How To Run A Design Sprint 2.0 (UX Framework)

Design sprints help you reduce risk, offer a more efficient process to validate ideas, remove traditional convictions and accelerate innovation.

5 min readJul 10, 2024

Design Sprint: Is it worth the time and money?

The answer is almost always yes.

A design sprint is without a doubt, the fastest and cheapest way to validate business strategies or test product ideas with real users. It relies on a consecutive row of workshops that support co-creation and empowerment.

How many times have you heard someone from management say, “Let’s be more efficient!” or “Let’s innovate!” without knowing how to go about doing so? Well, a design sprint encourages a ‘start doing’ attitude.

Here are a few scenarios where a design sprint approach might be the most effective framework to choose:

Validating assumptions
Reducing the risk of failures
Establishing an initial process
Setting direction on a new project
Gaining speed, efficiency, and focus
Aligning your team around a product or vision

Why do a design sprint?

Design sprints will help you understand essential areas to focus on, ideate solutions, turn your ideas into a testable hypothesis, make a prototype and get feedback from real users.

I’ve run 20+ sprints at work and as a consultant. The number one thing I hear is “Wow! We got a lot done”. It’s rare that stakeholders can really focus on a specific problem/solution without distractions. Getting people into the same room for hours or days can really move the ball forward.

Inexperience teams especially love this because it gives them a step-by-step formula that brings them from a problem to a solution with real-user feedback. They get a taste of design thinking methodologies with meeting principles that focus on moving forward.

You can squeeze months of work into weeks (or less).

Here’s a statistic to back up my claim. According to IBM, design thinking research can lead to a 75% reduction in design & delivery time, often reducing an 8-month project to 3–4 months.

A few not-so-pleasant scenarios can happen if you decide to ignore the importance of design sprints.

Taking longer to get to market
Having an ineffective team collaboration
Developing products with poor user experience
Siloed teams and gaps in collaboration knowledge
Wasting resources on features that don’t get used
Missing opportunities to gain competitive advantage
Unsuccessful product launches due to lack of user testing
Making decisions without understanding user preferences and behaviours
Investing too much time and money in ideas and products without validating user needs

Instruction on How I run a Design Sprint.

All you need to know

The amount of work that can be accomplished during a design sprint is incredible. You’ll be amazed at how productive your team can be when they have a good sprint structure to guide them.

Consent is key
Trust the process
Take regular breaks
Give positive feedback
Write names on the board
Focus on the big 3; ask questions, jot things down and mind the clock
Get people to commit to the sprint in advance or don’t do the sprint at all
Know that it’s natural to be nervous but try your best to project confidence
You don’t have to be perfect. Learn from the process and make the next sprint better
Being a good facilitator requires a balance of patience and impatience, confidence and humility

Here are some best practices for designing your Design Sprint slides:

Use large font sizes
Avoid slides with a lot of text
Include plenty of white space
Use colour to highlight key points
Keep design elements to a minimum
Use visual aids only when appropriate
Include concise bullet points as instructions
Be explicit about the timing for each exercise
Create title pages before diving into each exercise
Show examples of a desired output for each exercise
Limit transitions and animations, if needed use subtle animations

Final thoughts

If you’re interested in trying out a design sprint for the first time, I recommend you do your homework by reading the Design Sprint book.

Whether for research, marketing, growth design, branding, strategy, or any other disciplines related to building a product or exploring new markets, the design sprint method is acknowledged as a viable, efficient, and cost-saving research option.

Considering that design sprints help you reduce risk, offer a more efficient process to validate ideas, remove traditional convictions and accelerate innovation, you can’t afford to try this method.

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