Design Sprint: Rapid Problem-Solving for Business Success

Design Sprint is a methodology developed by Jake Knapp, the former design partner at Google. It is a 5-day process, to solve critical business problems effectively and test them rapidly. It quickly aligns teams to develop a shared vision and clearly define goals and deliverables. The below image gives an overview of the steps in this process.

I first heard about this during my internship at Amazon. I was working on a complex problem with two teams who have not worked together to solve issues with deliveries. I was invited to a two-day workshop in a room filled with product managers, UX designers, User Experience experts, SMEs, Applied Scientists, SDEs, and interns from both teams. Each team gave an introduction to the products they work on. Post lunch of day 1, we started to jot down problems in our product space on post-its. End of the day we formed themes in these problems and found 1 theme to focus on.

The next day everyone was split into groups and was asked to find solutions to these problems in the form of How might we (HMW) questions. At the end of the activity we voted for the solutions proposed by each team and the solutions with the maximum votes, were then selected for creating a small prototype. For me, this was something new, exciting, and engaging. I had never seen teams, work together to solve problems like this.

Read more about design sprint at - http://www.gv.com/sprint/