The Product Design Sprint from Google Ventures

If you have come from a digital agency background, or work within a digital marketing department responsible for online platforms, you will no doubt have come into contact with all manner of UX/design sprints and ideation processes to develop or improve your owned assets.

Jake Knapp, Design Partner at Google Ventures has outlined a technique used on a variety of their client problems that synthesises this down. It's called the Product Design Sprint. While this mainly applies to startups, it has a lot of relevance to any business that is interested in moving fast to market, and driving faster feedback loops.

This post will explore the Design Sprint process in more detail - I'm doing a lot of paraphrasing (my stab at the Feynman Technique), so check out the original article if interested.

Overview

Knapp writes that the Design Sprint process was developed out of a frustration of group brainstorming. He tended to find that while good ideas were thought up in this environment, they tended to not end up progressing; successful ideas ultimately come from individuals, not groups.

Amazon are by far one of the strongest leaders in product development, which is why any advice or frameworks they speak about are worth paying attention to. I really liked the following model outlined by General Manager Ian McAllister on how they achieve success in their own product development.

"Working Backwards" is a product management approach designed to aid in the process of making new products, features or product decisions, but can basically be applied to any sort of plan to introduce new functionality into project.

At it's heart, "Working Backwards" does just what it sounds like; it requires you to work backwards from the customer, as opposed to releasing a feature and trying to bolt on new customers to it. This is expressed through creating a fake internal press release announcing the finished product.