How we used a Design Sprint to empower team collaboration and move faster
This story begins last year, while I was working at Bancor, a blockchain startup based in Tel Aviv.
As a designer and founding member, I had the opportunity to work and collaborate with amazing people and to experience the development process of many different projects.
We started Bancor as a trendy startup with great momentum — a rising market, a huge crowdfunding success, and a focused product.
With time, things were starting to change. The fast-paced market slowly began to fade out and we started to experience some traction difficulties.
In an attempt to get back on track, the company decided to change strategy. This decision required the development of a new product under a new brand. No small challenge.
Realize when it’s time for a design sprint
Identifying an opportunity for a sprint can save your team valuable time and energy. It appears to be the secret sauce whenever you come across similar circumstances:
Communicate decisions
The way a decision is made is one thing, but the real problem is how decisions are perceived to have been made. Like a game of telephone, in the end, people understand the delivered message in a ‘slightly’ different way. That’s exactly what happened to us. Soon, our teams found themselves in meetings all day long, trying to figure out what to do.
Lack of clarity
The misalignment was too hard to manage. The gap between what the founders had in their minds was completely different than what we, as a product team, tried to spec and design. Let alone what the marketing team was planning to sell. It felt like we functioned as multiple misconnected units inside one company.
Get things going
Time to market can sometimes be crucial for startups. Even though we had limited time to develop and launch this new product, we were stuck and couldn’t get work done for a few months. We definitely couldn’t continue to work in that way.
The methodologies we knew until that point was obviously not very useful. We had to take a different kind of approach to handle the situation. That’s why the Design Sprint seemed to be a solution that could help us reboot.
Setting the stage
As a starting point, I gave a short overview of the sprint to our participants which included mainly the product team and representatives from the sales and marketing teams. Then, in the next week, without any interruption, we started to get things going and closed ourselves in a conference room.
Based on the AJ&Smart Design Sprint 2.0 we kicked off our sprint to make our time more efficient. I also watched their super useful videos to learn more. If you’re also considering running a sprint and need some tangible guidance, I highly recommend you to do so.
Defining the challenge
We started the sprint with the notion that at the end of it, we’d probably know what product we should be developing, but like in many other situations, this turned out to be just an assumption.
The beginning of the sprint was like a mirror in front of our face. Indeed, we quickly realized how much we didn’t know and was the exact challenge we were faced with.
As we had multiple experts across different teams, we had to uncover the challenge from many angles. This part of the sprint was also a profound moment. We instantly had a direct channel where all of our sprint members could discuss and understand the challenge.
Suddenly, the message was delivered in an uninterrupted way.
During the process we could make a couple of important decisions for the rest of the sprint:
- Focus on a landing page as the sprint’s prototype instead of trying to realize which product we should build. Before planning any product it’s necessary to first understand its value proposition. As a team, we decided that it would be enough to just prototype a landing page, as a tool to understand our proposition.
- The final prototype will not be tested on external users. There was much to be discovered before we could test it. The main goal of the prototype was to help ourselves as a team to be on the same page.
Time for solutions
Only half a day into the sprint we’ve reached a relatively clear mindset. This was a huge milestone, considering the amount of time we spent before the sprint.
We started to sketch ideas and produce solutions to different concepts. Then, when we started to vote for the best ideas of each concept, I’ve discovered the real strength of this part. If only our product team had to come up with solutions, we would never achieve the same result. Democratizing decision making might sound like a cliche, but only when you do so you realize how important it is.
We took the most voted parts and combined them into a mixed prototype. To make the process even more efficient, we leveraged the fact we had two designers on the team (including myself), so on the prototype day, we could have two different versions of the same prototype.
The prototype day marked the end of our design sprint. We voted and decided on the winner prototype. Based on this prototype, we could kick off the real development work of our project. In the following months, we worked hard to develop what we learned into a working product.
Design Sprint is a game-changer
In a short amount of time, we succeeded to achieve what we failed in many months. We identified a challenge, quickly made decisions, tackled obstacles and most importantly — understood what was ahead of us so we could plan a wise development strategy.
The sprint has massive potential to improve the collaboration culture in your organization. It’s also vital to any organization that aspires to innovate and move forward fast.
Interested in Design Sprint and want to learn more about the process? Sign up for a 1:1 chat with me!
Special thanks to Steven Fox and Ariel Zimroni for helping to publish this article.
