The power of sprints
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We chat to the Local Peoples Design Team about solving difficult problems using sprints.
What problems do design sprints solve?
Design sprints are great at getting validation for anything from a new feature to communications. They allow you to understand whether your proposition is resonating with your audience. Sprints are a way to quickly develop, prototype and test an idea with real users in order to validate some of your key assumptions.
Why would someone choose a design sprint over the traditional Design Thinking process?
Design sprints don’t necessarily replace a traditional Design Thinking process. But they do offer several advantages, one being that design sprints get into an iterative cycle much faster. In Design Thinking you typically have a long research phase followed by an ideation phase, design and then implementation. That process can take six months, whereas a design sprint gets ideas out onto the table very quickly, which enables you to get feedback on your ideas instantly. You’re iterating on ideas instead of refining theories so it’s a lot more practical. Design sprints allow you to create tangible examples and generate real data based on real designs faster in a more efficient way.
How did design sprints work to de-risk new concepts?
What they do is, firstly, allow you to create an atmosphere where a lot of different people from within an organisation can get in the room and share their knowledge together. Product teams are able to talk to sales and marketing teams, or engineering, distribution and customer service teams. They are all able to have direct input into the product creation. So I think that definitely helps from a feasibility sense. In the workshop stage of the sprint, feasibility constraints become very apparent and can be flagged straightaway.
The second component that helps to de-risk concepts is being able to test and see if users actually want this product or service. Following the sprint, teams will have a good sense of how desirable your concept is. Sprints answer questions like: what do people like and what don’t they like? What features are people excited by? Knowing the answers to these questions helps you iterate towards a better product-market fit.
What can Local Peoples bring to the process of design sprints to help organisations?
We bring an experienced team of people who’ve been running design sprints for a number of years across a lot of different industries and executional formats. In the team we have a mix of people with a wealth of skills in design, marketing, content generation and storytelling. This multidisciplinary experience combined with a human-centred design approach means we’re able to flex our team around complex challenges that are presented to us that aren’t just products but also around place and the environment.
There's a famous saying from David Kelley, the founder of IDEO. "Fail fast to succeed sooner." It's much better to fail in the early stages. Then you can iterate those stages faster and learn quicker.
Why should organisations participate in design sprints?
It’s better articulated in opportunity cost. As an organisation, if you invest resources, time and money in something and go too far down the development path before validating some of your assumptions with end-users, you might find the product doesn’t have a good market fit. What design sprints allow you to do is test some of those assumptions early on in the process to give you some validation in order to make further investments.
There’s a famous saying from David Kelley, the founder of IDEO. “Fail fast to succeed sooner.” It’s much better to fail in the early stages. Then you can iterate those stages faster and learn quicker. The great thing about this design experience is that it sets up a safe environment to use creative problem-solving and try new ideas in a prototype. You can learn really, really quickly without knowing everything upfront.
What if you don’t have a target market in mind for a product or service?
That can be an issue. Unless you’re using a design sprint to test a prototype over multiple cohorts in the hopes you’re going to find the right one, a more typical market analysis approach would be more useful to determine your target audience for a product. Design sprints presuppose you already have an audience in mind.
What if an organisation wants to answer many questions?
Great! That’s where the sprint process comes in. During Day One of the process, we facilitate an initial exercise that opens up the conversation to multiple questions. Then it becomes a process of voting on which questions you think you should be addressing within this sprint. The structure of the sprint really only allows you to work on a handful of questions at a time to ensure you gain valuable insights.
We recommend doing more than one sprint. You can either take one question and do several iterations with that one focus, turning a pretty loose idea into a very finely tuned product or service. Or you can look at what are the main challenges under a wider strategic umbrella, then examine them in a sequence. This allows you to cover a broader base so you end up with a collection of promising ideas.
Interested in learning more about strategic branding? Find out how Local Peoples can help your organization today.