Design Sprint Template
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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
Introduce the design sprint board to your team and people.
Run an icebreaker to get people used to online stickies.
Run an icebreaker to test the voting system on the board.
Show the materials people will need during the design sprint.
Alignment Workshop
Do a round of intros.
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
Define the long-term goal of your product/service.
Find lightning demos. These demos are about products that have solved similar problems and are inspiring.
Create the concept of your design with these exercises:
Notetaking
Doodling
Crazy 8s
4. Create a final solution concept.
Decision Workshop
Recap the challenge that you are trying to solve.
Create a concept gallery and vote on concepts.
Create user tests flows.
Storyboard your final idea.
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!
What should a sprint design include?
A design sprint should include a timetable so people know what to expect and book time for it. On a remote design sprint board, there should be a space for prep work and research (diverge and converge). Save some time for organizing some references, and make sure to inspire people with other product stories. In the end, organize a working space so people can conceptualize and produce the final prototype and storyboard.
How do I design a sprint design?
The Design Sprint Template by AJ&Smart helps you to design your remote design sprint workshop. Keep in mind that for running a design sprint, you’ll need to understand the design thinking process: frame your problem, diverge and brainstorm, converge and find solutions, prototype, test and validate assumptions with users. Once you plan these design stages, you can tailor the design sprint to suit your team's needs.
Get started with this template right now.
Remote Design Sprint Template
Works best for:
Design, Desk Research, Sprint Planning
A design sprint is an intensive process of designing, iterating, and testing a prototype over a 4 or 5 day period. Design sprints are conducted to break out of stal, work processes, find a fresh perspective, identify problems in a unique way, and rapidly develop solutions. Developed by Google, design sprints were created to enable teams to align on a specific problem, generate multiple solutions, create and test prototypes, and get feedback from users in a short period of time. This template was originally created by JustMad, a business-driven design consultancy, and has been leveraged by distributed teams worldwide.
Design Sprint Kit Template
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, UX Design, Sprint Planning
With the right focused and strategic approach, five days is all it takes to address your biggest product challenges. That’s the thinking behind Design Sprint methodology. Created by Tanya Junell of Blue Label Labs, this Design Sprint Kit provides a set of lightweight templates that support the Design Sprint’s collaborative activities and voting—and maintains the energy, team spirit, and momentum that was sparked in the session. Virtual sprint supplies and prepared whiteboards make this kit especially useful for remote Design Sprint Facilitators.
Official 5-Day Design Sprint
Works best for:
Design, Desk Research, Sprint Planning
The goal of a Design Sprint is to build and test a prototype in just five days. You'll take a small team, clear the schedule for a week, and rapidly progress from problem to tested solution using a proven step-by-step checklist. Steph Cruchon of Design Sprint created this template for Miro in collaboration with design sprint gurus at Google. This Design Sprint template is designed specifically for remote sprints so you can run productive and efficient sprints with colleagues around the world.
Research Topic Brainstorm Template
Works best for:
Desk Research, Brainstorming, Ideation
Coming up with a topic for a research project can be a daunting task. Use the Research Topic Brainstorm template to take a general idea and transform it into something concrete. With the Research Topic Brainstorm template, you can compile a list of general ideas that interest you and then break them into component parts. You can then turn those parts into questions that might be the focus for a research project.