Design sprint
Origin
Jake Knapp designed the protocol based on his experience at Google and Google Ventures. He described it together with John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz in the book Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days (2016).
Key factors
The three factors that make the Design Sprint effective are:
- Individual work: most of the ideation work is done individually, not as a group. This prevents the first ideas from dominating the discussion and makes room for diverse perspectives.
- Time to prototype: the workshop sets aside a full day to build a realistic prototype, not a perfect one. The time constraint is part of the method.
- Fixed deadline: the fifth day is for testing with real users. It does not move.
When to use it
- High risk: the team is not sure the approach is the right one before committing weeks of development.
- Not enough time: a quick answer is needed before making an important decision.
- Stuck project: the team has been going around in circles on the same problem for some time without reaching a solution.
Team composition
No more than 7 people:
- A Decider (essential): the person with the authority to make decisions about the product or the business.
- The members: people with relevant knowledge (design, technical, business, customer).
- A facilitator: manages the time and the process.
No devices are allowed during the workshop (phone, laptop, tablet), except during breaks.
The five phases
- Map and experts. The problem map and the Sprint Goal are drawn up. The team interviews internal experts to gather knowledge and perspectives. Notes are organized and prioritized on the map.
- Individual sketches. Each participant works individually to generate solutions: first with "lightning demos" (existing solutions that can serve as inspiration) and then with their own sketches for specific parts of the map.
- Decision. The team reviews all the sketches and chooses the best solution. The decider has the final say. A 15-scene storyboard is created for the prototype.
- Prototype. A realistic but non-functional prototype is built: believable enough for users to react to it genuinely.
- User testing. Five users test the prototype with an interviewer, while the team observes and takes notes in real time.
Design Sprint and AI tools
Generative AI is particularly accelerating the prototyping phase (day 4):
- Interface, text, and code generation tools can produce functional prototypes in hours, reducing the cost of this phase and enabling higher-fidelity prototypes.
- In the sketching phase (day 2), AI can be used to quickly generate visual or textual variants that serve as a starting point for individual ideation.
The value of the Design Sprint lies not in the speed of the prototype but in the quality of the decisions that precede its construction: the map, the expert interviews, and the informed choice of solution. Using AI to speed up prototyping without having done the previous phases properly produces a fast prototype that validates the wrong hypotheses.
Common mistake
Running the Design Sprint without the decider. The decider is the most critical role in the workshop: without someone with real authority to commit to the chosen direction, the sprint may produce a solution that is then never implemented because "it has to be checked first." If the decider cannot attend for five days, the Design Sprint is not the right format for that context.
Resources
🏦 Skill Design ThinkingState of the art and development guide · Skill Arena
🏦 Skill Agile InceptionState of the art and development guide · Skill Arena
References
- Knapp, Jake; Zeratsky, John; Kowitz, Braden. (2016). Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days. Simon & Schuster.
See also
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