John Zeratsky, co-creator of Design Sprint: “At first people were excited because it came from Google ”
It is at Google that everything begins. Jake Knapp organizes creativity workshops and brainstorming sessions. He quickly understands that the best ideas don’t come this way. His colleagues John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz, help him improve a method. This is the story of the Design Sprint.
I always liked doing projects. I liked working on my own. When I was a kid, I was into music and art. I always enjoyed doing things that rewarded uninterrupted focus with a result at the end. In college and university, I worked at a newspaper. That was my introduction to design. It was a daily newspaper. Every day, we got to go through the design process. At the end of the day, I could see the results of my work. I realized I shouldn’t focus on newspapers for the 21st century, that’s when I got into web design. I found a job at a startup.
Extended Process
I observe that the design process was getting slower. It took a few months to go from having an idea through finishing our design work, including launching and testing. I worked at a startup on a very complicated enterprise advertising products. Google acquired it in 2007. Now, the design process was taking even longer. It took about a year to get through big projects. I also worked at Youtube on a project where we redesigned youtube.com. It was the first time we introduced the notion of channels to Youtube. Before that, it was videos and playlists. I understood design and found ways to speed up the design process when I got to Google Ventures.
From Consultant to Facilitator
At Google Ventures, after making an investment, I would go inside that company and help them as a sort of Consultant. I would use my design and writing skills and help them reach whatever goal they had as a company. At first, I believe that I would be the expert who comes to help these startups. I would go in and tell them what to do. I’d say, “Here’s what I think you should do”. I quickly realized this approach was not going to work all the time. Sometimes I did have a good idea, but not always. With all the opportunities to go from company to company; I started to see patterns. I was looking for a system, we could use in any company. Be confident that we’d be able to help them. Not rely on our own past experiences as designers. The skills I had as a Designer could help any business be more successful. My ability to take an idea. Make it real and put that in front of customers, even if they didn’t think of themselves as a design business or design-oriented. Around this time, I met Jake Knapp. Jake started to experiment with this thing he called the Design Sprint. He had only done a few of them. It was a way not to bring answers to these companies but to help them find their solutions. It seems like a great fit for what we needed.
Conceiving the Design Sprint an iteration at a time
Jake was excited to join our team at Google Ventures and go through a process of experimentation. We would make tweaks and refine the Design Sprint process to make it work in any company. Any environment. When Jake joined, there were three of us. Braden was the leader of our team. Michael was a researcher, and me. Michael’s role was crucial. He had a lot of experience interviewing customers. We knew that in order for the Design Sprint to be as useful as it could be, we had to end the week with a customer test. The whole point is to quickly prototype something you could put in front of a customer. It can take weeks to months even to plan a typical customer research project. So, Michael was invaluable because he found a way to speed up that research process. Allowing us to finish every sprint with a test. Braden and I already worked with startups. We understood what they cared about. We learned what was important to them. What problems they had. Some of their common concerns. So Jake, Braden, and I became a trio working together doing sprint after sprint. We all sort of chipped in our own experiences to help make that process better.
Design Sprint: why starting with 5 days?
A lot of people look at the five-day process, and say, “Whoa, that’s five days! How are we going to do that? How are we going to set aside five days?” But that’s the right way to do it because we experimented with a lot of different formats. We did three days sprints, two weeks sprints. We even tried sprints that lasted like a whole month. We think that the five-day process is a good recipe to start with. If you’re going to cook something new, start by finding a recipe. If you follow the method step-by-step, you’re going to have a good result. Once you’ve tried it a couple of times, then you can start to tweak it and make it your own. It’s important that people start with the five-day recipe.
Design Sprint as a movement
I’m surprised how far the Design Sprint traveled. On the website, we have worldwide stories from governments, corporations, the tiniest startups, and nonprofit organizations. It’s amazing because we developed it for technology startups. We knew that it was useful for businesses in general, but we didn’t know how far it would spread. At first, people were excited because it came from Google. It came from Silicon Valley. It seemed like a way to help them be more efficient and innovative. People appreciate how it allows them to cut through the default behaviors from work. Having lots and lots of emails. Lots of meetings and feeling like they can’t focus on the part of their work that matters the most. The Design Sprint allows them to set aside those defaults and focus on the work that they want to be doing. That’s something that has kind of become more of a focus for the people who are adopting Design Sprint today.
There’s a whole community that is running Sprints and make their own adjustments to them. That’s the basic idea of working to build a prototype and test it with customers. That shouldn’t change. That’s essential. There are parts of the Design Sprint process where we relied on our abilities as facilitators. For example, making the map on Monday, which is where we kind of diagram out the process of a customer interacting with our product or our service. Then on Wednesday, making the storyboard. Which is where we combine the sketches that got the most votes. And, we make a plan for the prototype. Both of those begin with a blank whiteboard. We were comfortable standing at that whiteboard and draw, but a lot of people are not. There have been great contributions from the Design Sprint community. New ways of helping people get started with the map and the storyboard. It builds on some of the other techniques from the Sprint. It builds on this idea of the note and vote, where each person works on their own and contributes to their idea. And then there’s a quick round of voting to establish what the best ideas from the group are. Those are a couple of things that I wasn’t aware needed to change. But, now I understand why they need to. I’m happy that people have been able to contribute their own drawing ideas
