If you could reposition your product in 3 weeks…
“My product has been built around a consumer that has changed overnight. In the past, edits and improvements have taken months. How do I adapt and innovate rapidly?”
Buying thinking has shifted virtually overnight, creating a new, and very different kind of shopper, leaving brands with a strategy that may need agile adjustment.
Right now, start ups, medium sizes businesses and corporates have found success in applying the Design Sprint process to pressure test ideas, and to learn fast whether something will work .. or will not, without loosing time and money having to learn down the line, and be left behind by your competitors.
What is a Design Sprint approach? It’s a five day framework, combining Design Thinking with Lean Startup, to move from a customer problem to a range of creative ideas, and a tested prototype. In other words, it helps answer critical business questions through rapid prototyping, and user testing
Google Ventures pioneered the Design Sprint Process. This process has been customized by Rocketfuel to produce innovation for the South African and African market.
Watch GV’s Sprint Process in 90 Seconds
(Reference: Design Sprint by Jake Knapp (GV))
WHY A DESIGN SPRINT?
Statistics show that involving stakeholders and users early on in the design phase, can really validate the problem space to create better ideas.
- Time boxing ideation activities speeds up learnings and development, and drives the right behaviour from users
- We enable a wide range of stakeholders and participants, so it’s a highly collaborative process. We want to include multiple perspectives and view points
- Early stakeholder buy-in ensures all parties are invested in the outcome, and your innovations go to market, faster
- The multi-disciplinary team selection sets up the right environment to form a shared brain to ensure ideation is accurate, and ideas that filter through produce high scoring innovations
- Reduces risks of downstream mistakes, by uncovering insights that lead to a better understanding of your user and your problem space quicker
- The process ignites a large volume of ideas, pushing beyond limitations, and providing multiple solutions
- Key metrics are used to narrow down thinking, test hypothesis and validate or invalidate your assumptions
- Reduces the time and resources typically spent communicating across multiple teams and agency partners
THIS IS GREAT, BUT… how can we work together if we can’t be together?
Distributed teams work can be a tricky challenge. So what about running a fully remote virtual Design Sprint? Sounds crazy? – Well, not really.
We are potentially compressing months of work into a few days, with no travel, hotel-reservations, or other restrictions (i.e. travel-ban). Everyone participates remotely from home, all nice and warm. Welcome to 2020.
Three years ago, it would have been impossible to offer such a service, but the tools are here. Talented people in the Design Sprint community, such as Jake Knapp, have done a lot of testing and experimenting. Tools such as Miro have integrated feedbacks from sprintmasters to make it suitable for a Design Sprint. Today, thanks to these tools and our experience of running Sprints with multiple companies in the physical world, we are ready to accompany you in your virtual workshops.
We exchange information in real-time by videoconference on the MS Teams platform. Miro, a virtual whiteboard on which everyone can interact, allows us to run practical exercises.
Some of them are done physically, on paper, and shared later on.
We loved this article from Jake Knapp, where he lists the tools they use to run these workshops remotely.
(Recognitions: Jake Knapp (AJ Smart) – Google Ventures)
