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