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"This post was originally published on the Thoughtbot blog.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nA Product Design Sprint is a 5-phase exercise which uses design thinking to reduce the inherent risks in successfully bringing products to market. We've done six product design sprints so far and have made them a default part of our consulting engagements.\r\n\r\nParticipating in a Design Sprint orients the entire team and aims their efforts at hitting clearly defined goals. Sprints are useful starting points when kicking off a new feature, workflow, product, business or solving problems with an existing product.\r\n\r\nIntegrating design sprints and design thinking into our product development process keeps us aligned with our goals, and helps us invest our time and money wisely.\r\nDesign thinking\r\nDesign Thinking\u00A0combines empathy, creativity and rationality to solve human-centered problems. It is the foundation on which a Design Sprint is built.\r\nEmpathy\r\nWith Design Thinking, we use empathy to see the world through our customers eyes and understand their problems as they experience them. There may be many technological, financial, political, religious, human, and social and cultural forces involved. It is our job to develop a holistic understanding of these problems and forces and contextualize them in a greater world schema.\r\n\r\nIn addition to our own perspective, we aim to understand the perspectives of as many other people as possible to better diversify our understanding.\r\n\r\nEmpathy is the primary focus of Phase 1 (Understand) and a major part of Phase 5 (Test and Learn). We should aim to always maintain empathy when solving problems and building products for humans.\r\nCreativity\r\nCreativity is opportunity discovery. We use creativity to generate insights and solution concepts.\r\n\r\nThe most creative solutions are inspired by unique insights and intersecting perspectives. Empathy, as described above, empowers our ability to understand different perspectives and be more creative.\r\n\r\nCollaboration inspires creativity. More perspectives, ideas, and insights lead to more opportunity.\r\n\r\nCreativity is the focus of Phase 2 (Diverge), but is present in all phases (developing prototypes, testing/interviewing, researching/observing, creating experiments, etc.)\r\nRationality\r\nWe use rationality to fit solutions to the problem context through experimentation, testing and qualitative/quantitative measurements. This is the primary focus of Phase 3 (Converge) and Phase 5 (Test and Learn).\r\n\r\nDesign Thinking should pervade all of our processes outside the design sprint as well, from engineering to marketing to business development. In a complex business ecosystem design thinking can be used as a holistic approach to facilitating and maintaining a symbiotic relationship with your customers.\r\nThe Sprint Phases\r\nA typical length for a project kick-off sprint is five days, with each day representing a different phase.\r\n\r\nThis timeframe is not rigid and should adapt to the specific needs of the problem. For example, some phases may need more than a full day and others may need less.\r\n\r\nThe aim is to develop a product or feature idea into a prototype that can be tested to help us fill our riskiest knowledge gaps, validate or invalidate our riskiest assumptions and guide future work.\r\n\r\n\r\nPhase 1: Understand\r\nGoal:\u00A0Develop a common understanding of the working context including the problem, the business, the customer, the value proposition, and how success will be determined.\r\n\r\nBy the end of this phase, we also aim to have identified some of our biggest risks and started to make plans for reducing them.\r\n\r\nWhy:\u00A0Common understanding will empower everyones decision making and contributions to the project.\r\n\r\nUnderstanding our risks enables us to stay risk-averse and avoid investing time and money on things that rely on unknowns or assumptions.\r\n\r\nActivities:\r\n\r\n\tDefine the Business Opportunity.\r\n\tDefine the Customer.\r\n\tDefine the Problem.\r\n\tDefine the Value Proposition (why will people pay you?).\r\n\tDefine context-specific terms (this will act as a dictionary).\r\n\tDiscuss short term and long term business goals (What\u2019s the driving vision?).\r\n\tGather and analyze existing research.\r\n\tFill out the Business Model Canvas (this should be continually revisited).\r\n\tCapture our analysis of competitive products.\r\n\tGather inspirational and informative examples of other people/products solving similar or analogous problems.\r\n\tIf there is an existing site/app, map out the screens.\r\n\tAs they come up in discussion, capture assumptions and unknowns on a wall or board with sticky notes. Later we can revisit this wall, group related items together and make plans to eliminate risky unknowns and address risky assumptions.\r\n\r\nAll of these definitions are expected to change as we move forward and learn more.\r\n\r\nDeliverables:\r\n\r\n\tNotes &amp;amp;amp; documentation capturing the definitions and goals we discussed throughout the day. These notes should provide a solid reference and help with onboarding others later on.\r\n\tA plan for initiating the next phase of the sprint.\r\n\r\nPhase 2: Diverge\r\nGoal:\u00A0Generate insights and potential solutions to our customers problems.\r\n\r\nExplore as many ways of solving the problems as possible, regardless of how realistic, feasible, or viable they may or may not be.\r\n\r\nWhy:\u00A0The opportunity this phase generates enables us to evaluate and rationally eliminate options and identify potentially viable solutions to move forward with. This phase is also crucial to innovation and marketplace differentiation.\r\n\r\nActivities:\r\n\r\n\tConstantly ask, \u201CHow might we\u2026\u201D.\r\n\tGenerate, develop, and communicate new ideas.\r\n\tQuick and iterative individual sketching.\r\n\tGroup sketching on whiteboards.\r\n\tMind Mapping individually and as a group.\r\n\r\nDeliverables:\r\n\r\n\tCritical path diagram:\u00A0highlights the story most critical to the challenge at hand. Where does your customer start, where should they end up and what needs to happen along the way?\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\tPrototype goals:\u00A0What is it we want to learn more about? What assumptions do we need to address?\r\n\r\nPhase 3: Converge\r\nGoal:\u00A0Take all of the possibilities exposed during phases 1 and 2, eliminate the wild and currently unfeasible ideas and hone in on the ideas we feel the best about.\r\n\r\nThese ideas will guide the implementation of a prototype in phase 4 that will be tested with existing or potential customers.\r\n\r\nWhy:\u00A0Not every idea is actionable or feasible and only some will fit the situation and problem context. Exploring many alternative solutions helps provide confidence that we are heading in the right direction.\r\n\r\nActivities:\r\n\r\n\tIdentify the ideas that aim to solve the same problem in different ways.\r\n\tEliminate solutions that can\u2019t be pursued currently.\r\n\tVote for good ideas.\r\n\tStoryboard the core customer flow. This could be a work flow or the story (from the customers perspective) of how they engage with, learn about and become motivated to purchase or utilise a product or service.\r\n\r\nDeliverables:\r\n\r\n\tThe Prototype Storyboard:\u00A0a comic book-style story of your customer moving through the previously-defined critical path. The storyboard is the blueprint for the prototype that will be created in phase 4.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\tAssumptions Table:\u00A0A list of all assumptions inherent in our prototype, how we plan on testing them, and the expected outcomes which validate those assumptions.\r\n\r\n\r\nPhase 4: Prototype\r\nGoal:\u00A0Build a prototype that can be tested with existing or potential customers.\r\n\r\nThe prototype should be designed to learn about specific unknowns and assumptions. It\u2019s medium should be determined by time constraints and learning goals. Paper, Keynote, and simple HTML/CSS are all good prototyping media.\r\n\r\nThe prototype storyboard and the first three phases of the sprint should make prototype-building fairly straight forward. There shouldn\u2019t be much uncertainty around what needs to be done.\r\n\r\nWhy:\u00A0A prototype is a very low cost way of gaining valuable insights about what the product needs to be. Once we know what works and what doesn\u2019t we can confidently invest time and money on more permanent implementation.\r\n\r\nActivities:\r\n\r\n\tPrototype implementation.\r\n\r\nDeliverables:\r\n\r\n\tA testable prototype.\r\n\tA plan for testing. If we are testing workflows, we should also have a list of outcomes we can ask our testers to achieve with our prototype.\r\n\r\nPhase 5: Test &amp;amp;amp; Learn\r\nGoal:\u00A0Test the prototype with existing or potential customers.\r\n\r\nIt is important to test with existing or potential customers because they are the ones you want your product to work and be valuable for. Their experiences with the problem and knowledge of the context have influence on their interaction with your product that non customers won\u2019t have.\r\n\r\nWhy:\u00A0Your customers will show you the product they need. Testing our ideas helps us learn more about things we previously knew little about and gives us a much clearer understanding of which directions we should move next. It can also helps us course-correct and avoid building the wrong product.\r\n\r\nActivities:\r\n\r\n\tObserve and interview customers as they interact with your prototype.\r\n\tObserve and interview customers as they interact with competitive products.\r\n\r\nDeliverables:\r\n\r\n\tSummary/report of our learnings from testing the prototype.\r\n\tA plan for moving forward beyond the design sprint.\r\n\r\nOur Product Design Sprint process has been heavily informed by IDEO\u2019s Human Centered Design Toolkit and a series of blog posts by Google Ventures and we are grateful for the information they have shared.\r\nTop image credit:\u00A0mezzotint/Shutterstock"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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