The collaboration process alone could justify the commitment a Design Sprint requires. However, if you work with an external party like a consultant, strategic partner, or agency, the process of collaboration in and of itself can yield extraordinary value for all involved.
A Design Sprint can help your team clearly understand the problem, brainstorm solutions, then create prototypes to test those solutions with real users, all within the span of a few days.Ĭonversely, if you have a clearly-defined problem or if your team already has answers to primary questions, a Design Sprint may not produce enough new insights to make the intensive process worthwhile. Perhaps your organization wants to create a program to address a certain community problem, for example, but you have many unanswered questions. Design Sprints for Social Impactīecause they are heavy on exploration and validation, Design Sprints tend to work well for problems that aren’t very well-defined. Let’s explore how.īrainstorming ideas and clustering them together during a ‘How Might We’ exercise. While Design Sprints have historically been the purview of for-profit businesses, social enterprises, B Corps, and nonprofits can take advantage of this framework as well. The sprint gives you a superpower: You can fast-forward into the future to see your finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitments.
Instead of waiting to launch a minimal product to understand if an idea is any good, you’ll get clear data from a realistic prototype.
Working together in a sprint, you can shortcut the endless-debate cycle and compress months of time into a single week. Intensive, hands-on, multi-day workshops, Design Sprints can help teams quickly make progress toward solving specific problems for specific groups of people. Started at Google Ventures-which describes them as a “greatest hits of business strategy, innovation, behavior science, design thinking, and more”-Design Sprints have been used by companies of all stripes to solve complex business problems. In turn, this leads to better results faster and, often, for less money. This can be especially challenging when your work focuses on solving social and environmental problems, as with many nonprofits, B Corps, and social enterprises.ĭesign Sprints offer ways for organizations to foster better communication, stronger collaboration, and more successful problem-solving capabilities. Siloed organizational structures, outdated business management practices, and a lack of diverse perspectives can block the path to better solutions, which can impede an organization’s efficiency and longevity. Most organizations-companies, governments, and nonprofits alike-could stand to improve their innovation and problem-solving capabilities. Better Innovation = Better Products and Services Deeply understanding the problems we hope to solve can also help teams design more sustainable solutions. Coupled with our problem framing workshop post, you could also use it to facilitate your own Design Sprint. Through a case study of our Design Sprint work with the Alliance for the Great Lakes, we will also show the value your organization can get from going through this multi-day, human-centered design process. If Mightybytes or another agency has pitched a Design Sprint, but you’re not sure what that entails, this post will help you better understand the process, time, and resources required.
In this post, we explore how to apply this innovation framework and its problem-solving methodology to impact-driven projects. Design Sprints can help organizations devise new products, services, programs, and processes, but they’re not a blanket fix for everything.