How to Use Design Sprints to Tackle Creative Projects

What if your organization has an important creative project but not much time? How can you work at an accelerated pace without compromising quality? The solution may be to conduct a design sprint.

Design sprints are a concentrated period of creativity. Typically taking place over a few days to a week, they have the potential to create great work in a remarkably short period of time. This is possible because sprints cut out many of the delays produced by sharing, synthesizing, clarifying, and responding to feedback. By getting everyone in the same room, designers receive and can respond to input almost instantly.

Sprints also encourage closer collaboration with teams, and ideas tend to emerge earlier and get evaluated more quickly. In a sprint environment, it becomes easier to remember the steps and rationale that led to decisions and maintain the enthusiasm for the project that sometimes fades when projects linger too long. The likelihood team members will be interrupted by other projects and will have to switch back and forth diminishes, too.

Solutions Journalism Network is a nonprofit devoted to fostering journalism that spotlights social problems as well as potential solutions. During a recent website redesign project, the organization found itself waiting much longer than it had hoped for the final product. Looking for a way to speed things up, it hired my design studio to conduct a sprint. A week later, it was done.

When focus and energy are poured into the design process in a short time span, work emerges faster and often with better results than with traditional approaches.

Here is how you can set up a sprint for your organization:

First come up with a strategy. You want to know the big steps before the sprint begins. Imagine having one day dedicated to web design only to realize you failed to map the site out. The design time won’t be used wisely without the needed preparation..

Choose the team. Who needs to make decisions for the project? Where do the authority and expertise lie? Do you need to pull in outside strategists, designers, or facilitators? Make sure you have the right people in place for each part of the process.

Set the schedule. Create at least a rough outline of what you are going to accomplish and make sure the scope of work is realistic for your time frame. Let’s say you are doing a -fourday sprint to redesign your website. You should have wrapped up strategy and started doing sketches by the end of day one, if not sooner. If you are trying to strategize, design, and develop a website all in this period of time, make sure you have the right resources and can subdivide the project so the later steps like development can begin even before you are completely done with the entire design.

Choose a space. Find a place where you can be relatively isolated from your day-to-day routine. Doing a sprint at your office where regular work and distractions can easily find you could be a problem — unless the whole team is participating. Also, don’t forget to bring supplies like pens, paper, markers, sticky notes, monitors, or a projector — all the things you need to share ideas.

Once you’re conducting the sprint, follow these tips:

Watch the clock. While it’s OK to stray from your original plan, you don’t want to fall too far behind. It can be tempting to imagine you will finish leftover work after the sprint is over, but projects tend to lose momentum when everyone goes back to their routines. It’s better to have a good project that’s finished than a perfect project that’s only 40 percent complete.

Make sketches of ideas. A sketch is worth a thousand words. Even if you are not a designer, make sketches of your ideas and tape them to walls. Generate lots of initial ideas quickly before spending too much time on any one approach. Do this in small teams and then invite other teams to weigh in.

Have fun. Sprints are a dynamic environment. Debate the ideas and allow the rapid in-person exchanges to improve the product and move things along quickly. We rarely get the chance to share so many ideas with our teams and vendors. But take some breaks, too. Go on short walks and grab snacks. Sometimes casual exchanges produce the best ideas, and everyone needs to recharge.

When organizations can devote the time and resources to making a sprint work, the opportunity is promising. Bringing in outside facilitators and creative teams that have done this before can help avoid pitfalls and keep things moving toward success. If your organization wants to engage its team on a creative project and see results in record time, a sprint may just be the answer.

Matt Scharpnick is co-founder of Elefint Designs.