On July 25th, Cocoon and Business_Link organised a public workshop about Design Sprint and its practical use. On a sunny Tuesday afternoon, we greeted people from the corporate and freelance worlds in the Visionary building in Prague 7.
We wanted to demonstrate the core principles of the Design Sprint process and its practical use through several exercises in a one-day MiniSprint workshop (In a usual Design Sprint process, we use a 4-day format).
After a short theoretical introduction, we chose two topics: “Product innovation processes in companies” and “Internal communication”. Three smaller teams were formed and our facilitators led them through an hour-long “MiniSprint”. However, the problem with anything that requires creative and critical thinking is that it’s easy to get lost, lose focus, and fall into the trap of having useless, open-ended, unstructured discussions. The freedom to discuss might seem conducive to creativity or more informed decision-making when, in fact, it’s the enemy. Structure and discipline create the freedom needed to be creative. The “MiniSprint” exercise demonstrates an easy way to make faster decisions and take quick directions. When you have a list of solutions that can solve the most important problems, you must know how much effort is required to execute the solutions so you can decide which ones can be accomplished quickly and which ones might take more time to implement. Another part of the “MiniSprint” helps you to asses the effort/impact of potential solutions and choose the ones with the lowest effort and the highest impact.
The “MiniSprint” is inspired by the core principles of the Design Sprint:
- Work together, alone
- Tangible things are better than discussion
- Getting started is more important than being 100% on the right track
- Don’t rely on creativity
- Time-box everything
If you have similar challenges like those listed bellow, The Design Sprint might be the right fit for you. Or you can at least start with the “MiniSprint” (Remember one of the principles: Getting started is more important than being right)
Product development cycles run too long, causing teams to lose enthusiasm and focus.
- Teams are pressured to be ‘innovative’ but don’t know how to start.
- Cross functional teams find it hard to align with common business objectives.
- Teams lack real data on which to base business decisions, instead relying on endless internal discussions.
- Teams often work towards unclear goals as the project scope changes repeatedly.
If there is a challenge we could help you with, give us a shout. We can teach you how to replace all open, unstructured discussions with clear processes.
Let’s Co-innovate.
