 Hi, my name is Armour and I'm a Design Sprint Lead at AJN Smart. In this video, I'm going to show you how to run and sell Design Sprints like a pro. So this video is going to be very helpful to you if you're thinking about doing your first Design Sprint either with your team or as a professional consultant, or if you already do Design Sprints but you want to level up your game and see how you can offer a more valuable package to your clients. If you don't know how the Design Sprint works, we have a ton of videos that you can check out in the card and in the description. So if you have any questions regarding anything about the process, about how it works, how to sell it, how to promote it internally, how to get people on board, just put those questions down in the comments and we'll have a conversation about it. So in this video, I'm going to show you how to take the Design Sprint from a one week process and turn it into a four week package that is a lot more robust and that will increase your chances of having a successful Design Sprint with your team or with your clients. Now the way that we do that is that we took the Design Sprint from a one week process and we turned it into a four week package. Now I hear you saying but Armour, like the great thing about Sprints was that it was a short project, it was one week, no bloat, so aren't you really killing the value of the process by turning it into four weeks? And my answer to that is no. Let's say you took the book, you read it, you found it great and now you went and did your Sprints, right? You can absolutely do that. In fact, that's exactly how we started. So when we first read the book, we were so excited about it. We took this thing called a Sprint and we started selling it to our clients as a project, just one week thing. We worked with them exactly how it was outlined in the book. Week in, week out, each week a different client. But then we started running to some challenges. The first one being is that the Design Sprint as a process was really designed for startups in mind, right? So if you're a startup, you do this process to validate your idea and then you take the learnings from that and you improve on your idea to make something better. But what we found out was that when working especially with bigger companies at the end of the first week of a Sprint, there are usually so many questions like you end up with a lot more questions than you started with that people can really see that as a negative thing. And you can try your best to convince them that we have a lot of learnings and that we have everything we need to move on and improve on this. But a lot of people can't help but feel very negative at the end. And so as a result of that, we took the Sprint and we put something after it called the iteration Sprint. But essentially, we do another Sprint on the same challenge, taking the questions that we ended up with at the end of the first week and we start to, we try to answer them in the second week of the Sprint, right? So by the end of the second week, the result is so much more positive. I really, it's ridiculous. Whereas by the end of the first week, our clients were feeling really down. They felt like the Sprint wasn't successful. By the end of the second week, the prototype would be a lot, would have a lot more positive feedback and everyone would just love it. And if you have any questions about how the iteration Sprint works exactly and what the details are, just put those questions down in the comments and we'll be happy to answer them. Another thing that we notice is that it's really hard for people to commit for the length of a whole week, for example, even with the original just five-day Sprint, it was really hard to sell to our clients and ask them to be with us for five days. So one really important thing that we did is that we shortened the Sprint a little bit and we came up with a Sprint 2.0, which you can find a video on our channel about. So we took the process from five days and condensed it into four days. And even in those four days, we only require like the experts or the clients. So if you're working at a company and you're working with a team, you only need kind of the larger team to be there on Monday and Tuesday. So two days instead of five from the original book. And for the rest of the week, you're just working with a minimal, like you only need three people to be working. You need a Sprint lead who's a facilitator. You need someone to do the prototype and someone to do the user testing with the Sprint lead, so we've really minimized what the team needs to be who runs the Sprint rather than requiring everyone to be in the room. So that's very important as we extend the project forward because I don't want you to think that we're extending the project and requiring everyone to be there for the whole thing. That wouldn't be a realistic thing. And so now we ended up with these two weeks that are working much better than just the one-week Sprint. But we also noticed as we did more and more Sprints that we were working on more complex challenges, challenges that could use a little more prep time for our team since we're working as consultants to come in and understand. And there's only so much that we could understand when we just show up on the Sprint week, working with a client, trying to facilitate the process for them and add our own concepts and ideas to the process. And that's how we came up to the conclusion that we need a little bit of prep work and that's when we added a research week. I don't know, can you see that? So now we have these three weeks, right? So before the Sprint, we have a research week. In that research week, we basically talk to the client so you could do this either if you're selling it as a consultant or if you're doing Sprints internally and you need to get experts in the room. So what we do in this research week is that we talk to everyone who's going to be in the Sprint. First, we give them an introduction about what to expect and what's going to happen so that they don't feel lost when they show up on the first day of the Sprint. And we get as much information from them as possible so that we inform ourselves about the challenge. And that also gives us the advantage of being able to prepare some of the exercises that would normally happen on the first day of the Sprint. Things like preparing the map, preparing the how might we's or challenges, preparing what the Sprint questions might be. So when the client walks in on the first day of the first Sprint week, they find that we've already prepared a lot of stuff on the walls and that really takes the pressure off of them to come up with ideas on the spot because they're not starting from a scary blank whiteboard. There are a lot of their ideas, the stuff that they just told us in conversations when we talked to them and during the research week, they find it already on the walls and they just need to erase this, adjust that, correct that. And so it makes it a lot easier for them. So that's also something that we found very valuable in our work and it gave us the benefit of being more informed about the challenge so that when we're creating solution concepts for our clients, we can create something that is a lot more in depth because we've studied up on what the challenge is. So as you can see now, we have this three week block and you know exactly why each block came and how it improved the quality of the project. It improved the chances of having successful Sprint so we're not adding these for no reason. Again, like it would be silly to just add on more days to a process that had most of its value in its shortness, right? But now you know how these additions and these tweaks will help you have a more successful Sprint and they were not just added for the sake of it, right? And so the last thing that we did is that at the end, especially when working with big corporate clients is that we couldn't just leave them at the end with like the result and the prototype. They needed to take the output of the Sprint and present it internally to their bosses, to maybe a larger team that was going to then take for example, if let's say we designed an app, they were going to take it to the developers who are going to work on the app or things like that. So we needed to really package the results in a way that was easy to share, easy to understand and that's how we came up with what we call the delivery week. We took the delivery week and in that we package all of the outputs from the Sprint so we take the prototypes from week one and the updated prototype from the second week of the Sprint and we put them in a nice package, we highlight them, we say what worked, what didn't work, we answer the Sprint questions and we put all of that in a basically a slide deck that can be presented like immediately taken and presented internally. So for anyone who wasn't in the Sprint, they understand what happened and we also have a set of recommendations for a next step for our client because the great thing about a Sprint is that it's this recipe that's been tested and proven to work that tells you what to do and then as you follow the steps you get good results from it but then you're left with big questions about what comes next and so what we try to do to help our clients and you can do this whether you're doing a Sprint internally or selling it as a consultant is you come up with a set of recommendations for what should be the next steps otherwise you risk having the project go into like just endless discussions and all of the bad things that the Sprint tries to fix in the first place. So hopefully this gives you a good idea of why we do Sprints the way that we do and we've we found that this is the best way that we know of to do design Sprint projects right. Again doing the one week Sprint was great but it presented us with a lot of challenges where the client wasn't feeling great at the end and so we added the iteration Sprint to iron out the details and just make sure that we have a great positive end to the Sprint and to tackle more challenging projects and to onboard the client to the to the process we added the research week which made the process go a lot smoother since like I said we basically drafted a lot of the exercises that would normally happen in the Sprint and that took the pressure off of the experts that are in the room and we also reduced the days that the clients need to be in the room so they're essentially only there for two days on the first week and one day on the second week so although you're selling either internally or as a consultant this four week package you only require the time of the experts or the client to be there for three days three workshop days right that's hugely important if you're going to be successful in promoting Sprints as a way of working because it would be unreasonable to ask people to give up their time for four weeks right so that's also a very important part and lastly I'll I'll mention something about the team so the team that you would need to run a Sprint and those would be one Sprint lead who would be facilitating who would be coordinating everything about the Sprint one designer who would be doing the prototyping on the weeks of the Sprint and one user researcher who would be doing a lot of the research on the research week as well as the user testing in the Sprint weeks and then everyone works together on the final week to package up the results the prototypes the feedback from the user tests and put it all into a format that can be easily shared for your clients or for your company internally I hope you found this video helpful again I'm sure you have a lot of questions about the specifics put all of those down in the comments and I'll be happy to answer them I highly recommend you check out our other videos on the channel we have videos about innovation about general design advice and trends and about specifics of the design Sprint how we did the design Sprint 2.0 all that stuff so make sure to check out these other videos subscribe to the channel and check us out on LinkedIn we're also putting out a lot of content on there thanks so much for watching and see you in the next video yep all right does it show in the camera leave this in this is very professional uh all right very high tech set up here it's a bit it's a bit like provocative but how to do a professional package that you can sell either internally or as a professional consultant I'll do that again that is a lot more coherent best part is like every time I do a video I'll probably use a different title and if people like it's like what do you actually do