Spotlight
Design Sprints
Innovation accelerated
What are ‘Design Sprints’?
The Design Sprint has the power to fast-track your innovation journey and is a valuable risk-management tool when bringing a new product or service to market.
Originally developed by Google Ventures, Design Sprints are an agile method for moving from problem to solution in rapid time.
Our tailored, user-centric Design Sprints facilitate teams through an immersive five-step process, resulting in innovation decisions that are better informed, aligned, and arrived at more quickly.
Design sprints don’t replace in-depth development phases – they’re designed to provide decisions and direction, rapidly.
They can add value in the Opportunity Definition, Concept Creation and Concept Realization phases of Potential Realized – but, in true end-to-end innovation, you can ‘sprint’ any time.
Why Sprint?
Design Sprints can accelerate your:
- innovation process – evolve and add to your ordinary ways of working
- creation and iteration of hypotheses – explore ideas that push against your normal ‘constraints’
- multidisciplinary collaboration – bring teams together to build innovation direction
- learning from users – being more user-centred in your innovation direction
How do Sprints work?
With 25 years of successful innovation partnerships under our belt, we’ve built up a toolkit of over 50 models, approaches and methodologies to enable us to fine-tune the five-step Design Sprint process for our clients.
Exercising a user-centric, test-and-learn approach, and drawing on deep knowledge, cross-category experience, and best-practice resources, we uncover, prioritize and align global teams around evidence-based opportunities.
1. Discover
![](https://www.cambridge-design.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/1-Discover.png)
Immerse your team in the challenge, understand what you do – and don’t – know, and empathize with the true unmet needs of users.
Outcome: a challenge statement that’s exact in target and scope which you’ll focus on solving.
2. Design
![](https://www.cambridge-design.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/2-Design.png)
Create a set of user-centric ideas, using value propositions, insight statements, and concept boards. Early critique against your tailor-built success criteria allows you to draw up a meaningful shortlist.
Outcome: a longlist of possible solutions, with an initial priority order.
3. Learn
![](https://www.cambridge-design.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/3-Learn.png)
Putting users at the center of the process. Test-and-learn from users in co-creation activities to understand what’s resonating and what needs to be done next.
Outcome: real-time user feedback and evidence-based direction.
4. Build
![](https://www.cambridge-design.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/4-Build.png)
Translate user learnings to inform iterative development. Evolve ideas using fast prototyping techniques, such as rapid visualization, storyboards, high-fidelity renderings and ‘looks-like’ prototypes.
Outcome: a range of illustrative prototypes which start to bring to life the solution short-list.
5. Prioritize
![](https://www.cambridge-design.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/5-Prioritize.png)
Align on direction, ownership and next steps to take the Design Sprint output back into your business.
Outcome: a strategic action plan to maintain momentum and gain buy-in for subsequent development.
Sprint teams
Our multidisciplinary Design Sprint team equals deep knowledge and broad experience, and can be tailored to suit the nature and theme of your Design Sprint.
![](https://www.cambridge-design.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Design_sprints_flow-2.jpg)
Define Sprint
Where to play
Shape opportunities to ensure you’re doing the right things. Tackle tricky innovation challenges such as…
- Where are the opportunities for us in a disruptive market trend?
- Where are there adjacent market areas we can extend our existing asset base into?
- Where are the technology investments we should be making over the next five years?
- Where are the untapped stakeholder opportunities in our existing ecosystem?
Refine Sprint
How to win
Create solutions to ensure you’re doing things right. Tackle difficult innovation challenges such as…
- How can we react to a disruptive competitor launch?
- How can we be first-to-market in response to a growing consumer trend?
- How can we extend our portfolio to capture a new customer segment?
- How can we create a five-year user-centric product roadmap for our new strategic vision?
Ready, set…
Our Design Sprint programs can typically be delivered within 3-6 weeks of inception.
The heart of a Design Sprint is always delivered over 3-5 consecutive days, sized to the output you need.
![](https://www.cambridge-design.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Design-sprint-timeline-01.jpg)
“Agile innovation helps teams tackle tough challenges collaboratively, learn from users early and test hypotheses quickly.”
Martha Hodgson
Design Sprints Lead