Doing innovation is hard. You need to discover an unmet need, imagine the best way to address that need, build a complete product and then make sure the idea can be turned into a successful business. This can take years!
There is, however, another way. GV (formerly Google Ventures) proposes the Design Sprint: a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers.
It’s a “greatest hits” of business strategy, innovation, behavior science, design thinking, and more—packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use.
GV’s decription of the Design Sprint
RM Studio just run a Design Sprint, compressing months of time into a single week. We got clear end-user data from a realistic prototype.
The Design Sprint has given us a superpower: travel into the future to see our finished product in the hands of our customers before making any expensive commitments.
On Monday, we mapped out the territory and picked areas to focus.
On Tuesday, the team sketched competing solutions on paper (real and virtual).
On Wednesday, it was time to make difficult decisions: select which of the team’s ideas to turn into a testable hypothesis, and which to discard.
On Thursday, we created a high-fidelity prototype that would appear to be a functional product to users.
Finally, on Friday, we tested it with real live humans, making hundreds of notes and learning what we got right and where we need to iterate.
We have a good one!
5 days after we got started, we have a validated prototype that we can now turn into a product.
Design Sprints are a fantastic process to make tons of progress into an innovation. They are exhausting but also exhilarating, and they create amazing value for the team and our customers.
We are happy that our hypothesis was validated and we know what we need to build next in our accelerated journey to Product-Market Fit.
Want to see what we’ll make? We’ll be sharing our MVP at BETT on 23-25 March at ExCel London. Can’t wait to see you there!
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