2017 Highlight — Design Sprint Conference, San Francisco
This is an article about the first conference dedicated to GV’s Design Sprint.
If you’ve never heard of that, you can learn more here or read the book.
Hello Google
2017 is behind us, so what better time to peek back and revisit my personal highlight of the year? It’s been a bit over a month since I returned from the first Design Sprint Conference held in San Francisco in late November.
To be honest, I thought I would publish this article just a few days after my return, but the whole experience provided too much brilliant information for my little brain to process so quickly, not to mention the whirlwind of emotions it inspired. So don’t blame me — it took some time to digest all the cool stuff I learnt there. Without further ado, here’s my personal and in-depth review of this most memorable conference:
Mid- October. I receive this strange email:
My first reaction is: “Hmm, must be spam. The event is in, like, three weeks? And what’s this funny logo…?”
Coachella for designers
I consult the conference site and discover the list of speakers.
You know when you’re waiting for the program of your favorite music festival, and the day comes when the performers are unveiled? “Wow, Radiohead are gonna be there, Whaaaat!? Foo Fighters too? And Bruce Springsteen…!?” This is more or less the feeling I had when I read the list of speakers (and throughout the entire conference). Yes, I am an unapologetic Design Sprint fanboy.
It’s hard to express how lucky I was to have been invited along, surrounded by some of the most influential Design thinkers and Sprintmasters there are.
Hats off to Google teams who managed the feat of bringing together all these beautiful people and who immediately put us at ease. Not only was each participant a great mind, it’s also worth noting the infinite accessibility and kindness of each.
The result was three days that will certainly remain important in the young Design Sprint community for years to come.
At this point in the article, I already sense hands rising, so it’s time to answer the most pressing questions:
- yes food was good — better than good
- yes Google do have a secret “apéritif” place — see end of the article
- yes I learnt a lot — more than a lot
Springboarding off that last one, I’ll do my best to summarize in a few paragraphs a number of discoveries. And don’t bother looking for any logic in the order or selection of these themes, there is none — these are just my personal highlights:
Design Sprints for a better world?
I had thought about it for many months, especially since my first meeting with Snow Hu founder of Design Sprint China. These guys run Sprints at the scale of cities of several million inhabitants, such as Shanghai.
The Design Sprint (at least in Europe) has a lot of untapped potential. This type of workshop is actually used in a commercial context, mainly for creating digital products (the reason why it was created at Google Ventures in the first place).
Conferences of Geoff Baldwin (Ideo.org), Alexandra Jayeun Lee from Oakland’s Civic Design Lab or Surya Vanka, have opened my eyes to the potential of Design Sprints at the societal level.
I really liked the vision of Albert Jame, who works with the Canadian government and refers to Sprint as “blue-collar design thinking”.
A team, whether it’s comprised of ministers or ordinary citizens, can come together and roll up their sleeves, and imagine and test pragmatic solutions to real world problems. In a few days, the impact can be huge.
Meeting Jake Knapp
Now for an admission of a personal nature. Design Sprint has had a huge impact on my life over the last two years. And in that time, I have been an avid follower of anything Jake Knapp — the creator of the methodology — shared online: advice on Sprint or time management, his decision to leave Google to focus on his next book… And, over time, I built up a certain mental image of Jake the person.
They say it’s dangerous to meet your heroes because they always let you down. But let it be said, meeting Jake face-to-face was, for me, one of the highlights of the conference.
Picture fanboy me on the first day: “That’s him! There he is in real life, with this kind of weird tie! And the stories are true; Jake Knapp is probably the world’s tallest designer!” And, as I quickly confirmed, he’s one hell of a guy.
I had the privilege to chat with Jake between two avocado-quinoa sandwiches and two sips of LaCroix sparkling water (yeah, we were in San Francisco). We talked about the Sprint, his departure from GV, Switzerland (he lived in Zurich when he was a designer on Gmail), and the fact that we would surely meet again in 2018… Stay tuned!
More than ever, I realized that the Sprintmaster’s personality, his interpersonal skills and his ability to bring fun to a five-day workshop — often with huge stakes — are keys to a successful Sprint.
Simple, funny, easy-going: Jake Knapp is the embodiment of his Design Sprint.
Agencies and the Design Sprint
Actually, I had high expectations for this panel and, well, I was not disappointed: AJ & Smart, New Haircut, Bontouch, Moonshot… familiar names in the DS galaxy that for once were gathered on the same stools. All of them shared their successes and failures with realism and humor.
Globally there are two types of agencies:
- The full-service agencies, who will realize the product until the end
- The 100% Design Sprint agencies
Full-service agencies
This type of agency, specialized for many years in the design and development of digital solutions, is rightly beginning to take a strong interest in Design Sprint. In a certain way, it is the ideal way to start a project, to get to know the team, and to establish a climate of trust while gaining speed in the execution phase.
Mike Edmonds from Moonshot shared their approach to integrating Design Sprint into a global project perspective. (The Sprint serves as a kickstart, a lean-mode alignment phase follows that will lead to the build of the actual product in typical Agile sprints.)
The concern of objectivity: Pontus Axelsson from Bontouch agency raised a question that seemed to me crucial:
How, when the agency realizes the product to the end, does an agency accept that a negative Sprint result can mean the invalidation of an idea or product?
The business impact on the agency can be huge with months of work at stake…
The solution is probably in what Pontus calls their model of “Startup as a service”: the contract is signed for several months and binds the client to the agency. The redefinition of a feature, a pivot, or even the invalidation of this variant of the product are no longer seen as critical failures that may call into question the client / agency relationship, but as the normal course of the project, with all its hazards.
The agency will play its role as a “startup” and will make every effort to quickly find effective solutions to problems encountered, even running a new Sprint a few weeks later.
100% Design Sprint agencies
No problem of objectivity in this case. Agencies specialized in Design Sprint are not supposed to realize the whole of the product themselves. Their role is to bring their value to the Sprint, and if the tests of the day 5 prove conclusive, to orient their customers as much as possible towards the best provider for the continuation of the project.
Several Sprints can, however, be carried out in a very short period of time (AJ & Smart, for example, regularly chain two Sprints of 4 days back to back). With little hierarchical dependence or long-term contracts linking them to their clients, this type of agency can afford the luxury of being totally honest and bullshit-free. This kind of objectivity is key to a great facilitation.
The problems faced by the 100% Design Sprint agencies (this is also my case at Design Sprint Switzerland), are primarily related to having to find new customers permanently (a Sprint lasts max 5 days). In addition, always working with new teams, on new projects, and at high speeds can place designers out of their comfort zone and drain the battery.
Sprint agencies must therefore find experienced employees who are comfortable in any situation and able to produce high-fidelity prototypes in a matter of hours. The seniority of the team, its participation in the development of many products in the past, and its ability to adapt will be key.
About the infamous MAP on day 1
When I run my Sprints, the MAP is often one of my biggest challenges as Sprintmaster. We are in day 1, the team is full of doubts about the scope of the project, the strategic direction or even what kind of users we are trying to reach. I also had to develop a number of tricks (summarized in this article) to eventually manage to get it right.
In fact, I began to suspect I was a little weak in this department, but over time I realized that this feeling was commonly experienced in the community.
Not surprisingly, the MAP was a subject that came back constantly in presentations or conversations throughout the conference.
Erik Flowers presented us with the “Service Blueprint” as it is done at Intuit for products like Quickbooks (very impressive, but far too detailed to be achieved during a DS).
Jim Kalbach from Mural, during his brilliant workshop on the final day, shared with us a large number of UX Mapping projects.
I was particularly impressed by his co-creation experience with former repentant jihadists (“mapping the stages of reintegration into civil society after an experience of religious extremism”). Proof if ever it were needed that post-it is a universal tool and that this type of workshop is definitely open to all.
What emerges from these discussions related to MAP:
- Although some use them during Sprints, no one is very comfortable with the idea of persona, mainly the “demographic” aspect of the thing (age, level of education, city, origins). Jake Knapp recommends focusing on roles or activities (i.e. doctor, patient or receptionist, etc), without going into too much detail.
- Jim Kalbach suggests defining the main axes of the Map before the workshop and not trying to be exhaustive (at least not in the case of a Sprint). Any type of map is possible; user experience map, customer journey or service blueprint. The important thing is that this map is focused on the needs defined during the Sprint goal, with the appropriate zoom level (granularity).
- Key steps: during our discussions with Jake, he told me that the chapter of the MAP may have been a bit more specific in the book, including the fact that it is possible not to start with an empty whiteboard. According to him, the three phases common to the adoption phase could be summarized as follows: Discover> Learn> Start
The responsibility of the Designers
We are not always fully aware of it as Designer, because making decisions is our daily bread, but our role is important in the technological revolution we are experiencing.
Whether working for startups or Fortune 500 companies, Design Sprint takes us to the heart of the most crucial problems of today’s world. Some ideas, or decisions that will be made during these workshops, will have direct or indirect consequences on the apps or systems that we conceive and in a broad sense on people’s lives.
To conclude these 3 intense days, big up to Karwai Ng and Will Anderson,who thanks to their Iceberg Canvas (an extension of the Value Proposition Canvas of Yves Pigneur & Alex Osterwalder) presented us with a useful tool to become aware of the technological, social or ethical impact of our decisions.
Exchanging for several days with designers from companies like Google, Dropbox, Automattic, AirBnb, IBM or Uber was an incredible experience for me. I left the conference reassured on the fact that behind the big names are real people for whom this business is more than just a passion and who, every day, try to create products that make sense of and bring value to the world.
Thanks Google
Well, thank you so much to Kai Haley, Rebecca Garza-Bortman and all the great people from Google Design who helped organize this first conference.
It was per-fect!
Do not hesitate to contact me to know more about Design Sprint in Europe or to react to this post. I’ll be happy to exchange with you!
Stéphane Cruchon is a UI / UX Design Consultant and teacher living in Lausanne Switzerland.
