Design Sprint

1. Rapid Team Prototyping Exercise

   The Design Sprint is an ideal exercise when teams want to prototype something, a new product, a redesign of an existing product, or when they have a difficult product challenge to handle. Jake Knapp, then a product owner at Google Ventures, brought it to life. His work synthesized a bunch of insights which into a simple, step-by-step process. The Design Sprint! At Pentalog, we offer the Design Sprint in a compressed 4-day sprint cycle.

   What are the main steps to run the Sprint?

   • MONDAY is dedicated to defining the challenge and proposing a range of solutions.
   • TUESDAY is dedicated to reviewing and voting on “the best” solutions and then outlining the shape of the prototype with a storyboard.
   • WEDNESDAY is dedicated to designing and building the prototype (in a simple program like Keynote or PowerPoint, or something more sophisticated such as Sketch or Figma) and preparing the user tests.
   • THURSDAY is the day to test the prototype with 6 real users and then to distill that feedback to identify any next steps to be taken.
2. Faster Insights on Product and Feature Ideas

   In just 4 days you can learn if a product or a feature is worth further investment. The shortened format leaves nothing out except the time and cost of traditional user research which can take months to reach the same conclusions. Why wait so long to learn if your idea was good? With a Design Sprint, you find out faster. Often a single design sprint gives sufficient clarity to proceed, sometimes multiple sprints may be utilized to refine the focus on user needs. 

3. Engage Users Early in the Product Life Cycle

   In the Design Sprint process, you build a lightweight, interactive prototype which allows you to gather insights coming from your target users, you couple that with the actual goals and key results you want to reach. And so you will ideate and vote on the best solution that fits both business goals and users needs. The Design Sprint can help speed product adoption by users, because they are involved in the process at the beginning!
    

4. Tested Prototype

   The Design Sprint prototype is tested with real users during the last day of the sprint. After each test, it is sometimes even possible to update the prototype before collecting more feedback, making small changes which may have a big impact. At the end of the testing phase, your prototype has been rated by users, allowing you to preview next steps. If a rating is less than 8 of 10, you probably are not ready to advance out of the iteration cycle. 

   What can you expect from the prototype?   

   • An interactive high-fidelity test, for real users to touch. 
   • Insight into product-specific OKRs, KPIs and other metrics.
   • Prompt feedback to identify next steps based on effort and impact.