 Hey this is Jonathan from AJ and Smart and the video you're about to see is a Q&A that I did with Jake Knapp, he's the author of Sprint and we were talking about, we were answering a question about user research and it kind of went down deeper into the whole topic of user research even though we were first focusing on the design sprint itself. So the video you're about to see is from the Design Sprint Masterclass, it's an online course that we have and we're just taking a few snippets out of it and putting it on YouTube so that you don't have to you know pay to see a lot of it and yeah if you like it below there's a link to watch a one hour 20 minutes web class where we go deep into you know how to sell the design sprint, how to run design sprints all that kind of stuff so you can see that in the link below and yeah enjoy the Q&A. Hey welcome back to the Q&A part of this course where I'm standing here with Jake Knapp and we're gonna be just answering your questions that you've been pumping into the Facebook group for the last few months and we've got a great one, we've got a doozy. Okay let's have it, let's have it. Okay Andre asks and I'm gonna set the scene, I'm gonna set the scene, I'm just gonna read his question. Paint a picture. You're going into the design sprint okay you're going into the design sprint with a new client. That was the opening of the door, it's a creaky door. It's a very creaky door. You shouldn't have creaky doors, you shouldn't have creaky doors in the design sprint room. You're going to the design sprint whether it's with a client or an internal team and the internal team has a lot of biases on what they want to do on what they think the sprint should be and what they think the product should be but they've done no user research at all. It's all based on their own biases. Okay okay sure. What what do you think about that? Well because in design thinking that would be kind of a no-go. Kind of a yeah kind of a non-starter yeah so this is a this is a really good question and it's it's tough because if you do research before you come into the sprint you will always be ahead like you're always going to be ahead of a team who hasn't had a chance to do research. You're going to know more about your customers you're going to be I think of it almost as like you've already done a sprint if you've done research ahead of time and you're able to present it effectively and the team believes it. Now that's an important question because for many teams actually if they don't already believe in research you may not be able to just convince them like this is the right way to do listen to us so part of the idea with the sprint is it's a trojan horse for research. At the end of the week the team even a team who's totally averse to research will be really hooked on the idea of learning whether their prototype whether their solution works and they're going to see their customers react to it and their like research is going to happen by the time the week is over but there's this sort of bigger question about whether like where good ideas come from where do good businesses come from good you know sort of innovative products if you like where do they come from like do they come from doing exhaustive customer research talking to people and sort of discovering what their needs are and you know sort of empathizing with them or whatever or do they come from the insights that that you know people in business have you know they the way the workers or the folks on the team are thinking about the problem and you know I I want to say that they come from doing research and from really understanding customers but I think quite often they actually come from people just having an insight you know someone who knows a lot about a technology saying I think there's something really cool we could do with this technology and I think we should do it and you know a lot of those ideas fail a lot of those like technology driven or business driven ideas they do fail but I think that what where the magic really happens and if you look at the products that we all use every day the products that are success stories what happened was somebody had an insight and then they were able to figure out how to take that idea about a technology or a new business model or a new service model and then they were able to figure out how to really make it fit well with the customer they're able to sort of build a bridge from this this this crazy idea that they had this sort of brute force maybe this wasn't like something that really made sense to people right away and then they figured out how to make it make sense to people and maybe they had to like change the way people actually behaved and the way people operated like I think Airbnb is a really good example of this you know and those are designers who started that company they had this idea about this home-sharing thing that honestly like when I first heard about it it sounded a bit creepy you know I mean it's like you're going to be staying in somebody's place and like they had to sort of also change people's expectations in the world they had to figure out how to build that bridge and and they did it by taking their crazy idea you know and and their sort of insight into the business into the service what was capable with what was possible with technology and then they like figured out how do we make this fit the customer but it's like the insight or the inspiration or the opportunity first and then figuring out how do we make this fit not every insight will even be possible to fit to people and it's not to say that I'm sure there are stories where people just started with exhaustive discovery research and then came up with something but I don't know those stories the stories that we all like the products that we all know the businesses were so successful they started the other way so in a sprint I'm okay with starting with the company's insights and then seeing what happens yeah I think that's a great thing about the sprint you can start with a lot of assumptions and those assumptions are going to be challenged on the user testing day anyway and it is true I think like there's if there's some context that people need about around user research large companies let's say like a company like Slap today they wouldn't have started with user research but today when they want to tweak little things and they want to do like small tweaks to the like conversion funnel or they want to add new features today when they're already established that's when they start building personas that's when they start going a little bit deeper into user research but often at the start it is personas let's not but that's when they really start doing research and really trying to figure these things out the same with Netflix they don't they don't start with that like companies think they do but this kind of kind of almost like misinformation spreads around from these companies because they show that they do these processes and people think they did them at the start that's right yeah yeah and I think you know it's also there's look there's this I don't want us to be coming down too hard on like design in general because of course like we we think those those things are important it's important to know your customers it's important to do product work that fits your customers lives it really does matter I think that the there's just sort of this philosophical approach about whether you try to convince the team that there's a sort of golden perfect way to know your customer and like we must do like our design and our research this way or whether you try to help your team and I think that the I mean the design sprint my standpoint was I had I had tried in the past before doing this to like figure out what the golden way to do design was and I sometimes try to convince people look this is the right way to do it we should do it this way you know you should feel guilty if you're not doing it right but the reality is I don't know that there is a golden way instead besides the design sprint size of design in a design sprint you're you're really just trying to be helpful it's like look whatever you're trying to accomplish team and that might be that you are dead set on this one solution the design sprint is going to try to help you get there now along the way it's going to turn out that you're going to do a lot of design work you're going to consider carefully different viewpoints within your team you're going to put it in front of customers and you're going to find out really quickly if that's actually something people care about you're going to do all those things that as as designers we often want to do those things will happen but they're not going to happen in a way where you're trying to like convince somebody like force them down like just like you know ram through your your vision or make people feel guilty instead you're going to be helpful you're going to be helping them along the way so you'll take their energy and their enthusiasm for their solution you'll help them perhaps they'll be right if not you'll have shown them a way to learn and I think that's what it's all about to me that's a better way and a more fun way to work together great great answer Jake oh oh thanks that was amazing thanks hope you're enjoying the course see you later see ya so welcome back I hope you enjoyed that video um it got a bit uh I'm sure there's going to be a little bit of controversy I'd love to know what you think about user research um maybe not just related to the sprint but just do you think uh do you think products need user research especially new products or do you think that it's going to kind of make them a little bit too vanilla or do you think it's just like extra work that doesn't need to be done I'd love to know that in the comments so I hope you liked it give it a like if you enjoyed it um subscribe if you haven't already and as I said earlier there's a link the first link below is to a one hour 20 minute web class where I go through pretty much every little thing about why we as AJ and smart got into the design sprint and um you know tips on how to run it tips on how to sell design sprints if you're interested in that um but yeah that's it have a good one bye bye