Design sprint

The Design Sprint is a 5-day process developed by Google Ventures to quickly solve an important problem by going through understanding, ideation, decision, prototyping and testing. In five days, a cross-functional team moves from a fuzzy problem to a prototype tested on real users. It is a method for accelerating decision-making, not a substitute for a complete experience design process.

Monday: understand the problem in depth and define the target of the sprint. Tuesday: explore solutions individually (sketching, crazy 8). Wednesday: decide collectively on the solution to prototype. Thursday: build a high-fidelity prototype in one day. Friday: test the prototype on 5 users and analyse the results. The AJ&Smart version (modified Sprint) condenses the process into 4 days or even 2 days for seasoned teams.

For important, poorly defined problems, where the team holds diverging opinions and needs to converge quickly. Ideally: a stake significant enough to justify 5 days of intense collective work, with genuine uncertainty about the solution. The sprint is less useful for incremental optimisations or already well-mapped problems. It is particularly valuable for testing a strategic hypothesis before investing in lengthy development.

The ideal team is 5 to 7 people: a decider (the 'Decider' who has the authority to make the call), a facilitator (who guides the process), and 3 to 5 participants representing the key areas of expertise (design, development, product, marketing, business). Experts can be invited for short sessions (Monday morning) to share their knowledge without taking part in the whole sprint. Beyond 7 participants, sessions become hard to facilitate.

The Design Sprint is a highly structured and timed implementation of design thinking. It follows the same logic (understand, define, ideate, prototype, test) but within a rigid 5-day frame with precise exercises at each stage. Design thinking is a general thinking framework; the Design Sprint is an execution method. You can do design thinking without a Sprint, but a Sprint systematically applies the principles of design thinking.