Design sprint is a new-ish term to those outside our product/tech industry but yet a tried and thoroughly tested method. That puts a group of engineers, designers, and product people in a room for a few days to helps solve tough challenges and validates ideas through design prototyping and testing ideas on a specific problem involving real users.

Sprints are usually 5 days long and it encourages the team to align themselves with a shared vision with defined goals and deliverables. This process helps you to think outside of the box, shifting away from following your gut instinct and opinions, instead encourages you to let your users guide your decision making at a faster pace.

This format mainly popularized by former Google designer Jake Knapp. Each day corresponds to a separate stage in the process: Understand/Map, Sketch, Decide, Prototype, and Test/Validate.

By the end this discovery work you have all these different options available to you. The diamond has expanded, (Top Problem Definition) and you’re right in the middle. During the third stage (Define/Develop), you evaluate your ideas and select one to run with. This is the first diamond tapering back to a single point.

The final two stages within the Sprint – (Prototype & Test) follow the same structure. As you develop ways to turn your sketches into a real product, the second diamond expands – ie (DD- Develop/Deliver). From there, you choose the best approach and create a prototype to test. This is the diamond tapering back to its final rightmost point (Top Solution).

Until recently, the consensus has been that design sprints are best held in-person because they’re highly energetic processes. Face to face, snacks, buzzing around the room, Post-It notes on the walls, whiteboards with various iterations, and holding a dozen conversations at once – parking lot please. The thought of doing that online would be chaos, right?

Well, not quite.

Design sprints can work when your participants are hundreds or thousands of miles apart — But to work well, you need to tweak Knapp’s original process. Here’s how you do it.

The biggest change we made to the original design sprint is time. Whereas Knapp’s sprint takes place over five days,
were here you can change that format to span from 2–3 days.

On day one, we run through both ideation stages — Map & Sketch — to create a bunch of solutions to our problem. Then, on day two, we analyze those ideas and pick one to run with or move the real user testing if a day three is available within your scheduling.

The second big change from in-person to remote sprints is technology. Because participants aren’t in the same room, you have to use technology to support their interactions. The whiteboard is the beating heart of the design sprint. It’s where you anchor your ideas, arrange your thoughts, and experiment with new concepts. As tools, whiteboards are so effective because they’re flexible — you can scribble in one section, stick Post-It notes on another, sketch out concepts in a third. To recreate this online, we use collaborative whiteboard platform Miro

In some ways, virtual whiteboards are actually better than their physical counterparts. Ideas are ephemeral when you’re in-person, but they’re automatically recorded when you work online.The second piece of must-have technology is a video conferencing platform. It’s hard to communicate with someone if you can’t read their facial expressions. Although that applies to remote work in general, it’s especially important in a design sprint where you’re actively collaborating. Using conferencing tools like Zoom / Google Hangouts – or enterprise platforms like Microsoft Teams – makes for stability, high quality, and ability to easily record calls.

One important tweak teams must make for productive remote collaboration involves behavior. When you’re working in a physical room, it’s easy to stay focused. But when you’re working at home and battling screen time fatigue, it’s easy to drift off and get distracted. The good news is that you can mitigate distraction and disengagement by setting expectations upfront.

During the sprint, moderator/facilitator play an ongoing role in keeping collective energies up and attendees engaged. During remote sprints, with everyone hidden behind their black mirror, it’s even easier for this to happen and for attendees to fall through the cracks. Whenever a moderator notices someone is beginning to take over, they should move to re-engage others in the discussion, ensuring a diverse input and or falling back to the agenda or task at hand.