Startups and entrepreneurs could not deny the advantages design sprint “hackathons” give to their businesses. Instead of spending months creating new products and services, brands can speed up the process to less than a week.
A Google design sprint process isn’t a form of process cramming. It guarantees brands have a result with a perfect product-market fit. Most brands create excellent products but with lacklustre demand become losses instead. Design sprints speed up and prevent this from happening.
What is a Design Sprint?
This groundbreaking product development process uses a streamlined set of tools and techniques that allow small companies to create already-effective prototypes that just need smaller tweaks based on real customer feedback. These aren’t just project prototypes you’ll create. You’ll make products that you can recreate and polish for production after the process.
Here is the entire process of a design sprint day-by-day:
Day One
During the first day, development teams will write everything they expect the product to do for customers. No matter how whimsical or impossible, these end results will help steer the product’s direction. Throughout the day, teams will identify possible difficulties by mapping out the challenges they’ll face during design, production, and producing a result with a perfect product-market fit, allowing them to pick out a target objective that they to solve in a single week.
Day Two
With the challenges mapped out and the primary objective identified, teams will start creating solutions. They will review existing ideas that allow them to create innovative solutions for each small challenge that leads towards their primary objective. Each development member creates possible processes that lead to the solution. By the end of the day, the team will identify audiences that will suit their product best.
Day Three
During the middle of the week, the team will discuss the formulated solutions from Tuesday. The day will begin with critiques of each solution produced and voting for the one that is most viable in solving the primary objective identified on Monday. This Google design sprint process will take the majority of the day. By Wednesday’s end, teams will create a storyboard that illustrates the creation process of their prototype.
Day Four
On day four, teams will make their storyboard come to life. They will divide the storyboard scenes into smaller events that focus on the customer-end of the product. This means there is no focus on the aesthetics, but the functionality and overall solution the hypothetical end-product can provide customers. By the end of day four, teams will finish their test schedule with a list of test customers, review the prototype’s front-end functionalities, and fake an interview script to see the flow of the test.
Day Five
By the last day of the working week, the team has already produced an excellent prototype that is virtually worthy for customer use. The team will observe as each customer follows the written storyboard script. They will look for reactions, difficulties, and other events that can happen while the test customers utilize the item. A final interview allows teams to know what is right and wrong about their product, allowing them to improve on such and understand the direction their product should take.
Conclusion
Google design sprint process are amazing especially for startups that need a great product-market fit to establish their brand. Businesses that need huge innovative ideas can use sprints to stimulate creativity and growth. With teams seeing the direction their products will take using live feedback from customers, design sprints are excellent investments that only need a single week to accomplish.