Design Sprint Kit Template
Facilitate a Design Sprint with this ready-to-use kit. This kit helps your team collectively design, prototype, and test ideas around your product over just five days.
About the Design Sprint Kit Template
With the right strategic approach, five days is all it takes to address your biggest product challenges. That’s the thinking behind the Design Sprint methodology. This Design Sprint Kit Template is complete with prepared whiteboards and sprint supplies, making it especially useful for remote Design Sprint facilitators.
What is a Design Sprint?
A Design Sprint is a framework developed by Google and made popular by a group of designers working at Google Ventures. It is a five-day process for a sprint team to build and test a prototype. During a 5-Day Design Sprint, the team designs, prototypes, and tests ideas without building a finished product. The aim is to reduce the risks of launching a new product. With five uninterrupted days of design thinking, teams can answer important business questions based on insights from a realistic prototype.
What are the five stages of a Design Sprint?
A Design Sprint is split up into five stages, with different activities for each stage:
Day 1: Understand. In the first stage, you map out the problem. This is to better understand the issue at hand and choose where to place your focus. This stage includes performing competitor research, creating user personas, and understanding the overall business requirements.
Day 2: Sketch. The second stage involves sketching different solutions to the problem. The team participates in some collaborative brainstorming and puts their ideas down on paper.
Day 3: Decide. The third day is dedicated to decision-making. The team needs to make a collective decision around which innovative solutions to pursue. The chosen sketches are turned into a storyboard that lays out how you are going to create your prototype.
Day 4: Prototype. This stage is for your team to build a prototype based on your storyboard. This includes creating wireframes and focusing on the customer-facing aspects of your product.
Day 5: Validate. The final day is for testing your prototype with customers. By watching them interact with your product, you can gain valuable user feedback to improve your product or service before they're deployed.
Why use the Design Sprint Kit Template?
This Design Sprint Kit Template is your resource pack or toolkit to facilitate your team through a Design Sprint. It has all the tools, structures, boards, and features you need to encourage collaborative, creative thinking within your team.
The template is already categorized into different phases of a Design Sprint, saving facilitators time and effort. The pre-formatting makes it easier for you to kick off your sprint whenever you’re ready.
From day one, the design team can get stuck into the “How Might We” or HMW method. Instead of using a Sharpie and physical post-its, capture your HMW and User Journey Step notes digitally. From important design insights to user feedback, all your team’s ideas are safely captured in one collaborative space.
Remote Design Sprint Facilitators can use this kit to maintain the spirit of a co-located Design Sprint by using virtual Sprint supplies and prepared whiteboards. Whether your design team is in the same room or working remotely, this template fosters open communication.
Bonus: product teams can also use the kit to digitally document all of the sticky notes and paper used during a co-located Design Sprint.
What do you get with the Design Sprint Kit?
Here’s what you can look forward to using with this kit:
General supplies:
Voting dots
How Might We sticky notes
User journey steps sticky notes
Top insight notes
Colored positive and negative user feedback sticky notes
Masking tape
Monday supplies:
HMW Clusters (for expert interview notes review and voting)
User Journey Map Template
Wednesday supplies:
Art Gallery (to display Tuesday’s sketches and voting)
Storyboard template
Friday supplies:
User Feedback board (to capture user feedback on Friday’s prototype)
What is the difference between Design Thinking, Agile Sprints, and Design Sprints?
Design Thinking is a problem-solving approach developed in the ‘80s and ‘90s. This problem-solving methodology focuses on addressing a problem from a customer perspective.
Agile is a methodology based on the values and principles laid out in the Agile manifesto from 2001. It was originally designed for software development and project management. The Agile methodology includes several types of frameworks, such as Scrum and Kanban. These Agile frameworks include sprints, which last between one and four weeks.
The Design Sprint framework is derived from both Design Thinking and Agile. It is a prescriptive approach to tackling a product design problem. Design Sprints use design thinking-inspired methods but compress prototyping and user research into just five days. It was first developed at Google in 2010 by Jake Knapp. It was made popular in 2016 by John Zeratsky and other GV designers in their book, Sprint.
Get started with this template right now.
SAFe Roam Board
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A SAFe ROAM Board is a framework for making risks visible. It gives you and your team a shared space to notice and highlight risks, so they don’t get ignored. The ROAM Board helps everyone consider the likelihood and impact of risks, and decide which risks are low priority versus high priority. The underlying principles of SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) are: drive cost-effective solutions, apply systems thinking, assume that things will change, build incrementally, base milestones on evaluating working systems, and visualize and limit works in progress.
Creative Brief Template
Works best for:
Design, Marketing, Desk Research
Even creative thinkers (or maybe especially creative thinkers) need clear guidelines to push their ideas in productive, usable directions. And a good creative lays down those guidelines, with information that includes target audience, goals, timeline, and budget, as well as the scope and specifications of the project itself. The foundation of any marketing or advertising campaign, a creative brief is the first step in building websites, videos, ads, banners, and much more. The brief is generally prepared before kicking off a project, and this template will make it easy.
Product Positioning Template
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Marketing, Product Management, Desk Research
For better or for worse, your company’s chances for success hinge partially on your market. As such, before you start building products and planning strategies, it’s a good idea to conduct a product positioning exercise. A product positioning exercise is designed to situate your company and your offering within a market. The product positioning template guides you to consider key topics such as defining your product and market category, identifying your target segment and competitors, and understanding your key benefits and differentiation.
Brand Strategy Template
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Marketing
Develop a brand strategy for new and existing brands with this fully guided Brand Strategy Template. Find new ways to build your brand and set your business up for success.
Cost-Benefit Analysis Template
Works best for:
Leadership, Decision Making, Strategic Planning
With so many day-to-day decisions to make—and each one feeling high-stakes—it’s easy for all the choices to weigh a business or organization down. You need a systematic way to analyze the risks and rewards. A cost benefit analysis gives you the clarity you need to make smart decisions. This template will let you conduct a CBA to help your team assess the pros and cons of new projects or business proposals—and ultimately help your company preserve your precious time, money, and social capital.
Reverse Brainstorming Template
Works best for:
Ideation, Brainstorming, Team Meetings
Reverse brainstorming is a technique that prompts a group to think of problems, rather than solutions. Because we naturally think of problems, it’s a great way to get a group to anticipate problems that may occur during a project. To engage in reverse brainstorming, start by identifying the problem, and then think of things that might exacerbate it. Ask your team to generate ideas around ways in which the problem could get worse. Reverse the problems into solutions again, and then evaluate your ideas.