 Hey everybody, Jonathan here from AJ & Smart, and like everyone else right now in the world, I am working from home. We're still running sprints, you know, we're still doing everything we usually do, but at home. Now, a lot of people have been asking us, how do we run remote sprints? What are the tools we use? How exactly do we transform the things you do in an in-person design sprint into this sort of digital whiteboard and how do we deal with clients? How do we handle all of this kind of stuff? And the other day, what we decided to do is make one of our private paid live streams. So we have this online course called the Design Sprint Masterclass. In the Design Sprint Masterclass, we have the information on the tools and everything we use for remote sprints. And last week, we did a live stream and decided to make it public, decided to make it free because so many people are struggling right now to run workshops online. So what you're about to see just for some context is an excerpt from the live stream with myself and my colleague Tim running people through how we run remote design sprints and the tools we use. I think it was a great look inside how we actually run remote sprints. So I hope you enjoy it and I'm sorry about the quality of this. I know this is not a normal AJ & Smart video, but these are not normal times either. Thank you so much for watching and I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any other questions about remote sprints, make sure you leave a comment down below. Give us a like and if you find us on LinkedIn, you'll also find a lot more stuff on remote sprints as well. We're posting pretty much every day. We're also doing live streams the entire time. Check us out on Instagram at AJ Smart Design. Yeah, thanks so much for watching and thanks for your support as well. So first of all, AJ & Smart, I think if you're in this live stream, you know who we are. We're a digital product and innovation studio based in Berlin. Our clients are all around the world and because of that, we've always had to work remotely. So occasionally, I think in our sprint, if we look at the full four weeks of how we do our sprints, which we can explain later, only two days of those four weeks are necessarily in person. So like 98% of our sprints are actually remote and we never really shared the extreme details of that. And that's something we started to add to our online course now, but we wanted people who didn't buy the online course, who can't afford the online course, which we totally understand as well. There's a lot of students following us. We wanted to give you guys the inside view of how we do remote design sprints and then we'll answer some of your questions as well. Now, let's cut to the chase and we'll kick things off by showing you how we run remote design sprints at AJ & Smart. We want to show you everything, the behind the scenes, take notes, take pictures. We're going to show you exactly how we run design sprints for the biggest companies in the world remotely. And we're more than happy if you copy us. We're more than happy if you steal exactly these templates. Please do, because this is a time where you're going to need to run a lot of remote stuff in the next few months. I'm going to hand this over to Tim and Tim, who has been developing a lot of the actual infrastructure for our remote sprints. It's going to show you how we do it. So I'll talk to you all in a while. I'm going to sit back and drink some tea. So the first thing I want to show you is the structure that we use for remote sprints, where you will be able to see how we make use of the time, how we organize the days. So I'm just going to share this and maybe just give me... Yeah, can you see this? Can everybody see this? Okay, perfect. Great. So let's take a look at the structure of the sprint as we are running it. We are operating with a four-week structure, so we are never just doing one sprint week. We used to do this, but it just turned out to be very, very, very stressful. I think the first two sprints we ran back in the day were the standard one-week sprints, and then we just realized how insanely stressful it is for an agency to do that. I mean, Jake, when he came up with the sprint process, he was working in a very specific context of working with startups for like Google Ventures. So we had to adapt the process slightly for our purposes. And this is now a sprint package from Agent Smart Looks Like. So four weeks, the first week, and I'm just going to talk about the remote setup, by the way. So the first week is what we call the pre-flight week. It's when we are spending a lot of time doing research, onboarding the client, and setting up the project. So a lot of the things you see on here are, well, actually all of it is remote, all of it. So the blue chunks here are things that are just internal Agent Smart, like the team is collaborating on specific things, sending out invites, setting up the project on Basecamp. The red chunks here is everything that involves the client. So this is also the overview that we send to our clients before an engagement kicks off because we want them to be very clear on the specific times that they need to block to talk to us basically and make time for workshops. So the first two chunks here are one-on-one interviews with the team. We always try to talk to the decider or the project owner first. Sometimes the decider and the project owner is not the same person in that case. We want to talk to the project owner. And then we're talking to all the other participants of the sprint. Another thing that we are doing is sending out a survey that I can show you later as well in preparation of these interviews. And this is essentially just like a five-minute survey asking people to define the challenge a bit more clearly, listing the common problems they encounter at work, also ideas that they maybe have, or initiatives that were already tried internally, but for whatever reason didn't take off. Then we spent the rest of the week doing some internal research and preparing for the first remote workshop, which happens on Friday. And I'm going to talk about that in more detail later. The important thing here is these four blocks on Wednesday and Thursday. So this is essentially when we already prepare a lot of the things that we are going to work with during the first workshop. So we call the first workshop the alignment workshop. And essentially it's taking the first half of an in-person workshop Monday. And it includes things like talking about the map, how might we, can we sprint questions, long-term goal, defining the target user, things like that. And unlike an in-person sprint, we cannot ask people to sit in front of their computer for the entire day. So we knew that we needed to make a few changes and have more, but shorter workshops. So the first workshop actually happens on this Friday and it's pretty much taking care of the entire problem framing and defining the problem space that we want to solve for. And we're also using the time to already kick off user recruiting. So after talking about the target users, our researcher can already set up the campaign basically to do the recruiting. And if people are interested, I can talk about the recruiting as well. So all of this is happening entirely remotely. In the second week, we're doing two more workshops on Monday. It's the solution workshop where we are starting off with a recap, just talking about the decisions that were made in the previous week. Then we are doing lightning demos, sketching, and the sketching is happening remotely in the workshop with the facilitator giving guidance to the participants. However, we are ending the workshop when it's time to create the final three-step concept. So this is homework that we give to the participants, and we are giving them very clear instructions, and we are also giving them a time box. So we are not telling them to do it whenever you want, like as long as we get it in the morning. We're giving them a specific time when they have to send it in. We're doing this for the purpose of forcing them to just do it as quickly as possible and not worrying too much about the details. This is also the reason why we're not doing the solution workshop on Friday, because we want to avoid that people spend their entire weekend sketching the perfect solution, and then in the end, it doesn't get chosen, and then they're frustrated. So just to avoid that, we do this on Monday, give them a time box, and then we tell them when the time's over, send a photo of your concept to the facilitator, and then the facilitator will upload it to the board. We can take a look at what these boards look like as well. So Tuesday is when the decisions are being made. So we are again starting with the recap, then we're doing the art gallery, heatmap exercise, straw poll, decider vote, user test flow, and then storyboarding. And that's how we end the first chunk of workshops. And the rest of it is pretty much standard design sprint for us. I mean, we didn't even change the timings too much since we're ending on a Tuesday. We have a little bit more time for prototyping and recruiting, which is really nice. But yeah, so Friday, we spent some time preparing for the workshops in the following week. And if you know, I mean, maybe you know the AJ and smart design sprint structure. So as I already mentioned, we never do just one week of sprinting. We always do two weeks back to back. So the first week is for pure ideation, defining the problem, coming up with crazy solutions, testing them. The second week is for iterating on these solutions based on the user feedback. So it's quite valuable. And this is really where we are taking advantage of having talked to five testers in the previous week, because now we can really work out the details that didn't quite work yet and figure out what we need to change to make this really winning product. And we are running this iteration workshop remotely as well. We don't need that much time for it because we're always basing it on the things that were already created in the previous week. We already have really detailed prototype to structure our discussions on. And in the end, we're just very quickly sketching some fixes and improvements. So then we're basically just going back to prototyping the second version of the prototype. And usually, this is where the prototype gets so much more valuable for clients because they get something in the end that is a lot closer to a final finished product that they can then take to stakeholders and present their ideas back. So we're just running user testing on Thursday. Maybe they spill over on Friday and then we prepare for the handover week, which is the last week of the engagement. So nothing really gets created in this week except recommendations and defining very clear next steps for the client. So the first thing that we do on Monday is run a short remote workshop session where we just pretty much wrap up the sprint, talk about the feedback. And then we also talk about the biggest issues that remain open and need to be addressed somehow. And we're also trying to leave them with really solid and useful recommendations for the next steps once they end the engagement with us. So the rest of the week is really just us documenting the sprint, writing out the recommendations, creating a final sprint report. If people are interested, I can also show what that looks like because we are already doing this remotely. We are not necessarily sitting in the same room when we're doing all of this work and the entire sprint ends with a 60 minute wrap up call with the decider or sometimes the entire team can also join where we just show them the report and basically end the project at that point. So I have already shown you the high level structure, but I think what might be interesting before we look at specifics of running the remote workshop is how we do the entire onboarding phase. And I would like to show you a couple of things here. Okay, so this is the pre-sprint survey that we sent out to clients. And this is usually something that we sent out after sending a really nice onboarding message to them. Actually, maybe I should show the onboarding message first. Let's just continue with this here. So just assume you're the client. You already know, okay, something is happening. It's called a sprint with a company called Agent Smart. I have no idea what's going on, but I know that they will be sending me information. And then you receive this kind of like overview with an email where we pretty much show them exactly what I showed you just a couple of minutes ago, this overview of the project telling them when to block time and also sending them links to the survey you are seeing here. And also to scheduling service like you can book me where they can pick a time for a one-on-one interview. And so what's really important for us is just to prepare for these interviews to already get some insights into the challenge from their perspective. So every participant is just answering this survey. And as you can see, it's really, really short. A couple of things that are important from our side in terms of managing expectations and also getting an awareness of what is the client really looking for? Are they looking to actually create a product immediately after the sprint is done? Do they have developers waiting or something like that? Or do they want to unlock a budget by presenting this to stakeholders internally? This is where we are asking them things like what are the top one, two, three things you would like to get by the end of our sprint together. And this is just a long form answer here. How will you be using the outcomes of the sprint in your role? That's also really, really important. And this one here is really critical for the user researcher. Who do you think is the target customer for this challenge? Because when we see that there's a complete alignment on who this is for, we can pretty much start recruiting immediately even before we started the first workshop, which is really awesome. Because when you have done recruiting for user tests before, you know that it's super stressful to get these people in time. And the sooner you start the better. So this is a really good thing to ask the client. And if you see that there's misalignment on the side of the client, this is kind of like the first red flag that you need to be aware of that in the workshop. And if you feel like there is a complete misalignment that you just need to spend more time on hashing out these details. Who are your biggest competitors with regards to this challenge? Getting answers on this here really helps us with preparing things like lightning demos in advance of the workshop. Same with companies that inspire them. What do you think the solution could look like? I mean, all of these things are just material for us to prepare for the sprint and to really understand what is really the problem we are trying to solve? Are there any things that we can look at that already exist? And what are some things we can already prepare before we start working with the client? And there's a reason for that that I will be talking about when I show you the exact workshop setup that we have on my role. So this is the survey, just assume that both the decider and all participants will get them. And when we're doing the one-on-one interviews with them, we are pretty much just going through the results of that survey. At specific times, we're just asking them to go a little bit more into detail or have some follow-up questions. And sometimes it's just a sharing session where they pretty much just dump everything that frustrates them about the problem that they're trying to solve on us. And this is all really valuable because when we are doing these calls, we are always recording them with Lume. You can see this little thing up here. Let me just see if you can actually see this. Okay, I'm not locked in here right now. But anyway, Lume is a really good tool for recording your screen. And it's really cool when you're doing a video call to capture what is being talked about. And of course, we're always asking for permission when we do that. These videos are then used by the rest of the team because not everybody will be joining the calls. We try to avoid having this pile on where five people talk to one person. Usually it's the sprint lead and maybe a user researcher talking to them one-on-one. And the rest of the team can still listen into the interviews. But usually the person running the interview is also writing a very quick summary. And in any case, we have the survey to rely on as well. So yeah, how do we do these interviews? So we either use Google Hangouts or Zoom. I mean, it really depends whatever is most convenient for the clients. I should also mention that when we're doing these interviews, we are already apart from talking about the problem and how potential solutions and things like that. We are already trying to talk a bit about what they can expect in the workshop. We're not already talking about specific exercises. We're basically just introducing principles like, hey, just so you know, this is not just a conference call where you can put yourself on mute, switch the camera off and do other stuff that is unrelated to the workshop. You will have to focus. You can expect that. You will be working together alone. So it's going to be collaborative. And we are also trying to cut down on any unnecessary discussion just to set expectations so people are roughly aware of what to expect. And we are also using these one-on-one interviews to do a very quick tech setup check with them, where we are sending them the link to the digital whiteboard. We set up the communication tools and we just do a very quick trial run with them. It shouldn't take more than 10 to 15 minutes, but we're always planning to do that in the one-on-one interviews because it's sometimes not feasible to get people more than, you know, like for 60 minutes in the first week and we just try to get it out of the way so that people can just focus on the workshop. Yeah, so tech setup, talking about the challenge, preparing and all. Yeah, all is well then. Okay, so this is the survey. Let me end this and then if you guys are interested in it, I can open it. You gave me a moment. Tim, will you open up the Miro board? I think that's the main thing. Yeah, that's what I wanted to do next. Okay, you can put me away again, Ryan. Bye. This is the template that we have on Miro and I created, so this is the actual template. I just made a copy for this call, but I also created a version that is filled in that I will show you later so that it becomes a little bit more tangible how this is used. So yeah, as I already mentioned, we are using Miro, but there are tools like Miro. There's no shortage of digital whiteboards that are really, really, really good. And you can also get creative with this. In one case, Miro was not an option for us, so we had to rely on Google Slides to run the workshop and it actually worked fine. It was not as nice as Miro, but yeah, it still worked. So the important thing is when you're doing a workshop remotely is you have to see what people are doing in real time. That's really the most important thing from our perspective because you're already physically separated. You're sitting in front of a computer and it's really important for these kind of workshops to convey this notion of working together towards a common goal. And this just doesn't work if you just send people emails with homework and then you try to consolidate everything. So having a digital whiteboard like Miro or Miro is really awesome. The nice thing about Miro, and I'm pretty sure that Miro offers this feature too, is you can specify a specific part of the whiteboard that people see the moment they are clicking on the invite. And in our case, it's called Miro Basics. And this is essentially what we run them through when we're doing this tech setup check in the onboarding call. The funny thing is that a lot of these digital whiteboards have so many cool features, but you actually don't need most of them. And this is something that I would also like to really impart on you. If you're worried about like using a tool that is very complex, the good news is that your participants don't actually need to do that much stuff with the whiteboard. The main thing is being able to navigate the whiteboard and they need to be able to create sticky notes, duplicate them, fill them out and move them around. And that's what we are kind of like training them to do here with this setup. There's a bunch of other features that are only important for the facilitator. For example, starting a timer or things like that. But the participants don't need to worry about that. I mean, you are guiding them through the process. So that makes it makes it a lot easier for them. When we are talking about navigating the board, I mean, one convenient feature that Myro offers is the outline here. It's easy. So depending on how good your template is, it's pretty easy to just move through it like this. But you would be surprised how many people actually have trouble with, you know, like zooming and swiping on laptops. I mean, you probably, like most of you probably have, you know, really nice Apple laptops or something like that or some PC laptop. But when you're working with corporate clients, you can assume that they will have, you know, like Lenovo ThinkPad or something like that. And they're usually using Excel sheets and they have never used a tool like this before. So it's really important to assume that you have to teach them how to navigate the board and to make things a bit easier. We created this outline here. So if for whatever reason they get lost, we can just tell them, Hey, participant XYZ, can you please join us at the two year goal? And then they click on that. And then they immediately zoom to the two year goal. Okay, so as I mentioned, all of, yeah, all of what you're seeing now is the template that we create at the beginning of a sprint. So it's completely empty. And maybe the setup is interesting to people. I'm not entirely sure. We can also share that with you. But I think where it gets really interesting is when we look at this demo I created, which is a completely made up product and client that I just created in 30 minutes before before this started. Don't focus on the content too much. It will not make a lot of sense, but there is like a complete like lore behind it in my head at least. So in any case, when you're looking at things like the map, one thing that we notice is that if you're just starting the map from scratch with the client in the workshop, it's super tedious. And just getting people started takes time because you're always starting from a blank slate. And this is making it really hard for people to structure their thoughts and conversations. So what we are doing is actually start the sprint with a prepared map. So in this case, you can see here this target area that I can just very quickly delete that and these here as well. So when we are starting the workshop, we would already show the client something like this here and we tell them, look, this is just a draft based on what you told us in the previous interviews that we did with you. And we do this. So we come up with these kind of like map drafts as a team. And then we show this to the client and then we structure the conversations about the map around this. And usually people then start saying, yeah, here outbound sales, that doesn't really make any sense for us. And it's so much easier to make progress on the map when you already have stuff on the whiteboard. And I would really recommend if you have the luxury of doing this in advance, you should always do it. Just expect that people will want to change things. That's completely fine. I mean, it's still about collaboration. I mean, it's not about catering something final to the client. It's really just a means to get them started to talk about the map in a more structured way. So let's bring these things back. Yeah, same with things like challenges and how might we when we start working with the client in a workshop, we already have a collection of how might we use here. We have a collection of two year goals, print questions, all of these things are based on things we talked about with the client in the interview calls. And in the workshop, we always give them time to read through the prepared artifacts and also give them time to add their own. So it's a pretty good way to just get the ball rolling, basically. Yeah, let's see. So this is the map. And as you can see here, and this might be interesting for people as well, when you're using a digital whiteboard, you usually have voting features built in. So in my role, it's this functionality here. So let's say I select these sticky notes here and then I create this voting thing here. I can just very quickly say what people can vote on and what the area is they can vote on. However, so this is really convenient. But we don't actually like doing it too much. So this is just like our personal experience with it. The advantage you have when you try to replicate real, real stickers like here is that you really get a sense of people voting and working with each other. If you're using the voting tools, the advantage is that the votes are actually anonymous, but you don't see people voting and you just have this feeling that you're working on your own. So what we're doing instead is we prepare these little red circles here, just tell people to either grab them and drag them to the sticky notes that they want to vote on or copy and paste them. And this way, people can actually see like these red dots building up, which is really fun. I love seeing that built up in an in-person sprint in a real location. And it's quite nice to just replicate that. Same here with the Decider votes. We have already prepared these. And you might also notice that we are explaining the exercises on the whiteboard. So we would recommend that you don't switch back and forth between like a presentation deck where you talk about the exercises and the workspace. Because every time you do that, there will be people who are completely confused what's happening now. And some people will not go back to the workspace. They will be looking at the video conferencing tool or whatever. And it's just a lot of work for the facilitator to bring them all back. So we prefer to keep things contained to the digital whiteboard and just explain the exercises in a more tangible way. One thing that might be interesting is how the lightning demos look like. So the way we are using lightning demos, and this is also something I should have mentioned earlier, lightning demos are also homework. So when you're doing the lightning demos, it's usually something you can research at the end of the first workshop. So over Friday or maybe the weekend, you can just think about like three different examples you want to show to the team. If you want to get special brownie points from the facilitator, you can also make a little screen recording or something talking about your lightning demo and then send it all to the facilitator and they will be adding it to the board. So it's on purpose that we're trying to structure the workshops in a way to let the facilitator do as much of this work as possible, because we don't want to ask too much of the time of the participants, like moving moving things around or like uploading really big files to the whiteboard. This is something that the sprint team can do internally. Yeah, the solution concepts, maybe this is also something that we should be talking about. As you can see here, we prefer to still do the concept sketching on paper with a sharpie just because it's a really nice constrain that forces you to be not too perfectionist about almost creating a perfect wireframe just because you have a digital tool now and you feel like, oh, now I need to align all the left edges. I mean, I am the most obsessive compulsive person I know. So I know for sure that if I try to create a concept in a digital tool, I would already start immediately like going straight into UX design. And just to avoid that, we are telling people, don't worry, you don't need to do that in here. You can just do it on paper. We explain them very clearly how they should be sketching these concepts just like in a normal in-person sprint process, sorry, in-person workshop. And when they're done and it's time for them to submit their concept, they can just send it over to the facilitator as a photo or a scan. And if there's anyone who doesn't submit their concept by that time, it's perfect because we have the time until the next workshop. The facilitator can individually check in and ask people, hey, what's happening with the concept? Are you having trouble? This is actually something where the remote sprint offers you as the facilitator so much more leeway in helping individual participants make, like bring their vision across where in a normal in-person workshop, you are just like on this really tight schedule. And you know, you just have to get things moving forward. You have time now to really help people individually, which is quite nice. So then we have here a board for the user test flow. I mean, I think some people were wondering, how do we do the storyboard exercise on here? So at Adrian Smart, we are never jumping straight into the storyboard. We're always kicking things off with something we call the user test flow. I'm not going to go into too much detail what that is. There are tons of free resources out there where we talk about that process. But it's really easy to do on a digital whiteboard. The storyboard is then kind of like a mix and match of the user test flow. And the artist is then doing something that we stole from Basecamp's shape up methodology of product management and product design. It's called breadboarding. And essentially, it's just taking these very high level sticky notes to like one more level of detail where the artist is not drawing anything yet. They're just kind of like writing a list of bullet points of things that need to happen on a screen, maybe already with a couple of content ideas. If we're talking about like, you know, like what should the headline say? What is the label of the button? Things like that we can just do in text. And then if necessary and time permitting, then we can also look at the key screens and kind of like do almost like a wireframe version of the screen as a group. But this is really saving so much time and trouble. And it's really nice. One last thing I want to show you before we maybe have time to answer some questions, I don't know, is the wall of justice. So this is the funny thing is, well, maybe actually, it's not that funny. It's just funny to me. But this is actually the first time we started using my role and we didn't even do any Yeah, we didn't do we didn't do any workshops remotely. It was always in person and my role. The first time we used my role was just to capture the feedback from users during the test because honestly, it's it's such a waste wasteful procedure to write down the user feedback on these like green and red sticky sticky notes. You know, usually people, people have to run to the whiteboard, things get messed up, you know, like somebody like the sticky notes fall down at the end of the day, it's super annoying. And you cannot sort them easily. And so we started doing it digitally on my row. And you can see here what the sport looks like. Let's take so all of this is completely made up by the way. Jean Jacques here, assuming that we are interviewing this guy called Jean Jacques, the person who is taking the notes during the interview can create a new sticky note really quickly, capture feedback, it's it's effortless. It's actually a lot faster than doing it on paper. And I'm the biggest pen and paper fan of all time. I love sticky notes. But this is, I mean, objectively, this is just superior. And you should start doing this immediately. So you can see here, we're kind of like, working our way down each row. And each of these rows here is like about a specific feature. And what's really nice here is that if you at the end of the day, zoom out, you can identify like trends and and patterns immediately. And this is something that you cannot do with the paper sticky notes on a whiteboard, because usually they're not like ordered in any meaningful way. It's just like a scramble to get them on the board. This makes it really nice to see, okay, obviously, there is some, some issue here, all of the testers had negative feedback here. And some of the testers also had like very big problems with the feature here, report creation, whatever that is. So this is really convenient. And the cool thing is, you can also export this entire sheet and share it with the client. And this is really powerful, because we used to just take take photos of the whiteboard, but usually the tests would end in at, you know, late at night or something like that. And then you have these really grainy, pixely, horrible photos. And it's just it's just so unprofessional. So this is really cool, convenient. And I love it. Can you tell already? So and this is, yeah, this is the exact board that we're using for a sprint. John, what should we talk about next? Oh my god, Tim, that was beautiful. Tim, one thing that was unclear, and maybe we need to elaborate is what what is the finished storyboard actually look like in the remote sprint? Yeah. So as you can see here, we are also utilizing like the sketches from some of the concept here. So it usually the most important screens are already they're already in the winning concepts. And sometimes they're really interesting features or some some concepts that didn't get chosen by the decider have like the perfect headline or something like that. And like the rest of it is, you know, like we cannot we cannot use any of this except the headline. So what we usually do in a in person sprint is we actually take scissors and glue and cut these concepts apart and then kind of like create these like almost like low fire wireframes on a physical whiteboard. And you can do exactly the same thing here. So you can just take specific screenshots off like, hey, let's say I just need this filter thing here, the facilitator can quickly create this or just, you know, like do something like this here so that you can almost like build these cells just using the available like the the sketches that are already available. And you can actually you can actually like cover a lot of ground just doing that. In some cases, you need to create new elements or change something. And in that case, like a digital whiteboard is also offering, you know, like specific things you can do like maybe you just want want to create, you know, like a navigation bar or something like that, all of that stuff is pretty easy, easy to do. I mean, the like if you so that I think the reason why the storyboard is so challenging is not because, you know, it's it's sketching or like you need to have artistic, hey, artistic talent. It's because it's, you know, like you just need to get aligned on what needs to happen on every screen. You know, what is the content that needs to go up there and stuff. And the rest of it is like if you look at like a digital product, a lot of it like a lot of it is just like rectangles, maybe a circle here and there. But you don't actually need to be a talented artist to create that. It definitely helps. But it's not necessary. And this is something that you can create quite easily in in a digital white board as well. So one thing that is also quite cool of although it's a it's a luxury to have that. We have, we have someone on our team who has an iPad pro with some sketching app that he can actually he can actually share in like a video conferencing call. And he can actually just be the artist just like he would be in an in person sprint in a workshop because he has an app like a like an iPad pro. He has the Apple pencil. You can like literally draw based on the conversations that the client is having. And it's not it's not always an option. Depending on you know like the available tech and things like that. But it's also possible. So I know that you know like not everybody has an iPad pro not like so. But there are definitely tools that make it a lot easier. If this is not an option for whatever reason, just doing it like with squares and rectangles and circles in digital whiteboards also completely fine. It's easy. Great. So let's answer some of your questions. And I'm going to be answering some of the top voted questions in the questions and answers section. Now, first question. Thanks for doing this. How do you break the design sprint activities for remote activity? So so Tim the question here is which bits are online and asynchronous and homework? And which bits are in person? Yeah. So so the homework is first of all, researching lightning demos. That's kind of like what we give people as homework at the end of the first workshop. The second homework is creating the final concept. And yeah, this is this is pretty much it. So the rest of it is done in person with not in person, but like like remotely in the workshop. Okay. Tim, when it comes to the sketching, so the three part sketching, so actually creating the concept, do people do that in the how much time do they have to do that? Like do they do that like overnight or when do they actually do the sketching? Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, as I mentioned, we, we just want to avoid people going crazy over the weekend and spending a lot of time on that. So we give them so they have a little bit more time than usual, because sometimes they just need to do something or maybe they're just going off for lunch or whatever. We cannot control that, but we're just giving them a bit of extra time. We give them so once the workshop has ended, and we're telling people to do the homework now, we usually give them like a time window of about like three hours. And then we tell them, at the end of the three hours, please send your concept to the facilitator via email or however you need, like the conferencing tool or whatever is more most convenient. And this is usually, as I mentioned before, we're asking them to do that on paper with sharpies, and they can just make a quick photo with their phone or a scan or something like that. So that, like I said, the reason we're doing that is we want to have this element of you know, making something by hand and avoiding becoming too perfectionistic about like, hey, now I need to have like a rounded corner on this thing because it's a button. I mean, this is just like going to cost them so much time they can instead spend on thinking about like the actual product. So this is the reason why we're doing this. Tim, how do we deal with technical issues quickly and professionally? So this has been a massive problem for us in the past during remote sprints, where like the video just cuts off or like, how do we actually deal with that? Yeah, I mean, we used to have the exact same problems with user testing. And so what really improved the situation for us was starting to do these kind of like pre workshop technical checks with each participant individually, just to make sure that okay, they can actually use the tool. They have a good stable internet connection. This is also part of the onboarding that we specifically tell people, you cannot actually dial in by phone. You need a stable internet connection. You should get a quiet room somewhere. And you need to make sure that you have a webcam and a working mic. And then we just test that beforehand. But there are still instances when there is issues. In that case, so we are running sprints with two people, sometimes even more, but it's like two people minimum with one like lead facilitator and one co facilitator or a runner. And the runner is usually somebody who is kind of like training to become a lead facilitator. So sometimes they're taking over specific exercises. But what they're mostly doing is like making sure that everything is running smoothly. So they're helping individual participants if they're also keeping an eye open. If, for example, somebody drops out of the call, it's now their task to help them join quickly and also let the facilitator know, okay, Josh, we just lost Josh and I'll just quickly run. Can we just maybe like take a five minute break or something like that? And usually that really helps. And I think this is an instance where you almost cannot overprepare. The more you prepare and set up like, you know, like a fallback solution, the better. Because there will always be problems in that that you just don't expect and can't be helped. Cool. Okay, so Tim, why let's just put it to rest because actually it irritates me a little bit that so much of the conversation is about tools. Miro or mural? They're both great. I mean, it really doesn't matter. I mean, I know people who swear by mural. I personally have never really used it. The reason we like my role is just we have used it for a long time. All our templates are in my role. Sometimes we talk about like, hey, should we maybe check out mural? And then we do like a side by side feature comparison. And then we realize it's, they're so similar. I mean, this is not this is not to say that, you know, this is actually a good thing. I mean, they're really key, like, like if one one of these tools improves, the other tool like quickly improves as well, tries to add whatever feature was missing. They have like really like they're really both excellent products with really good support as well. I yeah, I mean, my my personal favorite is my role just because I'm more familiar with it. But mural is amazing as well. And like I said, you can even use something like Google Slides in a pinch. Like if there is like we sometimes have clients who for whatever reason cannot use either my role or mural because they just just like this year, they were able to convince their IT department. Hey, how about you allow us to access like Google tools. And in that case, we can actually use that. I mean, it's not it's not optimal. But there are other ways of doing it. You could even use something like Figma to be honest. I mean, it's it really doesn't matter too much. So and in the case of my role versus mural, I don't really want to make a call on that. Tim, Tim, honestly, like if you had to choose between fully remote, or the way that we usually do it pre Coronavirus, which is 90% remote, and then some days in person, what's actually your preference? Yeah, maybe in person with a hazmat suit or something. Exactly. So it's really, it's really tough because I mean, like they're like pros and cons for both approaches. I mean, I personally love interacting with clients in a physical location, you know, like building this report with people, like, you know, like workshopping with them. It's cool. And you actually have this feeling of kinship and teamwork. However, it's also very wasteful, you know, like flying around the globe, doing that or or sometimes we fly as a team. It always like this is actually something that bothers me quite a lot. And it's also stressful. It's very wasteful. It's stressful. And I mean, I personally would still like to always have some sort of in person component. But it doesn't mean that every sprint has to be in person. So we have we have done some in person sprints with clients that we build a really good relationship with. And every sprint after the first one was fully remote, because we have already built the report with the team. Yeah, we we know, like, they know they can trust us, we know we can trust them that they, you know, like that they will also, you know, heed our guidance and our advice. So I'll I'll just be I'll just stay a fence walker. No, fence sitter, right? I'll actually tell you the software that we use for running sprints in general. We use base camp for all client updates. So base camp is almost like the base camp for all of our projects. So we don't use email with our client, we're using base camp. Then we use Miro for the digital whiteboard. Tim, what what's the current video conferencing software that you guys like the best? Zoom, Zoom. Okay, yeah, same. So it's, it's, it's either hangouts or zoom. But I think zoom is becoming a favorite of ours, just because most, most clients we work with already use zoom. And it's incredibly robust. So we, we just like every day we're doing like a little agent smart company hangout on zoom. Yeah, 20 people joining. And it's, it doesn't slow down. It doesn't lag. It's, it's really good. It's and you can have some fun with it as well. I mean, it's just a really good tool. Works, works amazing. I mean, I personally find the UX very confusing sometimes still zooms UX. Yeah, once you get a hang of it, it's fine. Yeah. Yeah. And what we're also using notion for all our internal documentation. So how we document like the versions of our sprints and which exercises we're using notion. And I think that those are, and we're using the sprint team is using Google Drive for all the sort of just dumping information and collecting it out. We're using loom L O O M to record the user testing. And yeah, so yeah, basically, I think that's the core technology that we're using in the company. And we use a Yeti mic. It's a really, really simple microphone called a Yeti Y E T I. That's the microphone we plug in because then you can hear everybody around in the in the live stream. And we're using a simple logitech HD C 9 6 0 or something like that. When you search logitech HD webcam, you'll find it. So maybe also interesting. I mean, so where I'm working from right now is my home office and I don't have the proper setup that I mean that I have at the office. When we're doing when we're doing remote sprints, we're usually still doing it at the office. But we have like a proper setup there with a really good webcam, some light ring, etc. So that we have some really good lighting. Yeah. And our internet is also a lot more stable there. Yeah. Although it's not to I have to say right now, even though every neighbor in my house is on Netflix watching 4K footage, it's somehow OK. OK, so thank you, everybody. I think we have 300 people still on the call, which is amazing. I didn't get through all of the questions, but we just wanted to blast out this live stream quite last minute, give you a look inside how we're doing remote sprints so that you have a chance to do that with your clients as well. We have a massive amount of remote content coming up on all of our channels. If you're not already listening to the Jake and Jonathan podcast, get on there. If you're not already checking our YouTube channel every Tuesday, we have a new video always free. Our LinkedIn channel is exploding at the moment. We just posted a free overview of the strategy sprint. So 90% of our content is free. There's always like that last 10% which we charge for just so we can keep the shop open, you know. But thank you so much for everybody, to everybody for being here. We really appreciate your time. I love you all. Bye. OK, so I hope you like that video on remote sprints. As you saw there, we're using Miro or Myro as Tim says. And that is sort of the main tool. We're also using Basecamp. We got a lot of other videos coming up over the next few weeks. So make sure you subscribe to this channel. You can learn everything you need to know about design sprint, about being a workshop consultant. Thanks so much for watching the video. Let us know if you have any questions in the comments. Have a great day.