Three reasons why design sprinting should be your next step in business development

Over the last few years, design sprinting has been an unavoidable subject if you are engaged in design or innovation. But the five-day process that is the basis of a design sprint reaches far beyond the creative industries — it can create value for almost any kind of company.

For many companies, the development and launch of a new product or service can be a lengthy process that requires the involvement of many parties – both internally and externally. Maybe the process stretches over such a long period of time that you wonder whether it will still be relevant by the time it launches. It was with these problems as a starting point that Google Ventures developed the working process: Design Sprint.

Both financially and in terms of time, a design sprint is an extremely effective five-day process that focuses on solving business-related challenges through methods from the world of design – for example ideation, concept development, and user tests.

As a decision maker in a company, it can be difficult to figure out how investing in a design sprint can result directly in value creation. That is why we have collected three good reasons to shed light on some of the beneficial effects of a design sprint.

1) A design sprint brings employees together in one room

When you are working together on a project, one of the biggest challenges can often be quite simple: Finding a time when all the relevant employees can meet up. It’s not rare that this leads to a serious round of juggling with calendars, which ultimately just makes the project drag on. The solution: Bring on the design sprint!

In a design sprint, all employees/decision makers involved are together for one whole week (and this week of course has to be found in the calendar, we know!). In this way, a design sprint ensures that the different perspectives and all the expert knowledge in the group are combined, and therefore these inputs have been taken into account in the end product/solution.

2) Feedback from your users/customers provides an answer as to whether you are going in the right direction or not

One of the most frustrating and cost-intensive lessons you can learn is that the idea/product/service etc., that you spent so much time developing turns out to not be the right one. A design sprint can actually remove this expensive lesson for you entirely, because one of the most important phases in the process is the final user test. The sooner you test out your idea on actual users/customers, the sooner you can gain an understanding of whether it actually makes sense and if it’s worth going forward with.

When we did a design sprint with Kold College, this was one of the factors of the sprint that their chief of digitalization, Martin Falkenstrøm, emphasized:

“One of the ideas that I was quite keen on myself, was actually discarded on the basis of the user test. So if we hadn’t utilized the sprint, we would have potentially been in a situation where we had spent a lot of time and money developing something that in the end wouldn’t have made sense for our target group.”

3) A design sprint cuts away all the excess noise

Sometimes you just need clear framework and structure – and this is exactly what a design sprint is built for. A design sprint is a creative process, but most importantly it is a controlled creative process. The structure behind a design sprint means that when you are generating ideas – you generate ideas! When you are making decisions – you make decisions! There is a time and place for everything.

To begin with, it can be challenging to be governed by time and structures, but our experience tells us that the right solutions come as a result of this. And maybe even more importantly, this control is what cuts away all the superfluous meetings, infinite discussions, excessive focus on little (i.e. unnecessary) details, etc.

So next time you are implementing a new working procedure, working with digitalization, developing a new product, or something entirely different – it would perhaps be the time to ask yourself whether a design sprint could be the way to go.

If you are interested in learning more about design sprints and our approach to facilitating them, please reach out to hello@gejststudio.com.