 So what is the Design Sprint really? It's a very good question to you. But I thought you were teaching this course, shouldn't you? Yeah, totally, totally know what I'm doing. I'll tell you anyway, just for the benefit of the camera. The Design Sprint is a step-by-step five-day system for solving big problems and testing big ideas and really it's being used a lot for building better products faster. It was developed at Google first by Jake Knapp, the guy who actually wrote this book. As a way to bring design into Google in a way that was measurable in a way that was a little bit more logical and cold and specific than design thinking which is a bit more open and let's say creative. For us at AJ & Smart, the reason why we started using the Design Sprint is just because it was such a simple and obvious way to start working on a product. So for us it was like immediately took over the whole company and it's something we love, but it all started with this little baby blue book. Is that baby blue? Sky blue. We used to really operate like a more standard typical design consultancy agency doing like longer projects and customizing different types of work that we were doing for our customers and basing our work more on what our customers told us. They thought they wanted more than doing what we knew so we actually really changed to the Design Sprint as a process that you can plug into any problem or any type of problem and run the process and really always make sure you're validating ideas, make sure you're always solving these problems. So when we used to actually run more like an agency we would see that we would have these kind of typical development processes like I'm sure most of you are really used to seeing these typical processes where there's this cycle of like starting with an idea, spending time designing and building and coming up with maybe multiple versions and then deciding which ones to do and then implementing and developing and building them maybe finally launching and then collecting information on what customers really thought about the idea. Yeah and it's like this classic lean startup loop that was really trendy at the time where we thought okay we're going through this loop so it must be the most efficient way to do things. But what we normally see and when I'm teaching Design Sprints always getting lots and lots of nods with people when I bring this up but what we normally see in these processes is much more of the implementation and the building phase stretching out longer and longer with miscommunications and misalignments and teams handing over and passing information back and forth from each other the designers designing the developers saying that won't work let's go back to the drawing board and the process usually ends up looking a lot more like this where you maybe don't even actually get to launch and don't ever even actually get to see that data and find out if the idea was even worthwhile and would actually have an impact on your business. Closing this loop and making this loop a lot smaller of validating and getting data on a product or idea before spending all this time is really what the Design Sprint is all about and the Design Sprint 2.0 which is what we're going to be teaching is doing all of this the process we're about to teach you in four days instead of the original five that's in the book which we've developed with Jake as well as this four day process. So what does the Design Sprint actually look like in practice? It's all about getting a group of people in the room a mixed team of people to work on an idea together all at the same time. So you get the right group of people in the room and clear their calendars for the whole week so that they can work together on this problem. And what does that week generally look like? On the first day it's creating a map together where everyone in the room can really understand the system that they're working with the product or the service and how it works really getting a map together so everyone is aligned on understanding what they're working with and then sketching solution ideas that could really try and solve the problem the topic that we're dealing with at the time. And on the next day, the Tuesday it's all about deciding which one of those multiple solutions or combination of those could be the thing that we really want to test and really want to try and then drawing a storyboard that really gives a concise view of what that concept looks like, what that solution could look like and so that we can show it to people and test it with them. On the Wednesday, the third day it's all about building that into a usable prototype, a very quick way of showing what that concept is so that people can actually use it and test it whether that's a digital or a physical or non-digital prototype and on the last day where you actually line up five people that are the right kinds of people that you might deal with and actually running through those tests. And then on the Friday you have a free day where you can party. We should probably just reiterate the fact that this course that you're doing right now is based on the four-day Design Sprint 2.0 In the book, if you've read it, it's based on five-day, but the book is two years old this is the updated version so everything we're talking about from now on is about the four-day Design Sprint and you get the same results it's actually more efficient so just so you know So this can be really helpful for people who want to run sprints in their organization that you need the experts and the people with the knowledge it could be the product manager, the CEO marketing manager, you only need them in the room for a shorter amount of time for two days maximum so this can really help make sprints more efficient and actually be able to run them And easier to sell as well Yeah, easier to convince people to do them and spend that time. So maybe I'll just give your voice and we'll break there Dee Thanks John and go through some of the core principles Now these are some things that you're going to hear repeated over and over again during the Design Sprint process and these are the almost like the pillars of every exercise that you're going to be running in the Design Sprint So the first thing is that we're going to be working together but alone It sounds sad, but it's not sad In a normal design process what happens or even in a normal meeting when you're trying to build a product everyone's talking at the same time, everyone's arguing everyone's putting their solutions out on the table there's a lot of talking, there's a lot of collaborating and even though maybe it kind of feels good in the moment, it's pretty inefficient. What happens usually is that the people who are really good at sales pitches or the people who are really loud or the people who are really confident generally are able to get their ideas through a little bit better than people who are maybe a little bit more shy but it could be those shy people who could have some of the best solutions So what you do with the Design Sprint is that everybody works towards the same goal but without sharing most of the time without sharing what they're working on especially when it comes to the solutions everybody works on the solutions by themselves and later things come together so there's a lot of silence in the Design Sprint and it can feel pretty weird and that's why we usually have a sound track playing during the quieter exercises of the Sprint and that sound track we're also going to link to you somewhere here if you just search AJ and SMART on Spotify you'll find that as well so together alone is a huge one and it's something as a facilitator that's worth pointing out at the very start of the Sprint as well just to give people the idea look, we're going to be working together but we're not going to be discussing with each other it removes the bias of the discussion the second thing is when we do have some sort of a discussion we want to have something tangible for that discussion that's why you'll see whenever there is any sort of open discussion happening in the Sprint we're usually pointing at something or we're usually referring to something we're not just talking about and describing something that's not there in the Lightning demos we're showing the demos during the voting for the concepts, we're looking at the concepts there's never any discussion without being able to show something tangible to guide that discussion I love this one because it's about removing the different interpretations that people might have when you're just describing something you're using words and people might have a different picture in their minds of what you're actually talking about but when you have something to really show you're all seeing the same thing this is why there's so much putting things up on walls and really making things tangible that everyone can see the same thing in the Sprint so next one is getting started is more important than being right you're going to hear us mention this a lot during the training and the goal here is to keep in mind that moving forward getting started going from one exercise to the next is actually more important than making sure that each of these exercises and each of these decisions that you're making are perfectly correct the Sprint is about moving fast it's about gathering momentum and stopping to always second guess whether you're correct or not is going to kill that momentum so during the course we're also going to be teaching you ways to make sure that you break through those barriers when people really want to be right and really don't want to move on to the next step this is a really tough one as a facilitator but we're going to give you all of our tricks on how to keep people moving and how to help people let go of things that they might feel like are getting lost along the way for only $2.99 extra that's a joke so finally thanks for the joke thank you the last thing is that you don't want to rely on creativity now one thing I want to say about these slides what I just realized that some people are going to point out all these slides are made in comic sense no more comment to that it's just true ok so don't rely on creativity here's the scenario you come into the office on Monday morning this is our scenario we have a new client, a new industry maybe we're tired, maybe someone's a little bit sick maybe you're just not feeling very creative for the Sprint to work you don't need to rely on individual creativity you don't need to rely on people feeling in the mood to be creative the system allows for creativity so that's something super important also to explain to people especially who may not be comfortable in a creative environment that they do not need creativity to get through the Sprint and to have a great outcome in the Sprint as well absolutely so the Sprint will give you the framework to produce solutions that are going to be useful and going to be maybe even perceived as creative but creativity is not part of this process so don't worry about it those are the most important principles to keep in mind and I'll just really quickly repeat them again together alone, tangible is more important than discussion getting started is more important than being right and don't rely on creativity so that's the design Sprint in a pretty big nutshell