Enterprise design sprints

How to successfully introduce and implement sprints inside corporate environments.

You’ve fought so hard to get tools like design sprints approved & adopted in order to drive better, more efficient innovation. But then the ideas your team proposes inside your sprints are the same ones you’ve been kicking around for years.

Meh. We’ve been there, too.

In this post I hope to help you inspire your team to leverage the structure, speed, and human value of a design sprint to encourage new and inspiring solutions.

But first, a true story…

Sarah had been sitting at the conference room table for the last 20 minutes — she drifted between demoralized, depressed, and pissed. After 4 hours of watching her team present 1 bullshit idea after another, she decided it was time to speak up.

She opened her laptop, pulled up the company’s latest user engagement numbers, swiveled her screen around to face the group, stood up, and said, “We’ve been pushing to get this project funded for over two years. I’m sorry, but it feels like we’re playing it too safe by talking about creating something that’s been done 100 times before. These feel like marginal wins, at best.”

Sarah, a Director of Product at a multinational healthcare company, had been tasked a couple years earlier with overseeing the rebuild of her company’s flagship product. It had originally been built by the founders 14 years earlier to help companies better manage their health plans across their global workforces. The platform generated hundreds of millions in revenue to date. But time passed and employer organizations now faced dozens of better options that were smarter, more relevant, and more visually appealing.

For the first year of the project, progress was almost non-existent. Sarah organized countless stakeholder interviews and brainstorming sessions. But she couldn’t rally leadership and digital to align on a plan either group felt confident about or committed to. They were trapped in an endless loop of product ping pong, while the platform rebuild remained parked at the back of the roadmap.

Running out of options, Sarah began searching for better innovation tools and processes. She discovered story after story of enterprise teams having success with design sprints.

After pitching the process to her boss (Head of Digital), she received approval to organize a small group to run a sprint on a low-priority project that had been back burnered for the past several months. She used Duco to help the team organize & run the sprint.

While far from perfect, the results exceeded any other project they’d been a part of. Sarah, and the rest of that inaugural sprint team, were all equally sold on the promise design sprints represented.

She presented the group’s feedback & sprint outcomes to her boss and the primary stakeholder — the company’s global CRO. After several months of additional pitching, aligning, and planning, Sarah had approval to run a design sprint on the platform rebuild.

Why, then, after all of this invested time and energy, was the sprint team defaulting to ideas that were safe? In other words, solutions that were near replicas of existing competitor products or 10% net new from what their platform already offered today.

As Sarah came to learn — without the right mindset and planning, design sprints are entirely susceptible to uninspiring outcomes.

Design sprints that galvanize

Here are 5 concurrent steps you can take to help your sprint team destress, feel prepared, and tap their individual creativity.

1. Lessen the anxiety of joining your sprint

Enterprise teams are used to thinking about multiple, concurrent projects, over the course of months and years. Often, when people are invited to their first sprints, they freak about falling behind on all of their other work.

This is your chance to walk them through the structure of the sprint and reassure them that everyone in the room has other work on their plate too, but for this 1 week they will all be invited to focus all of their energy on only 1 topic. Likewise, remind them that this has been approved from the top, so they come into the sprint with a bit of ease.

Regardless, this will feel more like you asking them to do you a favor. But by the time the sprint is over, they’ll typically be asking you when they can join the next one.

2. Have them come feeling prepared

Next, consider the things that need to happen before your sprint — make sure everyone is clear on the problem they’re being asked to solve. Collect & share as much relevant info as possible so they have time in advance to consider the impact and arrive informed.

Nothing kills momentum more than team members who don’t know why they’re there, or otherwise don’t want to be.

3. Set appropriate expectations

Then, begin by kicking the sprint off by framing the week as an experiment with the primary intention of learning. For example, use the word disposable when you talk about the solutions you’ll all be coming up with — there won’t be enough time to become attached to them, which will help them feel more liberated to let ‘er rip.

In other words, help them unhitch their expectations that the sprint must result in a perfect solution the company will immediately begin building next week.

4. Invite them to push beyond dull and typical

With that mindset established, encourage them throughout the week to push for ideas that are less obvious and more risky. Do this repeatedly while setting your sprint goal, during the entire solution process, and while storyboarding.

If you’re still suspicious about the group’s risk tolerance, you can lead by example during lightning demos by presenting ideas & inspiration on the outer fringes. Demo solutions from industries entirely different from yours. Do your best futurist impression by presenting edge cases the group would have never considered or known about.

This enables you to plant the seed that it’s OK to push boundaries, without directly influencing the final solutions they come up with afterward.

5. Mind the process

As conversations ensue on Monday, help everyone avoid jumping into solution mode. Keep them focused on the problems you’re there to solve.

Then, when it comes time to ideate solutions, remember the golden rule of, first, diverging to allow people to work independently. Afterward, converge again to decide as a group which solutions or combo of solutions is best to move forward with.

These couple techniques will allow for open, unbiased discussion which ultimately enable the team to remain as liberally creative as possible.

Keep initial discussions and group understanding centered on the problem, while avoiding solution suggestions. When ideating solutions, be sure to diverge to foster individual creativity.

Wrapping up

We’ve seen it takes months or even years for enterprise organizations to green light the first round of design sprints. If you’re the PM, UX designer, or innovation manager that led that charge, that’s a lot of blood and sweat. The last thing anyone wants to see from such a new and emotionally charged process is the same old, vanilla solutions.

If you want to get the most out of your sprint team, gain trust and commitment from your stakeholders, and, ultimately, develop new lines of business for the company, you’ll need to make sure everyone is primed with the right mindset, before, during, and after your sprint.

These are 5 tactics we’ve used in our sprints to push the limits. What else have you seen work?

Design Sprint Toolkit

Since 2015, New Haircut has been recognized as a global leader in design sprints. Now, we’re looking to help others achieve the same success with their sprints with our Design Sprint Toolkit.

The toolkit includes all of our digital templates, presentation slides, pro tips, and dozens of sprint upgrades. Included are versions that support remote (virtual) or in-person sprints.

This toolkit is 100% comprehensive and ready-to-use, today.