Design Sprint tales: the experience of a first time facilitator
I facilitated my first Design Sprint and it was awesome! (and exhausting)
GUTS Tickets is a start-up based in Amsterdam that started 2 years ago with a clear goal: End ticket scalping.
Now, I don’t know if all start-ups have this but a few weeks ago, during our Q1 Product Strategy meeting, one of my colleagues asked the question:
How are we gonna decide which features we should build to reach these goals?
Until then what we had been building was pretty straightforward. Creating events, buying tickets, etc. We knew we had to build those features no matter what but now… How were we gonna decide which features were worth building? How were we gonna know that what we were building was a kickass as we thought?
Coincidentally, a couple days before that, I finished reading Sprint by Jake Knapp. So when my colleague dropped that question I had an epiphany, a moment of total clarity, the room got brighter and angels started singing around me:
This is your chance to introduce Design Sprints
And as everyone knows, you shouldn’t ignore ideas that are brought by a choir of celestial creatures, so I did it. I talked to some of my colleagues (CEO, Head of Product and Product designer, you’re gonna want to have the support of the big fishes), shared a couple of videos for them to get an idea of what I was talking about and, without much more effort, they were onboard!
Couple of days after that, we sat down to decide what would be our challenge and who would be part of the team. Two weeks later, seven of my colleagues and me were sitting in the meeting room, ready to start our first Design Sprint. And this is how it went:
The team
Business expert: the CEO (he was also the decider)
Marketing expert: our marketing/ community guy and our Head of Product
Customer expert: our service officer and support manager
Design expert: our Product designer
Tech expert: one of our backend developers
Facilitator: me, myself and I
Wednesday morning: Defining the challenge
For the expert interviews we had invited 3 people from the industry (an event organiser, a theatre consultant and a promoter) to help us as external experts.
It felt a bit awkward for the first few minutes. That’s when I realized how important it is for the facilitator to initiate and guide conversations: as soon as I asked a couple of questions, people were fully in.
We spent 40 minutes doing the interviews (a bit more than what’s recommended) but it was extremely insightful. For most of us it was the first time we had an actual conversation with clients, so hearing directly from them what their main issues were was super useful.
After this, we organized and voted on our HMW’s, drew our map and decided our long term goal and sprint questions.
Everything went pretty smoothly and people got the hang of it really quickly. But I could see how they felt a bit lost, mainly because it was harder for them to see where we were getting to and, let’s be honest, talking about problems is more of a downer than going crazy thinking of functionalities you could add to your product.
Wednesday afternoon: Producing solutions
Most people freak out when they’re put in front of a blank page and told to “create something”. But one of the great things about the Design Sprint process is that it eases that moment of actually coming up with visual solutions.
We started by having our lightning demos: a short research session in which everyone showed some example of “cool things” they thought could be used in our concepts.
It was really fun and interesting to see the different directions everyone took and you could see that moving into “solutions mode” was a total energizer. People started seeing the use of the morning session more clearly and started having something more tangible than just problems that had to be solved.
After this we moved into actually creating our concepts. All the work after the demos is individual and, at this point, I found really important to keep reminding people that we weren’t looking for art pieces, just clear concepts that they thought we could use in our prototype.
We started by taking notes of everything we’d already talked during the day so people could write down their thoughts, directions and anything that could help them in the creation process. So when, after this, we moved to drawing some rough sketches, people found easier as they had something to base it on.
The next part was a bit trickier: the crazy 8s. Have to admit my dear team wasn’t fully in when I explained the exercise.
We have to draw one idea per minute? I can’t draw at all!
But, you know, that’s why they call it the Crazy 8s: everyone will look at you as if you were mental just by suggesting something like that. Well everyone except the designer, that guy couldn’t wait for the timer to start while the rest were considering hiding under the table.
So yeah, the exercise was tough but also fun. People had a few sketches that could actually work and others that could be exhibited in an abstract art gallery… or a kindergarten hall. In any case, when after that I told it was time to come up with their final concept, nobody was scared anymore!
Thursday morning: Voting on solutions
Thursday started and people came in with a some more bags under their eyes than the day before… but ready to rock!
It was time to reveal the secret and let everyone see the concepts they’d ideated. We got started with the heat map vote, solutions presentation and then dug right into the voting.
Now this is when mediating became more important.
One of our colleagues couldn’t make it the day before so we agreed he could join mid-sprint.
We found out this slowed down the process a bit, as while everyone was already in the zone, he was having a fresh start, which meant he’d miss quite some context.
Nothing disastrous though, but let me give you a pro tip: be tough but fair when it comes to ending discussions. You’ll need to make sure you can differentiate between useful conversations and arguments about how testing the prototype on the moon would be awesome.
Also, having a decider who doesn’t mind giving unequivocal answers will be key at this stage. In our case, having the CEO (who can be a pretty cutting guy when necessary) fully involved during the whole Sprint made my job as facilitator way easier, as no one better than him understood the long term vision of the company and therefore the idea we were working on.
Thursday afternoon: Story-board
Building the storyboard was tricky. It’s one of the few moments during the sprint in which people actually work as a group and man, I could see why.
One of the things that the book Sprint by Jake Knapp says is:
Don’t create new ideas, stick to the ones you already had.
And it couldn’t be more right. When it comes to actually deciding what the prototype will look like, we had to make a really great effort to just put the pieces we’d discussed before.
As a facilitator, make sure you keep it moving, keep drawing and make sure you don’t spend unnecessary time on it.
Friday: Prototyping
Friday was the most hectic day by far. We had 1 maker, 1 assets collector, 1 writer and 1 interviewer.
We found out we should have put more effort in the story boarding. The last screen wasn’t defined enough (probably because we were too tired to notice the day before) so I quickly sat down with a colleague to come up with a clearer wireframe, while the one that was making the prototype kept working.
Creating the guide for the interviews went more smoothly. Luckily one of our colleagues had experience with user interviews. That, plus having the book Sprint around made it pretty simple to write down a really good template.
Another thing that we should have organized better was the amount of people “making” the prototype. We put it all in the skilful hands of the designer, but this was definitely too much, so at some point I jumped in and helped creating a couple of screens.
In the end everything worked out and we had a prototype we were proud of. But for future sprints I’d definitely try to have a way more defined story board so the makers only have to take care of putting the elements in place. This would have reduced the load and stress a lot.
Monday: User testing
This was one of the best days of the sprint. In the beginning we were worried finding enough people within 5 days would be a hustle, but it turned out to be pretty easy (we weren’t looking for anyone too specific and we had a pretty good reward).
Tests ran really smoothly. Our interviewer did a great job and we got really interesting feedback.
After the third interview feedback started repeating itself a bit, which matches Jakob Nielsen’s theory that 85% of the problems can be observed after having just 5 people testing.
By the end of the day we had collected a good amount of feedback. It wasn’t much of a surprise (we expected most of the ups and downs) but having actual users testing our prototype really motivated the team and it definitely helped us confirmed we were going in the right direction.
Conclusion
- Everyone had a really great time during our first design sprint. Even though it was a tough 4 days process and it required a lot of energy from all of us, we all agree we would definitely do it again given the right challenge.
- Having external experts during the first part of the sprint was key when it came to understanding the problem.
- It helped us realize the importance of user testing and validating ideas.
- Having someone joining half-sprint wasn’t a good idea. Maybe because it was our first time running a sprint, but we probably won’t let it happen again.
- Time-boxing events and individual work helped us reach decisions faster and it’s something that we want to apply more often.
- The story board should be as complete as possible. This will reduce the load on the people creating the prototype the day after.
- The end solution felt a bit plain. We should find a way to push for riskier ideas while keeping the goal and questions in mind.
If you wanna learn about design sprints…
- Of course, Jake Knapp’s book Sprint is a must
- AJ&Smart an agency based in Berlin has amazing content and masterclasses.
- You will also find a lot of content from Google Ventures (I mean, that’s where it came to existence)
