 Design sprints, you probably have heard about them once or twice. They seem to be this magical thing that everybody is talking about nowadays. And although they can be really useful, I think design sprints can do more harm than good when they are misused. Stick around if you want to find out how you can improve the quality of your design sprints and make sure you get the most value out of them. Let the show begin! Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to a new episode of the Serbs Design Show. This show is all about helping you to design services that have a positive impact on people and are good for business. And when you're into service design, the big thing these days seem to be design sprints. Now if you've never heard of design sprints in the most broad explanation, it's a notion that you take somewhere between 1 and 14 days, it varies, to go through a fixed process in order to find a solution for a specific challenge. The term has really taken an off after the publication of the Design Sprint book. I have to admit, I have a love and hate relationship with design sprints. I can definitely see a role for design sprints in their current form. They're great for implementation and execution. And I fully understand why design sprints are so appealing to both clients and practitioners. They provide a lot of energy, are relatively low risk investments and they focus on coming up with new ideas. Who doesn't like that, right? But in this video I'm going to raise a warning regarding the upmarch of design sprints because I've seen when they are misused or not used in a mindful way, they can end up doing more harm than good. So I'll address the three big problems that I see and also show you how I think you can improve the quality of your design sprints. Now before I continue, I'd really like to know what is your take on design sprints? Do you use them or do you try to avoid them? I read all of your comments and try to reply to as many people as I can. So leave a comment and let's continue the conversation down below. Let me illustrate the first big problem that I see with design sprints using something that I call the design clock and it looks something like this. In this clock, design sprints are represented by seconds. The minutes represent the project of which the sprints are part of, the hours represent the program that the project is part of and finally the day represents the bigger why of an organization. Why are we doing anything? I hope this makes sense so far. Now what I see happening in design sprints is the total lack of awareness of the bigger picture. People tend to run so fast in design sprints that they often end up tripping over their own feet. People assume that if they complete that design sprint, they will also automatically move the minute arrow. I think that's a really big and dangerous misconception, so my argument would be that every design sprint should also have a design clock. The second problem I see with design sprints is that they can give you a false belief that you're solving a problem that is actually worth solving. I like to think about design as the balance between spending time in the problem space and in the solution space. Design sprints, as they are positioned right now, don't really take the problem space into account. When you're participating in a design sprint, you usually don't spend a lot of time, if any, doing exploration and discovery. Design sprints are often focused on idea generation and idea validation. This is what Ash Moria calls the innovators bias. Check the show notes for a great article on that. And the problem with this is that although you might get your idea validated and the impression that your idea is worth pursuing, you don't know if you're actually addressing some of the bigger pains in the life of your customers. You might end up creating the perfect solution for a non-existing or trivial problem. And the cure for this is remarkably simple and easy to execute. Make sure you spend at least 50% of your time in the problem space. For the last problem, I'd like to refer to one of the previous guests on the show, Cheryl Lee Ryan, who said that we should do our best to design less, not more. Because when you think about it, in many cases, we can achieve a better design by actually removing stuff, not adding things. Design sprints are, however, always focused on creating something new. You're always creating something that will consume the attention of your users. You're always adding to the complexity. I'd like to join Cheryl Lee's pledge and argue that we need to do design sprints that focus on simplifying things. The most elegant solutions aren't the ones where there's nothing left to add. There are the ones where there is nothing left to remove. So my perspective on how you can improve the quality of your design sprints is by taking the Design Clock into account, making sure you spend 50% of your time in the problem space and strive towards simplicity. What is your experience with design sprints? Do you like them? Do you try to avoid them? I'd really love to hear your perspective. So make sure you leave a comment down below and let's continue the conversation there. I hope that you found this episode helpful and if it was, don't forget to share it with someone who might like it too. If you haven't done it already, I would love to have you to subscribe to the channel so we can keep bringing you more videos that help you to design great services. Thanks so much for watching and I look forward to see you in the next episode.