The idea of a design sprint emerged from Google ventures, a subsidiary of Alphabet, Inc. The main motive for developing this process was to help startups find the right way to address any business challenge that comes their way.
Businesses & startups face daily challenges of getting new clients, improving brand awareness, satisfying customers’ needs, or launching any new product or services in the market.
For any of these challenges, the main question arises, how it should be done properly. To resolve this problem, Google came up with a design sprint. It helps you make the optimum decision and ultimately generate more business revenue.
If you want to discuss some idea with your team, then a design Sprint is an excellent process. It is a 5-day process, wherein your team would collate the usage pattern of your target audience, prototype multiple ideas, and then validate them. It is extremely productive in a stage-gate project wherein you can check the project flow and make necessary adjustments at each gate.
If you look at a recent report by IBM, they conclude that if a company runs a design Sprint before taking any strategic decision, it reduces the delivery time by nearly 75%. Also, they found out that after going through the design sprint process, the final product has fewer defects (it is down by 50%).
If you are still skeptical about the design sprint and wondering whether to use it or not, here we will provide the major advantages of running a design sprint before developing an app.
Benefits of Running a Design Sprint
The process helps any business to validate their idea efficiently. There are various benefits of running a design sprint as follows:
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Finding Solutions
The reason for starting the design sprint process is creating a focused approach with your team to find different pain points and then turn them into optimal solutions.
This process allows all the stakeholders to flesh out different ideas. It empowers them to share the risk and doubts with other members of the team about something that could affect the outcome.
By working with the team, you would discover answers to some crucial problems at an early stage and move forward accordingly.
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Get User Feedback on Time
A design Sprint assists you to turn an idea into reality quickly by getting feedback from the customers quite early in the process. Design Sprint allows your team to design a rapid prototype and then test it with your users and get their feedback. This process ensures a high success rate of the product as it is addressing all the pain points of your target audience and is designed as per their specifications.
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Speed
One of the essential advantages of following the design Sprint process is it speeds up the process of putting an idea into motion. Large businesses with layers of bureaucracy find it difficult to be agile and quickly change their approach when they are dealing with any complex project.
Design sprint helps you speed up new product discovery by accelerating the decision-making time. Some of the leading companies worldwide, such as Facebook, Google, Medium, etc., make design sprints to test the product and then launch it.
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Reducing Risk
After you brainstorm with your team members about different ideas and the optimum solution, you produce a prototype or an MVP app.
It allows you to minimize the risk involved with time and budget when validating any complex application.
The faster you can validate your idea from other stakeholders, the quicker you can launch it in the market.
Furthermore, the feedback loop in the design sprint is also very short. Hence, you have the time to make an improvement or change the product in case of a botch-up.
Additionally, the prototype you have designed can be shared with your developers. They will understand what you want, thus saving you a massive amount of time.
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Better Collaboration
When you thrash out ideas in an informal setting like a product design sprint, it creates a spirit of collaboration in a group of professionals with different skill sets.
In a multi-disciplinary team, people can learn from one another by exchanging ideas.
In a product design sprint, you will find creators and experts in different domains coming to the same table to share ideas about what is more important and how to achieve it in an optimum way.
It is also a great way to check the feasibility of an idea by the developers. They can tell whether the creative idea sharing can be implemented.
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Building a Culture of Innovation
Most companies that want to succeed in this highly competitive marketplace need to rely on innovation. To do this, they need to create the right environment and give their team members the right tools so that they discover the next big thing.
A design sprint is a great way to improve your in-house innovation strategy and create an entrepreneurial way of thinking amongst your team members.
The design Sprint also allows the company to find out those members of the team who have leadership capability and are forward-thinking.
Promoting such people in the organization will make your business more competitive and adaptable to new changes. A session where team members can share their viewpoints is more effective as compared to analyzing a problem individually.
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Be Adaptable
The process is suitable for the majority of businesses and product initiatives. Being a short & effective process, you can adopt a design sprint depending on the complexity of the project. Besides this, you can work according to the agile methodology in the entire project.
Conclusion
At first glance, the design sprint may look quite challenging due to the time and resources you and your team put into it. However, if you place it against reducing risks, minimizing the time to market the product, innovative approach, a better team spirit, it makes total sense to adopt it.
The amazing thing about the design sprint technique is that you can adopt these principles outside the rigid 5-day process to gain many benefits without investing a lot of your time.
While the design sprint may not be the best solution for everything, it prompts you to take action, and you will find that a complex or inefficient process becomes much easier to handle.