Hey —

I co-authored the first Design Sprint book ( the "other less-popular" one ).

I was at a B2B SaaS company (Constant Contact, now part of Endurance) when I wrote it, we started it because in late 2012 there was maybe one or two blog posts from Jake and the GV team about sprints. We were doing them inside a larger organization and most of the posts at the time were about design sprint in startups so we started codifying our knowledge initially to train teams internally, and that ultimately lead to converting it into a book, cookbook how-to style. (more on that journey some other time).

I've personally led over 120 design sprints, mostly in large organizations and for a variety of topics, not just design or product, but service, technology, finance, HR, etc. We experimented with a zillion flavors of them: 1-day (too shallow), 3-day (maybe?), spread out over multiple weeks (don't bother), half-sprint (for ideation), etc in order to account for the enterprise culture of "I have no time" or "that's too much of my day." Some worked. Some didn't.

A few things I've learned: 1) There's no magic bullet. So many people look to mechanisms like this to solve much larger problems that may be around org structure, incentives, team makeup, product/technology performance, etc.

2) Timing: My colleague Jill Starret suggested a 10a-4p session, which worked wonders for many teams as it did take enough of the day to ensure focus, yet it allowed for individuals to still do their "day job" before and afterwards

3) Plan, plan, plan beforehand but improvise during. Get information up front and if you don't have enough research that first day will be a mess. Do a "research sprint" ahead if you need to.

4) Have a strong facilitator who is not a participant. Being a "Player-coach" is incredibly hard unless you have years of meeting facilitation experience.

5) A full design sprint is rarely followed by another full design sprint, usually iterations of adjusting the prototype according to what you learned from the test, updating any assumptions you have and then testing again for what you need to learn.

6) It's not about the outPUT of the sprint, rather it's about what you learned along the way.

YMMV.

Good luck!!

It's great that you got one done in your company!

Sprints are for solving big problems, not for run of the mill feature work. I don't think there's any company that operates regularly on that schedule. We've run 20+ sprints with different teams in our company over the past 1.5 years. No two sprints are the same, and we almost never use the entire GV playbook. Rather, we tailor exercises from GV, IDEO, and Luma to fit the needs of the problem we're trying to solve and the design maturity of the product team.

The point of sprints and "design thinking" in general is to get product teams out of the Gartner magic quadrant / feature-train mindset, and instead to approach the challenge from a problem-first perspective.

The important thing is to use sprints as another tool that you can pull at the right time to solve the right kind of problems. They aren't a substitute for long-term discovery/research projects, design iteration, data science, or usability testing.

yeah, because we only have 1 dev and 1 designer. That's me

We got them down to three 2-hour meetings. Sprints often stem from the perspective of an outside consultant.

Once a culture of experimentation and testing is established at your company the need for sprints diminishes. That's almost always a huge uphill battle with the way companies choose to operate—even with agile workflows.

I've experienced the exact same issues while at small startups. Since you have to move very fast, and everyone is insanely busy, making design sprints part of the process is very difficult. It's a nice method, but it seems more