Design sprints: For Organisations Big and Small
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We chat to the Local Peoples Design Team about the design sprint process and how they might help organisations of all sizes.
Would design sprints be useful for organisations with a smaller team, for example startups before they scale?
Design sprints started out as a process within Google Ventures to flesh out new product and service ideas. The process was originally designed for the startups within their portfolio. The fact that sprints have been adopted by other types of organisations is a beneficial outcome off the back of that.
Startups are often in a position where they have a limited set of resources and capabilities from having smaller teams. What design sprints enable is a jolt in terms of adding capability, design and testing. They also help startups to focus on their next steps. The structure of design sprints really forces focus out of participants.
You could have a startup that’s very engineering – or tech-focused but may not have much marketing or design capability. That’s where we’re able to help out in capturing the key messages and honing that into a proposition or set of propositions for the end-user. We can then build out and test these propositions. If you’re a product team or a set of engineers developing technical aspects involved with creating a new startup, testing may not be your first priority. That’s where Local Peoples are able to step in and provide a launching pad for thinking about their products in a user-focused way through a design lens.
The first and most important thing a design sprint does for an organisation is to get these people in the same room collaborating, talking to each other about a single thing.
Why are design sprints useful for larger organisations?
Design sprints are useful for larger organisations because, quite often, large organisations can be very siloed in terms of what people’s direct priorities are. So you might have a marketing team that works on one floor and a sales team on another floor. I’ve worked with companies where the customer research teams were producing reports that weren’t able to penetrate the rest of the organisation, just because they didn’t get together enough.
The first and most important thing a design sprint does for an organisation is to get these people in the same room collaborating, talking to each other about a single thing. That’s incredibly beneficial because you’re able to harness all the knowledge that’s stored in the organisation across these departments. Being able to get a viewpoint on a problem from multiple different angles is essential to a new product or service development.
The other reason design sprints are useful for large organisations is the process is designed to flatten out hierarchies. Within larger organisations often there are more entrenched hierarchies so there can be what’s called “HiPPO syndrome”, which is when the highest paid person’s opinion carries the most weight. Design sprints use voting dots to democratise opinions. Drawings and designs are anonymous so ideas don’t necessarily win just because people are able to sell them the best. Often, ideas that get pushed forward are pushed by the most charismatic and articulate proponents; design sprints flatten that out by getting people to write down their ideas using really crystallised language.They also allow people to look through the ideas by themselves and come to their own judgements. What that does is help to democratise ideas.
We’ve been in design sprints where the lowest ranked person been churning out incredible ideas. These ideas often don’t get the airing they deserve within a traditional company structure but in a design sprint they are all up on the wall. The CEO’s idea is just as valued as the intern’s. What generally comes out is an appreciation for everyone’s point of view and also the ability to critique without judgement. Even though there is a decider who makes the final choice I’d say that choice is based on the quality of ideas rather than the rank of the person proposing them.