Tips for facilitating Design Sprints
Two years on from a cripplingly awful design sprint I regularly use sprint methodologies to get teams involved early and de-risk high risk uncertainties. What changed?
Sprints are powerful, but they’re not for everything.
TIP 1: Hold yourself accountable by committing to put your work up on the worldwide web.
This article is one of the things I knew I had to do to hold myself accountable. I should have written one called “Well that was a shitshow”, two years ago but in it’s absence I’ve written this one instead. Knowing I’d be putting up my experiences in public forced me to a) consider carefully how my future sprints was going to run b) make better observations on what wasn’t working and c) fix them.
It’s 2018, I’m just over a year into my first role as the only UX designer in a product team of 3 responsible for designing a consumer facing app with 1m+ users. Looking to totally rebuild their app offering I hatch a plan to run my first Design Sprint to create alignment on what the product direction should be on the new app (well actually apps — Android and iOS were being explicitly targeted but our web app would also have to be able to support the majority if not all of the features offered on our native mobile applications).
My intentions were good, but my ambitions to thrash out a business direction as well as product to deliver it were…. overly ambitious.
TIP 2: Get a tight scope agreed with management as to what the design sprint will focus on and teach them what Sprint is.
Some of my experiences were down to biting off more than I could chew. I’d never run a design sprint before — hell I’d only ever even attended one! I did spend weeks preparing and had the support of our Head of Product, the engineers and UI designers I worked closely with. The MD was keen that none of the central team felt left out. Being a bit too eager to please I suggested that we therefore run two sprints as we’d be too many people for one. I can tell you that simultaneously facilitating two design sprints is not the solution to the problem that your boss wants more people in the room. Now I know I should either have run a separate sprint on a different week OR hired in another facilitator — at the time I was too timid to ask for the time of the CEO & Head of Product for 2 weeks.
TIP 3: SPRINT explicitly warns you on getting buy in from the decision maker but I’ll add to that to beware of HiPPOs. Consider your own position in the hierarchy; if you don’t have decision making power then you need to win other those that do.
I’ve learnt the expert interviews are a really good opportunity to placate your HiPPO. Put them on the stool — their command of the information and history of the company is usually the best after all. Script the questions that you know no-one wants to ask and make sure you’re asking the 5 W’s and an H on their behalf. Spend some time with the team to think of questions you believe will get the information the sprinters need to hear out there, remove the spotlight by getting them to anonymously enter questions on G Forms or Sli.do
I didn’t have the support or respect of our Head of Engineering and we routinely avoided each other but he was crucial to the success of the sprint. If you have a trouble maker in the business you need to get them onside, whilst his being exposed as a bully was ultimately a good thing it needn’t have come to various members of the team literally ending up in tears.
Judge your timing. If the C-Suite is transitioning speak with them about the right time to run a sprint. Are they comfortable taking the decisions from each other forward? Do you have the resources to run two? Lay out what it’s going to cost them in days of each person involved time, what they can expect to learn or gain and the problems that you’re facing.
TIP 4: Much like any other UX project you take on you can iterate on the process later. Don’t expect your first one to be a massive success and don’t overly engineer it. Stick to the Sprint book because it’s an easy recipe to follow.
Wanting to get the most out of Sprint, I ran a version of Design Sprint that took most of the Jake Knapp’s (progenitor of design sprints) original sprint and super-imposed some tricks from the 2.0 version his agency AJ&Smart run.
Trying to keep track of two different methodologies at once was hard work and I didn’t have the experience required to smooth the transition between the two. Stick to the book your first time round — it’s super easy to follow with checklists and support galore. It’s not perfect but if you’re a facilitating newbie it’s a lifesaver. You’ll put your own stamp on it with time.
TIP 5: Play with the timeline
Finally I shifted the timeline, we start on a Thursday, which gives me the weekend to prototype (DO get time off in lieu if you’re going to do this — I had a lovely Wednesday hiking with my dogs after to decompress!), recruit users to testing sessions and write a skeleton script and gives you Monday to sort the niggles.
TIP 6: Keep a journal of what works and what doesn’t. Keep focussed on improving only the areas that let you down rather than solving for problems you haven’t encountered. Steal ideas on how to improve from the professionals.
I found that whilst the original design sprint requires the whole group for the full time but it’s actually only necessary until the storyboarding is done. You can chop and change who’s required for prototyping and testing depending on the solution and a great way to get brilliant notes is to have 1 or 2 team members sit in and take your HMW notes in the testing sessions. If you book in advance it’ll give the sprinters most of their day back. To make sure that everyone sees where trends are emerging I now use Tomer Sharon’s rainbow sheet for note taking.
The Story-Boarding exercise in Sprint really flummoxed my team and we lost a huge amount of energy and trust in the process during it. Since then I’ve tried a few versions but do recommend the AJ&Smart Storyboarding hack.
FINAL TIP: Present a recap back to the business
However your company manages presentations make sure you get one in the diary. It doesn’t have to be an hour long presentation — even a 5 minute showcase will crystallise the learnings and re-enforce to the business what you’re taking forward and why. Include documentation — pictures of the sprint, clips from testing, the teams 2 page wireframes — it’ll help to bring it to life and as a bonus you’ll have written your case study!
Happy Sprinting!
Remember this is your first time and there are tons of people and resources to help — feel free to reach out or take a look at:
- UX Alpaca’s guide to getting started with the right question
- Google Ventures Design Sprint site
- The Sprint Book’s site
