Design Sprints can be the catalyst for an organization’s evolution. When it’s done correctly, it creates a culture of customer-centric problem solving, that is geared towards consistent innovation.

Let us take you on a quick journey on best practices and how it has benefited some of our clients, like Carrier.

Officially, a Design Sprint is a multi-day process for solving challenges through prototyping and validation of ideas and concepts through testing and gathering of feedback from actual people. In short, it’s a method of quickly brainstorming solutions and then testing them by immediately putting them in action.

Popularized by Jake Knapp, author of the book entitled “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days”, the Design Sprint is the practical application of our Design Thinking workshops. While the source material suggests that these sprints take place over the course of five days, through continuous iteration and familiarization with the process, some teams can reduce it into as little as three days.

Running Design Sprints has been shown to offer numerous benefits! These include:

Visibility and Alignment

Design Sprints allow quick alignment among participants despite them coming from different backgrounds, teams, and positions. The groups are led by top level executives that provide strong direction and quick decisions in situations that typically get a team stuck for hours or even days. Sprints are also a fantastic avenue for leaders to not only get their teams to focus on a specific solution but understand the problem and the other issues that have to be resolved alongside it as well.

Quick Customer Feedback

There is a useful part of the design thinking process that is often missing from quick workshops; that of building prototypes and then immediately testing them with actual end-users for their valuable feedback.

When we worked on sprints with one of our clients, Carrier, we invited a handful of people to experience and judge the prototypes we and the Carrier team built together in a short period of time.

It was thanks to this fast-paced, iterative process of building prototypes, testing them, and then tweaking them right after that the Carrier team was able to receive immediate customer feedback that once took them weeks or even months to collect. Time that was once spent only theorizing was now being used to experiment and find answers more quickly than ever!

A Time to Refocus

We seldom get the chance to come together, hunker down, and focus on solving specific problems as a single team amidst the daily grind. This is especially true if we come from different disciplines or departments. Design Sprints allow us to see our different backgrounds as an advantage and use them as a wellspring of diverse ideas. They force us to take a pause from the usual work for a few days and use the freed-up energy and headspace to accomplish daunting challenges in a short amount of time.

A Culture of Innovation

To be truly impactful, a Design Sprint shouldn’t just be a one-off session reserved for a few members, but an organization-wide activity ingrained in and supported by the company’s culture.

After our initial series of Design Sprints with the Carrier team, they’ve since conducted multiple internal sprints with the participation of different stakeholders, leaders, and employees within the organization that not only produced innovative experiments but thoughtful and impactful new systems and processes as well.

If anything, the Design Sprints we facilitated for them was a big step towards creating a culture of customer-centric problem solving geared towards consistent innovation.