Design Sprint

Chapter 5. Phase 1: Understand

The first day of a design sprint is primarily an opportunity to bring the working team to a mutual understanding of the problem to be solved. If the team members haven’t already met one another, then this is the time when everyone will get acquainted. Getting to know each other helps to develop empathy, which is a cornerstone of any design-thinking exercise. In this chapter, we’ll give you tools and exercises to help break the ice and inject a little fun into the process. These exercises will also help you get inspired. Whether you need to be inspired by facts or out-of-the-box ideas, we’ve included a collection of tools to get you there. Together you’ll answer the questions: “Who is the customer, who is the user, and what are their problems?” You’ll all share the relevant context so the answers to these questions can be understood clearly, but you won’t need to come up with solutions yet.

What Happens During the Understand Phase?

Get the Background	~1.5 hours
Get Inspired	~1.5 hour
Define the Problem	~1 hour
Know the User	~3 hours

As discussed in Chapter 4, a design sprint is a flexible framework, and you’ll need to adapt it to your particular situation. If the conversation requires it, exercises can be added, reordered, skipped, shortened, or extended. Your mileage may vary on the duration for each of the exercises; we’ve done journey maps in 15 minutes, and ...