Design Sprint Facilitation | 2024
Replacing months of guesswork in four days
Giving a team of eight a shared goal – and a guiding principle that lasted two years.
My contribution
Initiative
Facilitation
User research
Usability Testing
Summary
When a team needs momentum, not more planning.
The product had been in development for a year – without a shared goal, without a clear picture of who it was for. The team was building on instinct and reacting to individual stakeholder requests.
Instead of untangling what existed, we took a step back. Four focused days with eight people – developers, designers, and non-technical stakeholders – to ask one question: what would we build if we started fresh today?
How we ran it
Four days, one outcome per day
We ran a four-day version of the Google Design Sprint – tight enough to keep energy high, structured enough to get to a result. To fit our situation, we adapted some methods and replaced the expert interviews at the start with insights from research we had already done.
The most important outcome of the sprint wasn't the prototype. It was the guiding principle that gave the whole team a shared language – and a clear answer for every design decision that followed.
The sprint ended. The ideas didn't.
Long after the sprint was over, we kept coming back to its results. Whenever a design decision felt unclear, the guiding principle gave us a shared answer. And many of the feature ideas that came out of those four days found their way into the product – months later, when the time was right.
Learnings
What I take away