Don't know what's the next feature! What about a Design Sprint?

What are the Design Sprints?

Design sprint is a way of mixing best practices from: Agile development, User Experience design, and Software development. They’re more or less a time-boxed sprints (like the normal scrum sprints 2:3 weeks on average) that focus on understating the clients within one perspective (that’s why it’s called a sprint: Focused, Fast, and Fruitful) and market needs in a way that can affect the software releases.


They were invented basically on GV labs, to fit in an Agile environment, and to help guiding the team on their releases process.

Why they were needed?

Fast-based approach doesn’t mean randomly crafted software!

Agile was massively consumed among the different types of teams in software industry, it could also influence other parts and industries to adapt some of the practices that makes Agile software development effective. But, having that said, it’s not only about delivering something every 2 weeks, it’s about what we’re going to deliver every 2 weeks? Will it be something interesting to our clients? How can we know that?

Software that nobody uses!

Adopting the small-patches way to deliver software releases may sometimes be interpreted wrongly as “Deliver what ever you can code” approach, where in such case the organization will only be concerned of delivering software regardless many factors including mainly ‘Features that no one would ever use’!

Writing your user stories is useful to avoid those situations, but if you cannot test your assumptions very early before you actually start investing time and money in something can be extremely useful!

Design sprints are designed to help you figure that out, through enforcing a pipeline of experiments that any assumption has to pass in order to be a valid concept that can be further developed.

You think you know what the client wants, while actually you don’t!

You think you know your clients very well? You think you know exactly how they’re behaving on your platform? Sorry, but most likely you’re not! It’s not because your clients, it’s because the human nature! We’re usually too complex to be modeled.

So, that’s it! A control illusion! You actually need to constantly understand how your clients are doing and behaving, what captures their attention? What makes them tick? And to do that on a regular basis and on a team-scale, you definitely need a systematic approach of doing it!

A focus on valuable software.

A key point of doing the design sprints is to try as hard as possible to develop valuable concepts that we’re comfortable with to satisfy a need that EXISTS!

You’ll never know what is optimal for your customers unless you know them! And to know them, you have to go and discover them, and since we’re talking about user discovery, it’s more convenient to speak the UX language here, the design sprints are ways of getting you closer and closer to how the user will think and react, and whether or not he has the drive and motivation to use your proposed feature.


It’s very practical how this concept of doing design sprints can improve the production pipeline! Imaging that you somehow could put a filter on your innovation sources, to allow only the ideas that can make sense to users, and provide them with a scientifically proved value!

A focus on scientifically walking through the user flow.

The user flow may vary from one user to the other, and it can be very challenging to expect all the possible flows in one and only model, but science tells us that we can try to model as far as we know, and of course it’s always possible to pivot and try again, or in some cases, it’s possible to override the previous models at all!

Having a design sprints flow, makes you focusing on test as much as possible, and not just randomly test, you’ll be ideally focused on 1 perspective per sprint (i.e. value propositions, user motivation, usability, etc.)

At each step (or each type of design sprints) you’ll be focusing on scientifically testing your perspective, for example, you’ll be focused on testing whether or not your value propositions (i.e. your assumptions about what the user will find interesting) actually making sense or not, and you’ll do that by holding some experiments with your users and through observing their behavior.