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Participants in design sprints typically come with varied backgrounds and mindsets. That’s why it can be helpful to do a short crash course before diving into the actual design sprint — kind of like spending 20 minutes with a book before reading it. By doing this, you will know what to expect and understand the ideas in the book much better.

Here are some of the things I’ve found to be important when preparing people for design sprints. Some of this is also in the book.

1. The purpose is learning

Whatever ideas people come up with in a sprint, they serve only one purpose: to find answers to important questions. It’s important to underline that participants should become attached to learning, not to the ideas or design concepts produced in a sprint.

2. User reaction and feedback is the secret sauce

What makes sprints work is 1) immediate and spontaneous user reactions, and 2) user feedback. This is where all the learning comes from — but of course you need to watch closely, ask in-depth questions, and listen carefully, to get an accurate understanding of what people actually think and do.

3. Postpone decisions for a little while

One thing I’ve certainly found true is that many value and reward decision-making. Which is fair enough — how else would we make progress? But in a design sprint we need to suspend decision-making for a little while, to keep an open mind and generate a shedload of ideas, before judgement. In other words, we need to diverge (widen the play field) before we converge (make decisions about what to test).

4. What the 5-day process looks like

Like having an agenda for a meeting is helpful, it’s good to know what the process of a sprint actually is. Rather than use a lot of words, I’ll just re-use an image I made for a previous article about design sprints. Here is how I think a sprint can be summarised:

A Design Sprint is a learning loop where you define and create something (an “it”) you need to learn about. You test with real users, and gain valuable feedback and insights.

5. Focus!

It’s important to focus on two things: 1) very practically: be present. Don’t stare into your computer or phone, and 2) keep the goal, questions and assumptions top of mind throughout the sprint. Without these things, how do you know what goal post you are marching towards?

6. Celebrate failure

Referring back to the purpose of the sprint, make it plain that a “no” is worth at least as much as a “yes” — so don’t fall in love with your ideas. Instead, celebrate failures, because they tell us what not to do, and clarify how we might succeed.

7. Beware confirmation bias

People naturally create meaning and patterns in what they see, but this is based on and biased by existing knowledge. We tend to “see” patterns that match what we already “know” to be true. This bias towards confirming our existing opinions can block us from seeing new options — which is why it’s super important to be conscious of this phenomenon, and talk about it.

8. Embrace the power of sketching

Most people don’t like being asked to sketch, because they think it’s about drawing skills. It’s not. Anybody can draw a square, a circle, an arrow, and write some text. And that’s pretty much what you need to sketch out a story. That’s the first point: anybody can sketch. The second point is: sketching actually contributes to shaping and developing ideas, because the act of sketching makes things visible. And visible things are there for us, to behold, to reflect on, to share with others, and to further develop.

9. Beware groupthink

We tend to adopt whatever point of view the larger group has, which inevitably leads to ideas being shut down because they don’t fit in with the larger group’s views. In design sprints, many activities are done individually, precisely to counter groupthink.

10. Beware the good salesman

Some people are really great at selling ideas. But selling an idea doesn’t mean it is actually good. This is why the facilitator is the one doing the presenting in a design sprint, rather than whoever came up with an idea. This also has the added value that ideas need to be made very concrete, since the facilitator won’t know what to present, except what is made explicit through sketches and words. This “making-it-explicit” forces us to become very detailed about what our ideas actually mean and contain, which means we have to do a lot of exploration and reflection — which in turn improves our ideas.

11. The decider is there for a reason

A design sprint, while inherently a group activity, is not a democracy. The decider is there to ensure that decisions are made, and that those decisions have top-level support in the organisation. It would be pointless to learn a bunch of stuff and then find out that all the executives disagree because they weren’t in on the decision-making. Of course this also means that it’s important to pick the right decider, since he / she needs to be a person who can guarantee such support.

Thanks for reading! There are probably many more things you could add to this list — if you have any comments or something to add, I would as usual love to hear them. Have a great weekend! 😀

Further reading

Preparing for Design Sprints was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Preparing for Design Sprints

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