to believe in the the process of the design sprint yielding the best outcome.
And that’s okay too I don’t really worry about it because I know they will have the chance to put down exactly what they think should happen and then they’ll get to see that solution. And as the competition that that ensues once all the sketches are created is as fair as I could engineer it.
It’s not perfectly fair but it’s as close as I could come, given the constraints of you know the the world that we live in. So they can see their solution up against everybody else’s they’re going to get to see how other people on the team react to their solution anonymously up on the wall against these other anonymous solutions. They’re going to get to see how the decider reacts to their solution what they choose they can make an argument for their solution if they want at the very end. It’s ultimately going to be up to the quality of that solution.
And what the decider chooses and then after that choice is made they’ll build the prototype and they’ll test it. And you know what, if their idea is not chosen their solution doesn’t make it but the solution that’s chosen fails on friday well they can certainly bring it up again for the next sprint.
Or you know if the solution that was chosen works I usually see people drop that emotional attachment as they go through this process and see what happens. And see how we are validating and verifying and building confidence and the solutions that we end up pursuing.
Sometimes it is the preconceived notion that makes it all the way through and when it doesn’t make it through I think the process takes care of most of that emotional attachment. That can so often create arguments, disagreements and slow things down.
A conversation about remote Design Sprints
Stéph Cruchon and Paul van der Linden
Thank you so much for being here with us in the room and watching us live. This is amazing! We wanted to talk about remote design sprint and we think that it’s really something that’s hot right now. A lot of people are very interested about it and yeah we think it’s important to talk about it.
Turns out that Paul and I have now quite some experience of running remote design sprints. And we would like to share with you some tips and tricks and I guess Benjamin who is here,
James and Andrea who was also part of this conversation have a lot of tips and tricks because all of us we have been part of remote design sprints.
Maybe Paul could you just introduce yourself?
Yeah of course I can! I’m Dutch from origin I’m living in Switzerland already for quite some time, almost 20 years and been in digital innovation since actually 1986 already. And when Stéph asked me to do this conversation on Friday afternoon I was thinking okay.
Video conferencing and remote working when did I first encounter that and actually it was already in 1992 when I had my first video conferencing and sort of remote sessions with the Americas, when I was working at Philips Lighting. We did an Internet project or actually our first internet project demonstrating the power of lighting solutions in city safety and at that time did the whole remote work was really only available in the boardroom. So there was a big camera, television sets and then things like that but the technology sort of improved.
But the way we had to deal with the problems were exactly the same we have now, that we will also discuss today, so nothing changed in that sense so much over, yeah, is it 30 years almost? It was interesting to to see so that’s a little bit short so a lot of experience in remote working we know for remote workshops not only for design sprints.
And lately Paul we have been working together part of the master classes right because Paul is a Design Sprint fellow. When we run Design Sprint Masterclasses and when we have a lot of people, we need co-facilitators. So of course we call our fellows to to help us. Paul was facilitating one group of Design Sprint Masterclass, so a lot of fresh experience of running online sprints.
What’s you tip number one? Getting to know remote design sprint participants
In order to basically get on the same level with participants, it would be nice for example that I know her favorite drink or a favorite movie. Because then if she for example says I’m a hard rock fan and I know all the 32 albums of KISS then that might relate to me and she is immediately a person and not just the director of art in the portrait museum.
But she is a person and for me a good collaboration is try to humanize people that you are going to work intensively during first five days so that would be my first tip to put everybody at ease.
So the way we did it in our Design Sprint Master Classes. To start we create a Miro or Mural board and we asked people to just add a photo of yourself writing on the stickies. You you know, like basically what are you favorite drinks, favorite movie…
On thing we have been doing too – is to have a world map and ask participants to pinpoint exactly where they are. And already it creates a bit of interaction. It’s an easy task to do so, you know, you can just open Miro or Mural and do something very easy at first before going crazy showing the canvas. That’s a good start of a Remote Design Sprint.
Remote Design Sprint Onboarding
And it brings us immediately to the tip number two. Tip number two is the moment you are asking people how can you for example put your favorite movie or your favorite drink on the board. Like this they need to put a post-it, so they familiarize immediately with remote working tools without really thinking of what do I need to do, how do I put a post-it up.
So playfully you already know your way a little bit around the Miro or Mural board without being stressed. and you can already start using the remote working tools. It makes you at ease at the same time.
I will share my screen just so you can see how remote Design Sprint looks like and basically the templates that we are using that might be interesting. What you see here is the template we use for a remote design sprint. This is the template that wehave created that became the official Remote Design Sprint template.
It’s because Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky and Jackie Colnburn were part of it. That’s a template that you can find for free or you can just click on Mural or Miro, it exists for both platforms. You write Official remote design sprint template and you can get it for your own use.
So far there are two versions that exist: one in English one in French if you guys were watching us and you speak another language like Spanish Japanese, Chinese whatever you can tell us and it would be so amazing if you guys would be interested to translate the templates.
The way Miro and Mural templates work it is like guided activities for the whole week. You can just zoom in and you see here that’s the activities for the day one so the one of the Sprint long-term goal, Design Sprint questions… You can really zoom in to a crazy level to see exactly all the activities and how it works.
So we guide the group throughout the days going from exercise to exercise. At first it’s very scary, you enter that new remote environment and you are like oh my god I have a whole week of work just in front of my eyes, so people are a bit scared.
What I would recommend for the online sprint on boarding, is to create another empty canvas or almost empty with very simple activity. It could be an icebreaker, could be a world map, whatever… so people can familiarize with the tool before going through the real design sprint template.
Importance of the background during remote workshop
I think it’s time to stop screen sharing. I don’t know whether you saw that, but this is actually something that happens all the time during online design sprints.
Be careful with what you show. There was my daughter running in the back… Be aware that if you are working remotely that everything what is happening behind you is visible and will be visible in principle for all time your are working remotely with zoom. You don’t know whether somebody takes a screenshot and of course this was staged.
It’s important how your background might look and what is happening in the background of your screen also.
Honestly I don’t care for real how your background looks like, but it’s important make sure that people are not distracted by by what they see.
The camera is a very important topic. I don’t know why, but a lot of people tend to turn off the camera and for me when you do heavy activities online , what we are doing right now. Because of COVID19 there is kind of etiquette, I think it is very important to keep the camera on, that just simply mean- I care about what we are doing.
You see if people turn on the camera, they are with us in the online room, it’s not that we are controlling them, but it just means that I’m with you guys, I care. It’s so important to know what participants are doing when you are running an online sprint. During in-person workshop it’s pretty easy you can see if
someone’s grabbing the phone, doing something else. You see if the person really feels bad, when it’s enough and you need to make a break.
With Julien we were teaching a few weeks ago and it was crazy. out of the class of twenty students there were 17 students who turned their camera off.
Yeah…the students love to put their camera off.This is really disturbing because it feels like you are speaking to the walls…It’s important for facilitators and for participants to be able to put a face on the people and just to to see how they react.
Using Zoom if you press the space button you unmute yourself without having the need to use mouse. Which smoothens the interaction between participants and it becomes a dialogue.
Remote Design Sprint Rules
Tip number four. It’s really related to what we actually have during an in-person Design Sprint. We need to have the same discipline so if you are in a room with others and you’re working on your design sprint, you’re doing tasks. You hate when people meanwhile you are working, are taking their mobile phone and doing other stuff or calling their moms or do upload photos on the Instagram.
Actually, you need to ask and I think you can even demand people to have the same rules. So while we are working make sure that you spend time really on the topic of design sprint and all the rest can wait for the little breaks or the long lunch pauses.
Because working remotely it’s easy to have my second or third screen and to do my fortnight at the same time.Of course things like this will not help the success of the remote design sprint.
It’s actually funny because you know some participants, especially students sometimes think that we don’t see what’s going on. But for really you can see, because they have glasses or even you can see from their eyes that they are on Facebook. We know this because it’s easy to recognize the blue of Facebook or to see the video game in the glasses.
In fact, that’s why I have contact lenses now.
Design Sprint Onboarding – testing the tools and equipment
When we run a remote design sprints there is all that part of onboarding which is very important. In a regular design sprint you can just bring people in the room, you explain couple of rules and then it works and you can start. For remote design sprint we usually have an onboarding. Couple of days before the sprint we ask people if they could join the zoom meeting for like 15 to 20 minutes.
We test all remote working tools which we use during online design sprints. We test zoom, we test Mural, or Miro. We test the webcams, the sound, etc. The sound is so important!
People think they need a crazy microphone or crazy gear for remote workshop. For real, you don’t need all of this. Like Paul, your sound is amazing and you just have headphones. Right, the standard Apple ear plugs. Almost all headphones have a little part in here. There’s a microphone hidden, so you do sound really good with very simple material.
We also check the internet connection of the participants. If you have an onboarding before your remote design sprint, in couple of minutes you will see exactly who is gonna have some issues of connection.
In a remote setting it is important to have a Slack open or whatsapp group during the whole remote workshop time. This have saved our workshops so many times, especially if you have some technical issues. It is also amazing to have this during breaks, to have some fun. Like for example sharing photos of our meals to keep an interaction between the group going on. Of course, you need to choose the right tool for the right team. WhatsApp might feel a bit personal in some context. So instead we would be using Slack…Slack is a bit more technical but if you see already that you will need to have a lot of document sharing and all of these maybe it’s interesting to consider it.
Slack also works on mobiles, so it could use your internet connection. For workshop facilitators it’s a nice way to get help or share information.
During the remote design sprint it is normal to have some technical issues. You have those during in-person design sprints as well. There is that part called you know the lightning demos when you have to just connect the computer to show couple of slides, couple of websites… This specific part doesn’t work sometimes because it’s a bit technical.
In remote Design Sprint we spend a full week with zoom so it’s almost impossible to avoid technical issues. Couple of weeks ago we had our Remote Design Sprint Masterclass with three groups and each group had their facilitator or co facilitator. So in any case a problem was there what we did is was to assign the facilitator or co-facilitator to the person that had the issue and take them out of the real session.
For example if Jojo has connection problems, or his audio is not working and we as a group are trying to solve that for 15-20 minutes and with remote sprint we are on a tight schedule it’s a valuable time tthe group is losing.That’s why it’s important to have the co-facilitator, to take them apart and if there is still internet connection go in a breakout room and try to understand what the real problem is and take that problem completely away from the team that it could continue to work.
The Importance of Remote Design Sprint Co-facilitator
I was having a remote workshop two weeks ago and there was one lady who said – I really hate all this remote work, it’s never working for me and she was already having this natural dislike of doing remote and then if there is
somebody in the team that is also having all kinds of technical issues that will strengthen her feeling, I don’t like remote because it’s not working. I think that can be avoided by immediately taking the problem out,solve it and bringing the people back in into the room. So the tip is never do it alone. Always make sure that you have a co-facilitator.
You understands yet the whole setup of a remote environment and and take the problem immediately out and and don’t feel sorry like oh I’m taking out the executive or I’m taking out the most favorite person in the room now. Because it’s simply disturbing for the persons
and creates it I think it you don’t need to be a technical wizard.
Best browser for remote virtual workshop
Most of the problems there are pretty simple. most of the time 50 percent of the time you just need to say which browser are you using? Okay Microsoft edge, don’t use Microsoft edge you know it all. So I guess you can already fix half of the problems with just using Chrome or a good browser.
Then there is internet connection and then it’s like I’ve seen more problems on PCs than Mac but I think it’s more because it’s like all computers and like really business computers no these people who work with small screens, like this this big. These computers are made for writing emails and it’s not made at all for actually work and I’m just writing emails or using an excel so that’s an issue.
Importance of using 2 or more screens during the Remote Design Sprint
Having a second screen is for two reasons extremely important because at this moment I am really talking to you. I see everybody but let’s assume that I also have to work on the on the my row and I’m trying at the same time stay in contact with you. And to see your expressions it’s impossible because my screen is too small. Especially on tiny business PC. I have everybody on the right side I have my shared screen on the left side I need to look something up on the other one and it’s basically yeah you you’re getting lost. And actually you’re switching from one application to the other constantly.
So having a second screen for remote workshop is a must. With second screen you can have one dedicated to the zoom, to the visual and audio contact and one where you work on is simply ideal to have everything you need on the right location and you stay in touch your group. You stay motivated and connected and on the other side you can work and use the full space.
My remote work setup is now my small screen with the zoom so that I see everybody still okay and on the the left side I have my workspace where I can do whatever I need because if I’m working in the design sprint together alone or alone together I am anyway working there so not distracted. But if I need to find a contact I can just turn my head straight and I see what’s happening so I would advise everybody if possible of course to either attach their TV set or an extra screen.
I think you said it already, a screen doesn’t need to be expensive you know. You just take an old screen you know like from somewhere that’s stored in your garage or you can find screens for like 40 or 50 dollars on Facebook marketplace or whatever. So it doesn’t need to be fancy just a second screen. AS you have said is so important you put the zoom the grid of people so when when I facilitate I always put zoom on grid mode.
Grid-mode on Zoom for better remote workshop collaboration
I’ll just go on top right and you can change the display of zoom to the grid mode. You can see every one and I put that zoom view just under my webcam so the screen that has a webcam it is so key because you are actually speaking to people. So you look at them while you speak because there is nothing more important than respect. But the nice thing about that as well as a little something I saw that talking
into a camera or two into a lens it’s a ittle bit awkward but I have this little gadget on top of my screen. Basically I’m talking to the little owl and then I have at least a face where I talk to me that’s critical. You need to look into something because the lens doesn’t do anything but just having this on top shows that I’m talking to someone at least so I’m see two eyes where I look.
If I look in the camera and that’s a simple thing but it’s still useful for for having this nice connection yeah and if you have only one screen maybe
Remote facilitation tricks with one screen
I can show you a short video with you of the remote workshop we’ve run a couple of weeks ago. Justlook what we did basically you have the
working space which was mural that was taking most of the screen 2/3 and 1/3 was zoom because you can easily reduce the size of the column you make a column with zoom in grid mode and then you have everyone nicely on the screen
I can show you a video of remote design sprint. Yes so that’s why it’s actually an interesting sprint because it was really remote design sprint to its full potential it wasn’t just one team it was three teams at the same time. It might sounds like a nightmare, but it’s actually possible. I will say it’s as complex as running three design Sprint’s at the same time in one room but you can actually facilitate it. The only thing you need to do is to have one main facilitator that’s kind of leading the exercises and then each group can work on their own design sprints.
Zoom breakout rooms for facilitating Multiple Remote Design Sprints at once
There is an amazing feature in zoom if you don’t have it yet you should just dig in the options and activate it it’s called zoom breakout rooms and this saved my life when I needed to facilitate multiple remote design sprints at once. The day when I when I discovered this
functionality so if you have it it’s a small icon with like four squares. It’s appearing down so it’s called zoom breakout, it’s also the free.
It’s amazing what it does is that it allows you to open some sub-rooms, some remote workshop rooms for like two or three people to work and you can send people to these rooms. It’s like you can have a main design sprint room with everyone like if you have 15 people you have 15 people at once then you open the room and you send groups of five in three different groups you recall everyone. I recall them in the main room and then we continued facilitation which is amazing at first it looks a bit scary because you like wait I open my rooms I need to assign people to the room.
So the first time you do it takes a bit of time but you just need to do it once to and then automatically you open and close the rooms like that. This is amazing and honestly there is no limits in how many Sprint’s at the same time you can run. Because you could have I don’t know you could have ten Sprint’s at the same time. You have a main facilitator with several teams so you need to be very clear with your facilitation.
Explaining clearly that’s what we’re gonna do in the next ten minutes, you give the exercise send people to the rooms. They do the exercise and you call them back. I’m gonna write in the chat breakout rooms from zoom and it’s free you just need to activate it in the
settings, since it’s not activated by default. I don’t know why because it’s the best functionality of zoom that’s why the Easter eggs are always hard to find.
A bit of advice, I was in the easy position because I was facilitating and giving the instructions and then opening the rooms and then Paul you were in the room with your group maybe you can share a bit about how it worked for you.
During the remote Design Sprint Masterclass it was a little bit different because it was let’s say accelerated sprints that we were doing, where everybody more or less understood the principles of the design sprint already so it was not new. But what I noticed is that the moments that we were in the group together and yes Steph was explaining the next steps that’s the quality of energy level was on the right level. But when going into the smaller rooms where we had only four phases and then really being in each other’s face the energy level went up immediately because everybody saw that we were so much closer to the other.
I like to talk and therefore I take a lot of room but there are people that have much more interesting things to say than me but simply because I’m talking they will not talk and if you have a smaller team as a facilitator you see much more like a somebody wants to say something and if somebody is taking the air space.
The smaller breakout rooms is extremely important for smaller more intense and more effective remote workshop. Using them I saw that energy really moving and people sort of as a team came out back to the main room.
Optimal size of the Remote workshop group
Smaller teams the energy immediately going up in that perspective I like that a lot.
There was recently a good research on remote workshops and from a lot of research and I will try to find the article but shows that a group of five in remote is the most optimal number for doing remote work and and actually we from an experience without having that report at that time so already that that there’s four people and and the facilitator was actually really great, really giving the right energy and then and commitment to each other actually to do it one moment of the screen that is critical.
Prototyping during Remote Design Sprints
When you storyboard what you cannot prototype so it’s that transition between we have a very good idea we have good ideas that we want to push forward, but now we need to make a prototype and taking the ideas that we want to push forward. We put them on the wall we’re like okay we have these two or three powerful ideas we’re gonna split the group in two or three teams and now we concentrate only on one part of the prototype.
We split the group, we let people work and then we meet in like say one hour one hour and a half and then people will be way more active, way more willing to work only on one part of the prototype. It’s the way you can absolutely and you should do the same with a virtual design Sprint’s, a remote sprint using the zoom breakout room so as soon as you start prototyping you should kind of assign the work, speed the work in smaller groups and then you create breakout rooms.
You send people for like one hour or so and then they come back with something tangible.
Importance of the breaks during remote working
I think is extremely important when working remotely and I think we were already feeling that we are now almost one hour in this call that everybody yeah we have a fantastic conversation so the energy levels are still high, but make sure that during the week there are really enough moments that you just have breaks, like five minutes for having a snack that you just you can take five minutes to stretch your legs. Because sitting at the desk is different than then walking around in a room
then step putting the sticky notes so make sure that you have enough time to give people to rest.
I have already used my bottle of water three or four times during this session because it is important that you stay hydrated and that you stay full of energy so make sure that you have some water and some snacks next to you.
I think is important since you cannot do a group lunch, make sure that people have really the time to go away so at least 45 minutes for a proper lunch so they can check their Instagram or Facebook or whatever you need to do else and then havea decent meal that you can really get back to energy levels.
I would advise not to make the sessions too long, so start at at nine ish and around mid-day have a break of 1 hour. And finish the day around 5 o’clock in the afternoon so that it is all not too long and that you keep your energy levels up
And personally think that think five days design sprint is really interesting in remote working because you can have shorter days, so it’s less tiring, it’s less stressful and it’s a format that that works really well for all participants. They had to take care of the kids to cook for the family so it’s also something we had in mind and we were giving one hour and a half of breaks.
Because of Covid19 people have really became really good at workingremotely and zoom. Of course you need to install zoom the first time, which is a bit annoying to install to use it ,but then it just click on the link and it works. And I guess, I have no stats, now a huge portion of the population has Zoom installed on the computer because at some point someone asked them to join the zoom meeting.
We had 15 people actively working in the sprint from more than 10 countries that the countries we had issues with was Nigeria and Lebanon for really technical issues like power outage in Lebanon. It’s no more that you have one hour per day you have no power and that’s normal that’s how it goes but turns out that these people they are used to this, but I was freaking out. I was like oh it’s not gonna work,they cannot leave. But no, they were super patient they were like okay guys I need to leave you because it’s the one hour power outage in Beirut and that’s the way it goes. I’m gonna join in one hour. So zoom definitely not a problem.
Miro/ Mural Design Sprint templates speed
I know Miro had a better better speed before and Mural did just updated the speed right now so it should be way better. But I would watch out to put too many images on the on the boards. If you can, and especially when you do solution sketch and you have to to upload the images on the board. Take some time to optimize them. You open Photoshop you optimize your images before adding them. This saves a lot a lot a lot of bandwidth because if people did take a photo on the iPhone because they have good camera in Africa so they have good iPhones. They take a photo upload the image and every single image is 10 to 15 megabytes which is crazy load so that’s a lot.
I think as facilitators you should collect the sketches you optimize them in Photoshop or whatever and you upload them that’s my top top advice.
User Testing during Remote Design Sprints
What you use for testing whether having a web testing a web app we have okay so you can try InVision maybe but you have to load it and I would go honestly with a zoom conversation with everyone who is already on the zoom. You invite the person on zoom and then you share your screen meaning that you have the prototype ready on your screen you share the screen and you ask the person to kind of react to what you are showing.
So it’s more guided, it’s less an accessibility tests like they don’t have to click themselves.
Design Sprint case study - Swiss Tech Convention Center
Le Design Sprint s’inscrit dans un contexte de course à l’innovation. On nous demande la plupart du temps de signer des kilos de non-disclosure-agreement,ces fameux contrats de confidentialité. C’est le jeu, on l’accepte volontiers et il est vrai que l’on travaille régulièrement sur des projets secrets, ou parfois sensibles. De plus, on vit en Suisse, pays du Gruyère et du secret bancaire.
Au final, il est généralement assez compliqué pour nous de montrer en détail ce que l’on fait et ceci est partagé par les autres Sprintmasters au niveau mondial. Raison pour laquelle on trouve facilement des récits de Design Sprints, mais on nous montre jamais les prototypes ou l’après-sprint, c’est maintenant le cas:
Article complet sur Medium
Collaborate better with Design Sprints
It’s time to collaborate better. Too often, the relationship between a client and its agency boils down to the classic setup of decision maker and performer. This proven model has, however, largely demonstrated weaknesses in the areas of web and digital. The Design Sprint brings a fresh perspective and an integral approach.
To make a great digital product, sharing and collaboration during the conception phase is vital.
New Design approaches put people at the center of the process: the client is now personally involved in the project. The Agency for its part, is trying to better understand its needs and its business. The team formed like this will communicate better, show more solidarity, and move forward quickly.
the Team
During the five days of Design Sprint, we focus on your project with a common goal in a friendly and relaxed atmosphere: to develop the best prototype in the allotted time.
The Sprintmaster
An important aspect of this new way of working is being frank. As a Sprintmasters, our interest is to make this Design Sprint a hit; this means guiding you in the domain of of digital design, but also to give an outside view, as honest and constructive as possible.
During these five days, we will form a team and collaborate closely together. It will bring together the Sprintmaster who will lead the workshops and will execute the prototype, and between 4 and 6 people from the Client side.
Who to choose from your company to participate?
A member of management
Google recommends that the CEO or a member of management is present (even if just for one hour) on the first day of the sprint, to give the vision and mission of the company and discuss the objectives of the sprint. Also during the decisions taken on the 3rd day, “Decide” as they need to be validated before going any further with prototyping.
The Project Manager / Product owner
Very often, a project manager is appointed on the client side to follow the development of the application. As a centerpiece of the organization, this person will probably participate in the entire Sprint.
A marketing person
Even if the website or the app is not for promotional purposes, these are generally people within a company who will judge the quality and efficiency of design. Moreover they are very familiar with their target audience. Having Marketing on board will ensure the impact of the product.
A technical person
If the company (or startup) has software engineers, involve them in the Sprint! They are aware of the technical limitations and will raise a red flag if an idea is too complex or out of budget. Developers contribute in their way in creativity: finding realistic solutions and simplifying features.
A business stakeholder
It is essential that in the Sprint the team has understood the business model of the future product and its key success factors. A business vision and a thorough understanding of how the company creates value will be a strong asset.
A designer
Although the Sprintmaster is himself a designer, a second UX or visual designer to integrate the team would save time on the prototype and would allow us to test several solutions in parallel.
The ROI of a Design Sprint
Can we quantify the return on investment (ROI) of a Design Sprint? Discover how this methodology allows substantial savings and adds value to your product. We live in an exciting time, digital business transformation is on and the established order is shaken up. New models of disruptive startups such as Uber, Airbnb, Netflix or Spotify are reinventing entire industries. It is in this tense and hyper competitive context that companies must update their digital tools, with high stakes involved.
Let’s talk money
Creating a new website, a mobile application, improving an intranet, rethinking a packaging or even a developing a strategy … All these projects take time, need very specific skills and require a substantial investment.
When I ask my friends “what do you think the average cost of developing a mobile application is?” the answer I get is: “well 3000 … wait 5000? no… it can’t be 10’000$??”
To give one number, the entry ticket would actually be closer to 150,000$.
This article from the website Formotus has brought together various recent statistics from the US market. We’re talking about “business” applications. Keep in mind that this is the initial cost of the App (ie v.1.0 on the Store). It is clear that the application will evolve over time and that the cost of infrastructure and maintenance can be significant and will increase the price.
There are exists calculators that can give a rough estimate on the cost of an app. They operate on the principle of giving an estimate based on functionality.
Although the approach is not perfect and does not take into account the number of screens or the expected visual quality, you still get a good ballpark estimate.
The real cost of an App
A significant part of the cost is not even visible to the end user, because it is caused by the infrastucture, servers, web services etc. The development cost (coding) is also very important: in Switzerland, a working day of a developer costs on average between 1000 – 1500$. This often requires very specialized knowledge and many years of experience. Some agencies try offshoring (e.g. India or North Africa) where rates are much lower, but very often the quality suffers, and it requires many hours of project management to get an acceptable product. In the end, the financial saving is not guaranteed.
In order to create a website or a mobile application, you need a team consisting of many specialists: Project Manager / Product Owner, Business Analyst, Designer, Developer, System Engineer, Tester. Each of these experts will spend a few days to several weeks on the project. If one refers to the statistics of the website Clutch, the average App project is around 125 days. It generally takes between 3 to 6 months from the initial idea to the launch on the store.
Where time is wasted on a project?
In most digital projects, the different stakeholders work in “silos” and rarely meet. This lack of direct relationship leads to misunderstanding and frustration, and decisions usually go back and forth.
Another important aspect is the user feedback. It sometimes happens that an app is launched but gets negative feedback from early adopters. In-depth testing will then be conducted and the problem will eventually be detected, with the consequence of having to modify the code and experience along the way. This results in costs and delays.
As a designer, I often thought about my role and my added value. I came to the conclusion that my contribution is absolutely necessary for approximately 20% of the design work. The Design Sprint focuses precisely on this time period.
Optimize your budget with Design Sprint
One of the innovative aspects of the Design Sprint is the concept of “timeboxing”.
This “constraint” of five days requires us to go quickly, to focus on the project, seek simplicity and efficiency. It is also the insurance for you to get the best return on investment: many ideas and experiments in a very short time.
The challenge of Design Sprint is to deliver maximum value in a short amount of time.
In contrast to a specifications document, a prototype doesn’t need to be perfect and comprehensive. It is actually a space for experimentation, a “time-bubble” that stimulates creativity and innovative solutions.
During a Design Sprint, we do not seek scientific accuracy: instead, we will focus on emotion, simplicity and figure out if the product feels right. “As a user, do I want to use this app?” When it comes to speed, common sense works miracles and solves many problems.
The real financial gain of a Design Sprint is not the time saved on the visual design. It is above all the work on the consistency of the experience and simplification of features. All that has been simplified will not be part of the project and will therefore not be developed. Here lies the ROI of Design Sprint.
Think again about the daily rate of a developer (1000-1500$). Spare him a few weeks of work by simplifying or removing a bunch of useless features – this is what will be saved on the budget of your product.
Who should run a Design Sprint and why?
Are you a big company seeking to integrate the speed and responsiveness of startups in your process?
You know your different hierarchical levels and validation procedures hinder you in developing your products. By integrating a few days of Design Sprint in your product’s development strategy, you will be able to compete with the most innovative startups.
Are you an innovative startup dreaming of creating a mobile application or a cutting-edge web platform?
You know better than anyone that you will need to attract investors and demonstrate the qualities of your future business. How do you make them want to invest in your idea quickly and by limiting the costs? – Through the Prototype that we will create together in a one-week Digital Design Sprint.
Does your company already have a mobile application you want to improve?
In one week, we will identify the potential of improvement, both at the user experience (UX) or user interface (UI) level, or at the level of Information architecture (IA). With the prototype being created in a few days, you will be able to test the improvements and validate their merits, before mobilizing any resources to develop them.
Are you a web development agency and want to win a client’s pitch using the “wow factor”?
You know that a well-crafted technical proposal and an attractive price are not enough. The customer wants to see something and be seduced.
During a Design Sprint, we will develop a demonstrable prototype of your proposal and give your customer the desire to entrust you with his project.
Do you have THE big idea but lack of digital knowledge?
One can be a brilliant entrepreneur but must accept the challenges of the digital transformation. Design Sprints also aim to discuss ideas and provide counsel. The Sprintmaster, as a seasoned digital consultant and web specialist, will advise you in your choices and ensure that your project is on the right track.