The product design sprint: a five-day recipe for startups

At Google Ventures, we do product design work with startups all the time. Since we want to move fast and they want to move fast, we’ve optimized a process that gets us predictably good results in five days or less. We call it a product design sprint, and it’s great for getting unstuck or accelerating projects that are already in motion. I’ve planned and run over 100 of these sprints, first with teams at Google and now with startups in the Google Ventures portfolio. Over the next several posts, I’ll be sharing a DIY guide for running your own design sprint. Before the sprint: Prepare Get the people and things you need. Day 1: Understand Dig into the design problem through research, competitive review, and strategy exercises. Day 2: Diverge Rapidly develop as many solutions as possible. Day 3: Decide Choose the best ideas and hammer out a user story. Day 4: Prototype Build something quick and dirty that can be shown to users. If you think you’ve heard of this model before, well, you’re right.

Experimentation Is The New Planning Technology is a bitch. It affects every industry, often in ways that are difficult (if not impossible) to anticipate. There’s always the possibility that a Napster or a Netflix or a Wikipedia will arrive to completely disrupt your business or industry. So it makes sense to have some kind of system that allows you to continually develop options and explore possibilities, so that when the day of disruption does arrive, it finds you ready with a few alternatives in hand. The time to seek those alternatives is now--not later, after a crisis has already arrived. Let’s Be Deliberate: Real Strategy Emerges An evolving portfolio of strategic experiments gives the management team more choices, which means better odds that some of the choices will be right. Management theorist Henry Mintzberg makes a distinction between deliberate and emergent strategy. Deliberate strategy is goal-oriented. A Portfolio Of Experiments In 2005, Google set a formula for distributing its engineering efforts: 70-20-10.