A design sprint is a multi-day process that allows selected team members to brainstorm, review ideas, define and discuss business problems, and dialogue about potential solutions. Design sprints consist of the following steps:
- Day 1 — Map: This portion of the sprint is used to establish structure for the week’s activities, most notably focusing on your long-term goals (e.g., addressing the “why” of the event) and questions, concerns, and or issues you feel should be addressed during the week. It should be noted that assumptions your team currently embrace can be rephrased as questions and deliberated upon to foster more success.
- Day 2 — Sketch: The goal of this step is to generate several ideas (as quickly as possible), including tapping into existing ideas that are useful to consider.
- Day 3 — Decide: This is the phase where the team collectively decides which of the ideas presented on Day 2 are the most viable and doable.
- Day 4 — Prototype: On day 4, it’s time to start creating visualizations of the most viable ideas and prepare for validation.
- Day 5 — Test: If possible, present the ideas you generated to understand and validate how well they would
These five steps provide the ability to validate ideas and bring others to the surface that might be overlooked, collectively helping to optimize success for your initiative.
When it comes to design sprints, you don’t have to go it alone. The Hub offers design sprint support as one of its services. We can assist your team by organizing and facilitating the sessions, as well as prescribing a plan to execute the results from your sprint.
