This document outlines the process of a design sprint used to validate product ideas. It discusses gathering inputs from various perspectives, defining problem statements and hypotheses to test, conducting rapid prototyping and user testing, and analyzing results to determine whether to pivot, kill, or continue an idea. The goal of a sprint is to learn quickly without fully building products in order to reduce risk and build the right solution for customers. Interactive prototyping and usability testing are emphasized over traditional design approaches to gather early feedback and make data-driven decisions.

1. Product Design
Sprints
Alex Britez @abritez
alex@unthinkmedia.com

2. Who am I?
Originally a Designer
Full Stack developer
Graduate degree in Digital Media
Design for Learning
Alex Britez
Director of Digital Innovation
alex@unthinkmedia.com
www.linkedin.com/in/unthinkmedia
@abritez

3. look at my super awesome idea

4. “That idea
sounds precious,
let’s build it
right now!”

5. Failed Startups
Broken-Boards
Find Fights Event Website
Broken Boards more than a
decade later.
Find Fight...at least I got
a cool hat out of it.

6. The old wayRisk
Time

7. I’m probably wrong
how fast can i know? how far am I from success?

8. Continuous learning reduces riskRisk
Time

11. Traditional
Design, Usability
“What are we making?”
Design Thinking &
Lean Methodology
Measuring, validating
product market fit
“Are we making the
right thing”
Agile
Collaboration, Delivery
“How do we make it?”

12. What is a Design Sprint?
The sprint gives teams
a shortcut to learning
without building and
launching.
- Google Ventures

13. Why a Product Design Sprint?
Flexible, repeatable process
Semi-predictable deliverables
Goal oriented
Removes waste
Customer Centered
Flattens silo
Transparent

14. Dan Olsen’s Lean Pyramid

15. A sequence of rapid iteration

16. The Design Sprint

17. The hats to be worn
“I make sure there is
rigor in the process”
“I interpret the findings
into a point of view”
“I turn insights into
product idea”
“I create tools and
experiences that we
could learn from”

18. Gather all your inputs!
Unknown
Known
UnknownKnown
Facts that we need to validate
with data
Our gut intuitions, requires
serious validation
Exploratory provocations to
uncover an unfair advantage
We don’t know, but know how to
find out (logs, reports)
Certainty
Knowledge

19. Problem
Validation Loop
Understanding & Hypothesis
Goal: to get create a shared
understanding across your team,
teasing out risky assumptions and
run experiments.
Test those assumption with REAL
customers, and observe and
empathize with their pains.

20. credit: unknown
Shared Understanding

21. What problem are we solving?

22. Set goals!
Happiness: measures of user attitudes, often
collected via survey. For example:
satisfaction, perceived ease of use, and
net-promoter score.
Engagement: level of user involvement,
typically measured via behavioral proxies
such as frequency, intensity, or depth of
interaction over some time period.
Examples might include the number of
visits per user per week or the number of
photos uploaded per user per day.
Adoption: new users of a product or feature.
For example: the number of accounts
created in the last seven days or the
percentage of Gmail users who use labels.
Retention: the rate at which existing users are
returning. For example: how many of the
active users from a given time period are still
present in some later time period? You may
be more interested in failure to retain,
commonly known as “churn.”
Task Success: this includes traditional
behavioral metrics of user experience, such
as efficiency (e.g. time to complete a task),
effectiveness (e.g. percent of tasks
completed), and error rate. This category is
most applicable to areas of your product that
are very task-focused, such as search or an
upload flow.

23. Example of Google’s HEART framework
Example Goal:
For users to keep discovering new content
Example Signal:
The amount of time users spend engaging with content on our site.
Example Metric:
The average number of minutes spent actively engaging in content on the site,
per user, per day (uploads, views, shares, etc...)

24. Lightning Talks
Lightning talks allow the sprint team to understand the problem from
many different points of view. The talks should include:
Business goals and success metrics
Technical capacities and challenges
Existing relevant user research
Pedagogical Research
Field knowledge
Customer support

25. Define your market segments

26. Job-based segmentation “assumptions”
Does one on one
instruction at
Writing Lab
Teaches a lecture
class of 400 students
Teaches class of 20
students
Job Context Desired Outcome
Grading essay Get all students to
grade level
Motivation
Reduce time to
grading essays
Get good rating from
student
50% of bonus
based on student
evaluation
Work life balance
Getting tenure

27. Screener (a persona diagnostic)

28. Writing your Hypothesis
We believe that ____________ that _________
need to ____________ because __________ .
persona type job to be done
motivationdesired outcome

29. Prioritizing Risk: Impact vs Certainty
Based on our inputs, and
their individual agency,
how certain are we that
our assumptions are
true?
How much risk is there if
we are wrong?

30. Draw your line in the sand
We will test this assumption using ______________. We will know
we have succeeded when _____________ of participants do
______________.
experiment type
success metric
quantifiable outcome

31. Design your experiment
Customer Development Interview
Stage the problem to capture emotion
Tread carefully….
User Testing to get a baseline for process improvements
Presumptive Design Prototype to validate underlying
assumptions

32. Cost vs. Certainty (evidence)
The less the certainty, the
less time/$ you devote to it.

33. The science of asking questions
Problem Discovery
Describe your each step
involved to complete [job to
be done]. What are you
thinking during each step?
What are you feeling?
Problem Validation
Tell me about the last time you
[process you’re improving]
What are you currently doing
to solve this problem/get
this value?

34. Act like a 5 year old
Problem: The Washington Monument was disintegrating
Why is the monument disintegrating?
Use of harsh chemicals
Why do they need harsh chemicals?
To clean pigeon poop
Why so many pigeons?
They eat spiders and there are a lot of spiders at monument
Why so many spiders?
They eat gnats and lots of gnats at monument
Why so many gnats?
They are attracted to the light at dusk
Solution: Turn on the lights at a later time

35. Avoid aspirational response
Aspirational
How important is a balanced breakfast?
It is very important! Gives you energy to get through
the day
Actual
Could you tell me what you’ve had for breakfast
the past three days?
I was in a rush getting the kids to school, so I just
had grabbed a pop-tart!
Why were you in a rush? Why..? Why…?
How often are you in a rush?

36. Get out of
the building!

37. Get out of the building
Look at how differently
that instructor’s teacher
assistants give
feedback.

38. How I am empathizing

39. What is the journey map?
Example from: http://justin.bz/create-a-customer-journey-map/

40. How motivated are they for change?
Need
Current Satisfaction
Opportunity
Risky
(you better be really good or
really cheap)
Risky
(don’t care enough to pay)
High Risk

42. Correlation between context and motivation

43. Gains Pains
● time
● quality
● experience
● cost
● onboarding
● team buy-in
Is making “better” mousetrap enough?

45. Real-time analysis
Pro: Very fast
Con: Pretty shallow

46. Analyze your results and take action!
Pivot Kill it
Continue

47. Solution
Discovery Loop
focusing on
quantity over quality
building on each other’s ideas
keeping each other focused on our
goals

48. Why think outside of the box, when
you could make a spaceship out of it?
Designing for constraints

49. Step 1: Creating a “How might we…” questions
Why use this?
1. Shared Point of View
2. broad enough to avoid a narrow
perspective
3. specific enough that we address
the core issues to be solved
Example
“How might we create a safe place for students to practice their speeches?”
Source: Ideo
Step 2: Remember your goals!

50. Organizing your thoughts
3-5 minutes
Everyone on the team quickly gets their
thoughts on paper.

51. Diverge: Crazy 8s
5-7 minutes
1. Each person gets a few sheets of
paper.
2. Fold paper in half 4 times
3. When time starts, have each
team member fill up those boxes

52. Design Studio: Co-design w/ customers

53. Share your ideas
(5 min share + 3 min feedback) * team members
1. Each member get 5 minutes to share their entire
8 panels.
2. 3 minutes of feedback per team member
3. During Feedback
a. Build on the ideas
b. Combine ideas
c. Highlight what you really like ...and repeat

54. converge
select 2-3 of your favorite concepts
combining is okay, but don’t go crazy. it becomes
impossible to explain

55. Converge: Storyboarding
15 minutes
1. Each team member has paper and sticky notes.
2. Think about a “critical path” that best
communicates the value proposition
3. Draw the starting point of that path
4. Draw the ending point of the that path
5. The rest of the time is spent filling in the areas in
between.
6. In the last 5 minutes have them place the stickies

56. Silent gallery walk through
2 minutes per idea
1. Each member gets unlimited number of small sticky
dots
2. Signal every time 2 minutes pass, so reviews would
swap positions.
3. Have them add sticky dot on the ideas that they like.
4. Add additional feedback on stickies
...and repeat

57. quick critique
3 minutes per idea
1. Hand the person getting the critique a timer set
to 3 minutes
2. Have team state what they liked
3. Build on ideas
4. Combine ideas with another group member
...and repeat

58. converge
select 2-3 of your favorites in the entire group

59. Create posters for Stakeholders

60. dot voting: Thinking Hats
3 minutes per idea
Customer Voice: Invite some customers (or target
market) to help narrow down the products.
Business Viability: Will we be able to sell this?
Technical Feasibility: How difficult will it be to
make this?
Pedagogical Value: Are the design decision backed
by any efficacy research? Will students learn?
Risk! ...and repeat

61. converge
& create
Select 2-3 of the most popular product to prototype

62. Solution
Validation Loop

63. Dan Olsen’s artifacts
Interactivity
Fidelity
Hand sketch
Static
Wireframe
Mockup
Clickable
Wireframe
Clickable
Mockup
Interactive
Prototype
Live Product

64. Our typical path
Interactivity
Fidelity
Hand sketch
Clickable
Wireframe
Clickable
Mockup
Live Product
iterate
iterate iterate
iterate

65. Interactive doesn’t mean code

66. Design your Experiment
List down the goals
Describe tasks
Invite participants
Run Test

67. The science of asking questions
Product Validation
Could you introduce me to a
few colleagues that
would be interested in a
product like this?
Product Optimization
If you had a magic wand,
what would you add or
remove in this product?
Wrap up
It sounds like x is very
important to you, while y
is not. How accurate is
that?

68. Analyze your results and take action!
Pivot Kill it
Continue

69. Some interesting reading

70. Thanks!
alex@unthinkmedia.com
www.linkedin.com/in/unthinkmedia
@abritez