Design Sprint

A Design Sprint is a time-constrained, structured process for rapidly solving design problems and testing solutions. Typically lasting five days, the sprint involves key stages such as understanding the problem, ideation, sketching solutions, prototyping, and user testing. Design sprints are highly collaborative and aim to provide actionable insights and prototypes quickly to reduce risk and accelerate innovation.

The Design Sprint is valuable precisely because it forces a decision in 5 days that would otherwise take 5 months of meetings, prototyping, and internal debate. For startups facing a strategic product question — how should we redesign onboarding, should we build this new feature, what should our mobile app look like — a sprint gets you to a tested prototype and real user feedback faster than any other process.

Google Ventures popularized Design Sprints and used them with portfolio companies like Slack and Uber. Slack ran a sprint to redesign their onboarding flow that resulted in the 'What brings you to Slack?' segmentation question, which significantly improved new user activation.