Mapping the Design Sprint challenge
Mapping the Design Sprint challenge
Day #1 Map your challenge and check it with domain experts*
It’s Monday, it’s time to get started for real. As there will be people who’ve never met before in the Sprint, it’s important to break the ice and remove barriers around status, experience, and any anxiety about expectations – in a Sprint everybody is equal (unless you’re the Decider) and everybody’s opinion counts. We like to do a warm-up exercise from the Daresay Toolkit to put everybody at ease. With this done, the role of the Decider – the person who takes any key decisions during the day is allocated. This is usually the Product Owner, CEO or Project Manager.
Breaking the ice: the lef-handed sketches of different Design Sprint team members at Länsförsäkringar, are put on the wall.
Invite other stakeholders to contribute
With the ice broken, it’s time to move on to mapping the challenge. This usually starts with a very complete and convoluted story, but this is often where you need to start in order to move ahead. It’s important to list the current position of a product/service/process, the goal of the Sprint and the long-term goals of the organisation. It’s unusual to have all this information at hand in such a small group, so the people that do (so-called experts) should be invited into the group at this point to share their viewpoints and knowledge. By the end of the day the map of the challenge has to be broken down into a clearly defined target group, a user journey, and a manageable goal with the desired effect that end users will experience.
This is put on the wall or whiteboard, as most things are in the Sprint. Having all information accessible and easy to view plays a central role in fast, innovative, collaborative work.
An external facilitator ensures you get an objective view of the challenge and reach agreement on the user journey in the allotted time.
*Much of this information can be found in “SPRINT – how to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days”, by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, from Google Ventures. We’ve just tailored it to find a way that we think works best for our clients and delivers the best results for them.