Errrday we're sprintin'

I’m a big fan of design sprints. I’m talking about proper design sprints, not the day-long brainstorms we’ve all had to endure. When done well, Sprints can shortcut design; they can bring users into the process, they can expedite approvals, they can even lead to new technologies.

The problem is that organizing and facilitating a really great design sprint is a lot of work—and who has the time? If your team is anything like mine, we’re all doing more than we’ve ever done. We’re using fancy AI tools to scale people’s individual impact and we’re moving really fast. So the idea of asking someone to take a few weeks to plan a sprint is starting to feel weird.

Instead of continuing to implement sprints, we spent some time thinking about sprint techniques that might be useful to implement as daily practices. It’s worked well, with the team having plenty of “doh, why didn’t we do this before” moments. So here they are, our top three sprint techniques that have benefitted the whole team when implemented as a daily practice:  

1. Setting intentions: If you’ve ever run a design sprint, you know how important it is to set a clear intention for each exercise. Bringing this same intentionality to meetings, 1:1s, working sessions, crits—the whole team has found it to be incredibly beneficial. We’ve not added formality. We’re not sharing crisp agendas or reading memos for 20 minutes before discussing anything. We’re just using the same techniques we’d use as facilitators, to articulate the actions, ideal outcomes, and intention of every team interaction. Something as simple as “Here’s what I’m hoping to get out of this session:” can have a huge impact on the quality of the time together. 5 stars. Would recommend. 
2. Prompting contributions: In a Sprint setting, a facilitator is mindful of including everyone—nudging the quieter voices in the room to speak up. As a team leader, I try to do this all the time, but having the whole team think about it has been transformational. Hearing team members call on each other for their opinion, directly, has been amazing. There’s a hidden strength in this behavior—it’s impossible to do it without sounding like you really value the person’s opinion. So it’s good for team health, transparency and culture too. Perhaps most exciting is that it’s improved the quality of the design critique across all our projects.
3. Dedicated moments of reflection: Something we do in sprints all the time is take a moment to intentionally reflect on concepts or discussion. Doing this at the start or end of everyday meetings has proven to be a really effective way of cutting down churn outside of the meeting itself. We hear if someone is apprehensive about a direction, we get a sense of the team’s appetite for taking on a bigger challenge, and we occasionally get surprised by a new idea or consideration from a quiet voice on the team. I’ve personally found these mini reflections to be most valuable when focused on the work. I know there are similar practices for team health and culture—but I’ve loved creating space to reflect on the work we’re doing and how we’re feeling about it. I think it’s improved everyone’s craft. 

There are more examples—of course there are—I particularly like trying to bring some of the prototyping and user testing methods into everyday design team practice. We’ve done smart things with NotebookLM and some built some handy prototyping frameworks that have really helped in that space, but I’ll write about those in a future issue. 

For now, have a think about what you can steal from the Sprint method for your daily practice—and let me know if I’m missing something.