We're here with Nadya again, and
we're going to talk about the stages of design sprint.
But let's first talk about what is a design sprint?
>> Well that's a great question.
Design sprints started at Google about five years ago, and since
then have become a powerful movement that helps product teams at Google,
our developers and companies in the industry, solve design problems quickly.
>> And what are the stages of a design sprint?
>> So a design sprint always starts in the planning stage.
That's potentially the most important one.
The design sprint is run by a person called a sprint master.
We found that sprints that have a designated person who's in charge of
the event, and in charge of the team lead to much higher satisfaction and
to be much higher deliverables.
So we always want to have a point person who is organizing.
This could be the PM on your team, or this could be your CEO, this could be
the designer, or it could be you, regardless of whatever role you play.
The role of the sprint master is first to identify the challenge that the team
should be solving.
If that is not clear, it's very hard for anyone to make progress.
Second, the role of the sprint master is to assemble the team.
We want to invite all the right talent, and that's the most important part.
If you don't have a team, the sprint doesn't really happen.
One of the benefits of the sprints is that you don't always have
all the talent that you want, but you can get them.
Because the sprints are short,
you can invite people who are not from your team.
So for example, if you and I are running a sprint, and we didn't have a designer
or researcher, we could ask one of our colleagues who is in another team or
another company, to join us for two to five days.
No one wakes up in the morning hoping to have a boring day.
And when you invite them on a sprint, they usually say yes.
And they have fun, and they help you solve something quickly, and
really benefit your team.
>> And what are the next stages after planning?
>> Okay, so the design sprint framework is based on the understanding of design
thinking.
So anyone who is a designer might find these things familiar and
very comfortable to practice.
The good news is that if you've never practiced design, this is very,
very easy to learn.
Generally, there's six problem-solving stages of design sprints.
The first is designing the challenge.
You have to do that.
Once you have done with that,
you start six problem-solving ways of attacking this challenge.
The first is to understand.
Understanding a challenge is very, very important.
There's a great quote that I love that says, first seek to understand,
then to be understood.
Many teams fail because they start attacking their
products based on the solutions that they have in their heads.
And they do not understand the customer, the requirements and
technology that they have.
So what you recommend in sprint is to start with lightning talks.
You quickly want to hear from everybody in the team that can represent
a particular perspective, and generally the most useful are three.
First, you want to hear about the business goals.
We believe that good design is good business.
And we always invite the stakeholders of the business to
tell us about their objectives.
In a startup, that may be the CEO of the company, or
it could be someone who's really in charge of revenue.
>> Right.
>> It's useful to have them there.
They can bring valuable perspective so
that the designers are not running away from the goals of the company.
Second, we want to hear from the engineers.
Designers and engineers go together like peanut butter and jelly.
You need them in the room, because, if the designers create something that
the engineers cannot deliver, it sort of doesn't matter.
So the engineers are there to tell us what is feasible right now,
what is the code able to achieve?
And what are they able to do, sort of, within the parameters of this sprint?
So this is a business stakeholder's technology, what's missing?
Well, you can create a startup, but
you cannot create an audience if you don't have a perspective of the user.
So what's really important is to bring a perspective
that tells the sort of potential users of the product that we have.
A lot of companies are not sure of who their perspective user is, so
it's useful to invite the first kind of ideas that you have about
who might this be impacting.
And if you're not sure, you can invite different groups.
For example, if you're creating a news app, you can invite people
who are news reader and read the New York Times on paper, and
people who love reading the newspapers on their iPad.
And then people who don't read the news at all.
And by learning what each group needs,
you're able to tackle a quite broad set of users.
By hearing their opinions in the beginning,
reviewing user research that's relevant, and talking to users directly,
the sprint becomes so much more well informed.
And the chances that they'll miss something are so much lower.
>> Very cool.
So we talked about understanding, and we talked about planning before that.
What is the next stage?
>> That's a great question.
The design sprint in the series of intellectual motions that allows us to
open their minds and then focus again.
We believe that we shouldn't just jump through solution we should learn as much
as possible and then focusing on the best choices and
through that we end up with better results.
After the distant phase, which opens everybody's mind, we have another phase,
which is about definition.
That is the phase that helps the team understand what is the strategy they
want to pursue.
So, at this stage, we tend to look at the user journey that we want to take
the user on, so, for example, if we're creating an onboarding flow, this may
look at the major steps along the way of someone signing up for a new service.
Or, if you're creating a new product, this may take you from all the stages
that are key to someone learning about your product, discovering it, the first
time they use it, the first time they return, and what we wish to everyone is
that users become their master powerful evangelizers, where they're
coming over and over to the product, and they're really enjoying using