If you go through the entire sprint process building on a faulty assumption or an incorrect hypothesis, you’ll end up with a solution that doesn’t solve your initial problem.
Google Ventures’ (GV) design sprint process is, for many product managers and their teams, the go-to methodology for solving big problems at a break-neck pace. It involves six phases (usually spread out over three to five days) where a motivated team sequesters in a post-it-covered room to brainstorm fixes for the issue at hand. But there’s one flaw in GV’s method: you’re supposed to wait until the final phase to engage in product validation.
If you go through the entire sprint process building on a faulty assumption or an incorrect hypothesis, you’ll end up with a solution that doesn’t solve your initial problem. That means your team’s time and energy go to waste while your challenge persists. The solution? Validate your ideas early—and often.
The purpose of GV’s design sprint methodology is to answer a question or tackle a problem quickly, using a pared-down and highly focused approach. It’s become a popular problem-solving process—especially for startups with limited time and resources to devote to product design.
The typical sprint process is versatile, fast, efficient, and collaborative. It can help product teams push through stubborn internal roadblocks and speed up their development process to fit with the long-term goals for their product. Simply put, there’s a reason the design sprint has gotten so popular: it delivers results.
However, there’s a risk involved with those results. If your team waits until the final phase to validate, you may find that your assumptions about your customers or your proposed solutions were incorrect. That would mean you’ve spent three to five days sprinting to develop a prototype that doesn’t address your user’s problem. Our approach improves the results of your sprint by adding continuous validation to the already effective process from GV’s design sprint kit.
To get the most value out of your team’s time and talent, take steps to validate throughout your sprint process. With a validation-focused approach, you can find opportunities to learn in every phase of the sprint—and, in fact, in every stage of product development.
It’s helpful to think of validation as an external check on your team’s assumptions against users’ real opinions, context, and feedback. There are benefits to seeking that external point of view as early as possible:
Under the typical step-by-step process popularized by Jake Knapp in his book Sprint, a design sprint takes place over just five days. The process involves a facilitator who understands how to run a design sprint workshop and a small team of key decision-makers—product managers, UX designers, user researchers, and others with insight into the product. The sprint team follows a set schedule so, at the end of the day, they’ll have made real progress through each of the six phases.
A design sprint is meant to take a product team through a shortened development process. Traditionally, teams start with an idea, build a product, launch it, and then learn whether or not their product is valuable for users. During a sprint, that team would jump straight from their idea to the learning stage. With a validation-focused approach, however, learning is included in every stage; it’s not limited to one part of the process.
Phase One under the design sprint process is “Understand,” and it’s dedicated to making sure your internal stakeholders understand the big challenge your company is facing. As part of this step, you’re supposed to describe the problem from every angle, including the users’ perspective. Validation can help you check your assumptions about your users’ points of view, so you get a better understanding of the problem they’re facing.
Before deciding, as a team, on your sprint’s focus, take time to validate in the first phase. That means that as soon as you agree on what challenge you’re solving or what question you’re answering, you’ll ask your users if you’re on the right track.
Even if you’re trying to sprint in a typical five-day process, you still have time to validate during the first phase. Validating an idea or problem with your users doesn’t have to be time-consuming—you can gather a handful of responses from users and still get actionable information to move your team forward. For fast validation results, try:
UserVoice Validation also offers quick microsurveys, which provide you with actionable feedback within hours.
Turn scattered user data into meaningful customer intelligence, guiding smarter decisions and creating a better product.
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