IMPROVE YOUR BUSINESS’S CHANCES OF SUCCESS AND SPEED TO MARKET WITH DESIGN SPRINTS

Improve your business with Design Sprints

Organizations worldwide have spent over $2.3 trillion in research and development (R&D) efforts. In 2019, businesses in the United States alone spent $493b on R&D activities, an 11.8 percent increase from 2018 [Fn1]. While investments in these types of efforts continue to rise, the problem many businesses face is not having a strategic approach that enables their R&D efforts to achieve the organization’s goals.

R&D can too often be disconnected from business priorities and implementations, leading to failed product implementations – 75% of products launched fail to achieve the expected value in the market within the first year [Fn2].

Establishing stronger connections between R&D, business priorities, and implementations helps to increase the short-term and long-term product value. To strengthen connectivity and accelerate value delivery, organizations must shorten the cycle from ideation to implementation and focus on the highest value to their customers. Design sprints can shorten the cycle time between creating ideas to delivering customer value.

Design sprints are an approach that allows teams to quickly work together on a business opportunity (or problem) and prototype a solution, test it, and iterate in a short space of time. Leveraging customer feedback, design sprints allow organizations to focus on the biggest problems with the most impactful solutions.

This intense focus allows a testable solution to be developed, even in the face of time and resource limits. In some cases, solutions can be deployed as quickly as one week. The design sprint was developed at Google Ventures and arose from a combination of methods, including Lean Start-up, design thinking, and systems thinking.

Embedding design sprints into the business-solving process will help your organization:

1. Uplift customer satisfaction through a customer-focused approach 

Most customers would buy more from a company if the company incorporated their feedback [FN3]. Design sprints engage your customer in co-creating the solution so that it is tailored towards delivering value to them.

Engaging in a customer-focused approach helps the team articulate what the customer values and prioritizes the team’s work that will meet customer needs. Further, the team can reduce the likelihood of wasteful, non-value-producing, efforts by avoiding features the customer does not value and focusing on delivering exactly what the customer values. help your organization:

2. Build alignment in a cross-functional team 

A cross-functional team is comprised of a group of people from different functional areas of the company to provide the required expertise to develop solutions. However, just having cross-functional teams alone is not a guarantee of success [Fn4]. Having highly aligned teams can increase success factors such as growth and profitability [Fn5]. 

Design sprints align team members and teams to keep their shared purpose and customer requirements as top priorities, which helps to stave off distractive details that can divert our attention away from delivering customer requirements and value. Design sprints ensure teams drive the most impact out of the dedicated amount of time working together. 

3. Enhance speed to market by rapidly testing and validating concepts 

The ability of managers to control uncertainty is a major driver of increasing speed-to-market [Fn6]. Design sprints enable managers to control for uncertainty by developing a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) and having customers test that MVP.

The MVP has just enough features to validate and learn about what customers find valuable about the product. Focusing on minimal features shortens the development time and focuses resources more effectively. The MVP is improved as the development team receives feedback and observes customer behavior with their product.

4. Rapidly adapt to changing market and working conditions

Companies that better adapt to changing market conditions have a competitive advantage over their competitors [Fn7]. Design sprints create feedback loops with customers, who sit at the intersection of consumer demand and the offerings of competitive suppliers in your market.

Feedback loops throughout design sprints influence the design and requirements of the solution. Quick iterations help teams become nimble to quickly pivot and adapt when updates are reported. The product’s value is consistently refined in each MVP iteration as external market forces and internal working conditions will continuously evolve and cannot be entirely controlled or planned.

5. Reduce the cost and risk of failure by rapid test-and-learn 

Organizations that have an embedded culture of frequent experimentation reduce execution risk and increase product revenue [Fn8]. Rapid test-and-learn forces the team to focus on the delivery of quick iterations, allowing the team to be cost-effective by not committing time and budget. These iterations enable faster recovery when the team is required to pivot due to new information.

Knowledge of what the customer values increase over time as the team gains a holistic view of the customer through research, direct communication, and behavioral observations. In each iteration, the team will adjust to customer preferences which will convert the first iteration’s shortcomings into the second iteration’s success.

The design sprint approach can be applied to deliver value faster in any industry and business. Most recently, we worked with a car manufacturer undergoing an extensive consumer-facing digital transformation. Using design sprints, they were able to increase their rate of customer adoption and decrease the time-to-market of their digital product.

ADAPTOVATE trained and coached the client in design sprints to create a prototype of their web portal. The client needed the prototype within two weeks to showcase the MVP with their network of car dealers. Dealers could click through the digital product and experience the value it could bring their customers. Their feedback was quickly incorporated into the development cycle of future iterations. As a result, the client was able to achieve:

• 110% increase in dealer participation in a program utilizing the digital portal

• 70% reduction in development time

• Precise prioritization of what customers wanted, quickly making it the #1 digital tool used by dealerships

Design sprints can be used to create new products, design new services, and even deploy new internal solutions. By unlocking the creativity and innovation of teams, rapidly prototyping a solution, and engaging customer input in the design and iterations, your organization can rapidly create new solutions that customers actually value.  

Notes & References: 

[Fn1] Source: National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf22303) 

[Fn2] Source: Harvard Business Review: Why Most Product Launches Fail (https://hbr.org/2011/04/why-most-product-launches-fail) 

[Fn3] Source: Tempkin, Dorsey, and Brown. Qualtrics XMI Institute. (https://success.qualtrics.com/rs/542-FMF-412/images/2022-Global-Consumer-Trends-Report.pdf) 

[Fn4] Source: Tabrizi. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2015/06/75-of-cross-functional-teams-are-dysfunctional 

[Fn5] Source: Harrel. Forrester Research. https://www.forrester.com/blogs/sales-executive-perspective-on-alignment/ 

[Fn6] Source: Chen, Reilly, and Lynn. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3076869_The_Impacts_of_Speed-to-Market_on_New_Product_Success 

[Fn7] Source: Reeves & Deimler. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2011/07/adaptability-the-new-competitive-advantage 

[Fn8] Source: Thomke. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2020/03/building-a-culture-of-experimentation