Design Sprints

WHAT

The Design Sprint is a methodology developed by Google Ventures, based on generating ideas and finding solutions through design thinking, rapid prototyping, and testing. The methodology is designed to take place over five days, but you can approximate the methodology in four hours (Sánchez Peña, 2018).

I've probably run at least 40 design sprints now in (1) classrooms for undergrads, MBA candidates, and executives, (2) professional development workshops at major conferences for entrepreneurship and business management, and (3) research meetings designed to address fuzzy or unwieldy problems as a guest speaker or facilitator. Bottom line up front is that THEY WORK...if you keep participants on message about what each step in the sprint is designed to accomplish and what their specific roles and attention should be. It is easy for participants to get overwhelmed and lost, and, as a result, to revert to "non-design" approaches that didn't work the last 20 times they were tried. You, facilitator, need to be much more specific in the instructions you provide and the "nuts and bolts" of their activities than your intuition will tell you. And you can never stop asking great questions to keep them going.