Design Sprint Template

About the Design Sprint Template

AJ&Smart, a product design agency, created this template to help teams improve and facilitate their design sprints. After years of facilitating hundreds of sprints, AJ&Smart gathered the processes and techniques they use with their clients and shared their secrets when it comes to great design sprint facilitation.

For more info on the AJ&Smart Design Sprint and detailed videos, visit: https://ajsmart.com

What’s the Design Sprint Template?

Google Ventures originally created the design sprint, mixing business strategy, innovation, and design thinking with an all-in-one workshop. The AJ&Smart Design Sprint Template is similar to the original process, adapted to the virtual environment.

On this template, you’ll find a step-by-step guide on how to run an intense, 4-day design hackathon for hybrid or remote teams. The design sprint is divided into four spaces:

• Onboarding

• Alignment Workshop

• Solution Workshop

• Decision Workshop

After you run this workshop, you and your team will be able to answer critical business questions by designing, prototyping, and testing ideas.

Benefits of the Design Sprint Template

Many designers and facilitators run design sprints to determine if a product is a good market fit, if they need to work on features, or if value propositions are still up to date. Teams run these sprints to avoid wasting time and money on ideas that might not produce desired outcomes. The design sprints take just one week, and they help find answers about whether or not to move forward with product design and production.

The major benefit of running a design sprint is that you will have a high-fidelity interactive prototype at the end of your workshop, tested by real users and with clear insights about what to do next.

Once you have your product representation, you can:

• Ease the decision-making process.

• Hold a second design sprint to iterate and polish your product.

• Prototype and sell your idea.

• Develop the concept further.

How to use the Design Sprint Template?

The Design Sprint Template helps you to facilitate and guide a design sprint. Here is how to use this template:

Timetable

Prepare yourself and your team to block time on their calendars. You’ll need 3 to 4 days to run the whole sprint. Here is a breakdown of what you’ll do:

1st day: Frame the problem. You’ll define the challenges and scope.

2nd day: Decide which challenges to prototype.

3rd day: Build a high-fidelity prototype.

4th day: Test and get feedback.

Facilitating your design sprint:

Each frame contains one stage of the sprint and can be followed chronologically.

Warm Up & Prep

1. Introduce the design sprint board to your team and people.

2. Run an icebreaker to get people used to online stickies.

3. Run an icebreaker to test the voting system on the board.

4. Show the materials people will need during the design sprint.

Alignment Workshop

1. Do a round of intros.

2. Explain what a design sprint is and how it works.

Start the sprint going through:

• The map

• Expert interview

• Voting on challenges

• Collecting goals

Solution Workshop

1. Define the long-term goal of your product/service.

2. Find lightning demos. These demos are about products that have solved similar problems and are inspiring.

3. Create the concept of your design with these exercises:

• Notetaking

• Doodling

• Crazy 8s

4. Create a final solution concept.

Decision Workshop

1. Recap the challenge that you are trying to solve.

2. Create a concept gallery and vote on concepts.

3. Create user tests flows.

4. Storyboard your final idea.

5. Close your workshop and ask for feedback.

Pro tip:

• Try to keep the sessions as short as possible since losing focus is very easy. Change the timetable if needed, if it allows you to keep the workshop more streamlined.

• Keep this board as a living document.

• Start the workshop with pre-filled templates with artifacts and stickies in place, so people can get an idea of what the workshop looks like. Don’t start from a blank slate!