MVPverse — As a PM how to prepare for a Design Sprint.

In my previous article — The Design Sprint Hack — I introduced the concept of the design sprint, its tenets, and a brief on its features; a bit like a framework of a design sprint. But, as they say, a framework is as good as its application, which made me wonder how you actually run a design sprint.

Although the concept of design sprint originated at Stanford, it was pioneered by Google, who was after bringing a UX-led approach to its products. The improvement that Google did was to make the process much more flexible and adaptable to every scenario.

So to actually run a design sprint there is some preparation that needs to be done.

The preparation

• Plan for each day, there needs to be a specific task for each day. Broadly falls under the category of Notice, Empathy, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test for tasks for each day.
• Sprint brief, The sprint brief will act as a guidepost for the team throughout the sprint. It should list your defined goals (the problem or problems you’re solving), deliverables, agenda, and methods. It should also provide the sprint team with background for the project and any user research that’s already available.
• Team composition, as per Google a good cross-functional team is what is desired, they have included vertical heads, sales heads, and marketing heads in their sprint, obviously based on the kind of project and expertise needed. As a ground rule, a Product Manager, a BA, a Tech Lead, UX/UI, and UR people should be in this team, to say the least.
• Visual Aids, as someone leading the sprint, it is important for you to have artefacts/visuals handy and available with the team. Visuals such as brief, any preparatory material for the product, any user research, and any websites/apps that you may be getting inspired from. Having these visuals in front can streamline the process.
• Compile User-research, you do not want participants to waste their time in gathering UR. It is mandatory that a bit of UR-related deliberation is already done. At least, answers to questions like — who would be our early evangelists? what user segments are the most valuable to us?- should be answered. It will be best to have an idea of their pain points as well.
• Key Presenters at the start, In addition to the compiled data, you may want to line up key speakers and external experts who can share a fresh perspective on the problem the team is working on. Google’s design sprint methodology calls these Lightning Talks since they’re meant to be a concise presentations lasting between 10–15 minutes. Helpful topics might include a summary of customer research from someone on the support team, competitive audits from an analyst, and a review of product performance from a product manager.
• Ice breaker session, An ice breaker is a great way to get everyone comfortable with each other and jumpstart creative thinking. If you don’t already have an idea just Google.
• Collaboration Platform, in the day and age of wfhing, it is important that you have a good stable platform where people can collaborate and generate their ideas for the team to use in future. Some of the tools that can be used are Miro, Teams, and Office Online.

In next article I will be writing about how to run and what aids do we have to facilitate that.