Design Sprint Facilitation

Design sprints are an excellent way for a team to quickly and collaboratively improve a product, create a shared vision, or validate a new concept.

It’s a framework I have come to enthusiastically promote as a way to take a team from confusion to clarity in just a few days.

With a skilled facilitator, sprints can build team-wide consensus without design -by -committee. Sprints can let us learn from our users without dreaded focus groups. Sprints can allow for an entire team to be productive in the design process.

I love facilitating design sprints and empowering teams to solve complex problems. I follow Google’s 6-phase framework, which I helped to outline in The Design Sprint Kit, with some of my own personal improvements.

My process differs from Google Venture’s process in that I believe, with adequate preparation, it’s not necessary to ask a full team to dedicate five whole days to a sprint. I’ve seen many successful sprints take only three days. I like to thoroughly plan and customize my sprints based on the team and the problem to be solved. As you can see from the rest of my work, I like to get my hands into the design as well. So as a sprint progresses into day two or three, I will often split my role between facilitator and designer. 

If your team is interested in my facilitation help or guidance in planning a sprint, please be in touch.

Leading the icebreaker at the 2018 Sprint Conference