There are times when we face big problems and hard decisions in our businesses. In fact, starting and running a company is a constant struggle to win new clients, increase awareness, respond to customer needs and successfully launch products to the market. These challenges often raise questions on how it should be done properly. Having tested numerous solutions we’ve adopted Product Design Sprint, a tool initially developed within Google, which will give you answers to these strategic questions. Our clients confirm its effectiveness and enumerate its many benefits. We picked five universal advantages of Product Design Sprint to give you an idea how your business can profit from adopting this framework.

Product Design Sprint: Magic Sauce for delivering outstanding solutions

Product Design Sprint is a collaboration framework for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping and user research. The process includes a set of methods that are selected from some of the greatest practices of business strategy, design thinking, user research and even psychology. Furthermore, it helps to avoid miles of e-mail messages endless conversations and arrangements, which often lead to miscommunication between the parties involved. See what you can win thanks to Design Sprint:

1 ) Simple solutions to complex business challenges

Right from the beginning, together with your stakeholders, your task is to set a goal and create an explicit vision for failure and success of this sprint. The main reason to conduct the sprint is to find all pain points and convert them into valuable solutions. Along with effective communication, it empowers contributors to share ideas, risks and doubts that can affect the final results. At the end you can gather all doubts, assumptions and verify them with clients. The collaborative approach enables you to get answers to complicated problems within a short period of time. It would be harder in a different environment.

2) Speed

Agility is especially interesting for large organisations whose tremendous growth has lead them to a corporate size and structure. Bureaucracy and slow processes are often seen as the inseparable part of scaling a business, so definitely speed is the main topic on the table.

The sprint itself is meant to be short and agile, as it is easily adapted to the complexity of a project. It speeds up new product discovery. For instance Spotify: despite being a large company, it is able to maintain agility by giving small focused teams the autonomy to explore an opportunity within a Product Design Sprint. They validated and prototyped their Spotify „Running” project in 5 days with their own adaptation of product product design sprint.

3) Smaller Risk

You can minimise risk by reducing time and budget on validating your ideas. Imagine that you can shrink months of development and feature testing into just a few days. It is a perfect method to create MVP in a blink of an eye. Remember, the faster you prototype, the faster you can validate your idea with investors, customers and other stakeholders. That gives you extra time for improvements or changes in case of failure. Huge companies like Google, P&G, AirBnB, or Spotify are using this Product Design Sprint methodology to transform their companies and build competitive advantage, without huge failures along the way.

4) Efficient collaboration

Product Design Sprints foster collaboration with varied groups of people, with different skillsets. It is an extremely satisfying experience, when you are able to spark creativity, encourage people to think outside the box and compare their perspectives from completely distinct fields. Such a group brainstorming session is way more effective than analysing the problem by individuals separately. You skip unnecessary arrangements, misunderstandings and loads of email correspondence. During the Sprint, there is no time for a lack of organisation and ineffective discussions. As a result, you save time, money and stress. On top of that, the variety of solutions that come up during workshops, can be surprising and let in a breeze of freshness.

5) Services validated by customers

Nowadays companies underestimate the value of the user-centered approach. This often leads to misunderstandings and missing market needs. From the Product Design Sprint perspective, it is one of the most important pillars in this framework. That means that during the workshops members have to act with empathy and remain aware of the customer’s needs. What’s more, the integral part of this process is listening, trust and building meaningful relationships with users. This approach builds products from a user’s perspective and with the needs that they want to fulfill in mind. Did you know that thanks to Product Design Sprint, Airbnb developed itself from a small startup to one of the most popular services for renting accommodation?

Key Takeaways

• Solve the most complex problems.
• Increase your speed and make critical decisions fast.
• Obtain a clear vision of success and failure.
• Reveal and appoint KPI’.
• Effectively collaborate within departments.
• Reduce bureaucracy.
• Gather all important people in one place.
• Make the process user-centered.
• The traditional method is much longer (the core team has to spend only 5 days on Product Design Sprint).

Conclusions

Building great ideas into elegant, thoughtful, engaging solutions is hard. Even harder when you and your customers are not included in the creation of those solutions. Especially for larger organisations. With faster, better solutions that your customers are using and promoting, there comes a better overall health of your business.

We are conducting workshops too. If you are struggling with your decision - remember to act fast and schedule a Product Design Sprint session with CodeCarrot.