Blog Insights
Design Sprints: An Exercise for Product Teams
A design sprint brings together business strategy, innovation, and design thinking to create and test a product in just five days. As you look to develop new digital communication products or campaigns, a design sprint is a great way to both get things moving and release creative ideas.
By using the design sprint method, you can compress potentially months of time into days. Instead of waiting to launch a minimal viable product (MVP), you can create, test, and gather data from a realistic prototype in one week. This allows teams to see a finished product and user reactions before making any substantive time or monetary commitments. “The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers.” -Jake Knapp, Author of SPRINT, and Design Sprint co-inventorDesign Sprints are great for:
- Kicking off new products or features
- Unblocking an existing design project
- Working through a company pain point e.g. losing donors
- Working through a user pain point
- Writing and testing content


Who should be on the design sprint team?
Generally, a design sprint team is made of the following roles:- The decider: This is the person with the final say. While most often it’s the team leader, product owner, or senior-level budget holder, the decider can also be the lead engineer or project manager. Whoever it is, everyone must agree that they ultimately get to say yes or no.
- A facilitator: This person ensures that the design sprint runs smoothly and modifies the sprint activities to best fit the team’s needs.
- A customer/user representative: The person on your team that knows the target audience best.
- A designer: The person (or team) who will transform the idea into reality.
- An engineer: The person that will ultimately help develop the product. They’ll have great insight on whether an idea is possible.
- A marketer: The person that can brainstorm, pitch, and write with ease.
- Reinforcements: More designers, more customer representatives, more engineers, and more marketers provide additional ideas and insights.
Looking for a design sprint partner?
If you’re interested in running a design sprint, or are ready to move to the implementation phase, our design team would be happy to chat.