Design Sprint

Chapter 4. Before the Design Sprint: Make a Plan

If you’ve arrived to this point, you’ve decided that a design sprint is applicable to your idea or project and you need to know where to start. In this chapter, we’ll show you what you’ll need to do to get ready for your design sprint, from defining the scope, to crafting agendas, selecting participants, and even to setting up your own “sprint kit.” By the end of this chapter, you will have primed the pump and be ready to turn on the spigot.

Determine the Timebox

Design sprints work best as a one-week exercise, Monday through Friday, where each phase takes one day. This timebox allows time for enough depth, while the constraints lead to accelerated results. This one-week schedule is the most common practice and recommended as a priority for your team.

Sometimes this schedule just isn’t possible, or the needs are a bit different. As mentioned in Chapter 3, there are a number of alternative approaches to a design sprint; whatever your time availability is, your preparation is as important as the work you’ll do before and after the design sprint itself. All the participants should be sent the agenda beforehand and see examples of what the results of a design sprint might look like; however, we discourage an over-engineered approach to the expected result. For example, it’s not useful to enter a design sprint with an exhaustive feature list ...