How To Tailor Your Design Sprint for Various Aspects of Business?

When the design sprint was first introduced, it was adopted by many consultancies. The methodology was used extensively for one primary purpose, BRINGING NEW IDEAS TO LIFE.

Over the last few years, the design sprint has been providing clear advantages to business in terms of addressing business complexities and improving business communication. What design sprint does is that it helps the clients in seizing opportunities and boosts the energy levels of the team members while saving them valuable time and money.

Design sprint approach focuses on three key business aspects:

·     Help create an innovative strategy for the customers of today

·     Prototyping ideas and testing them immediately

·     Outpacing everyone – providing maximum productivity and alignment to businesses.

What is Design Sprint?

The Design sprint methodology helps organizations focus on their conceptual and strategic aspects where the design itself is a means to an end rather than the goal itself. Therefore, Strategy Sprint has recently been added by many organizations to the product portfolio.

The approach is ideal for adding a fresh set of eyes and also creating a strategic context before jumping on to deciding prototyping the conceptual product. Strategy Sprint can offer a thorough and fast way to plan and envision the future with a robust digital strategy.

Bring your IDEAS to life in just 5-Days

Design Sprint 5 days Process – Image Source from the book “SPRINT” / Google Venture

How does Strategy Sprint relate to Design Sprint?

Strategy Sprint and Design Sprint can be considered as two sides of the same coin, more like a dynamic duo that works together like a clockwork. It is also a way for organizations to think ahead about their upcoming challenges for the business in a creative, productive and a much faster way than before.

So, what exactly is Strategy Sprint? Let’s look at from a different perspective. When digitalization is merged with a high innovation demand, it creates one of the most disruptive forces you can find in the modern business era.

In times like today, businesses find it extremely difficult keeping up with the pace and hyper-modernization. Such organizations emerge as leaders in bringing innovation in the industry. We believe that firms should strive towards being ahead of the curve by implying innovation methodologies.

Turn your innovation plan into successful growth plans

Strategy Sprint requires you to develop a solid evaluation plan for your business. This way, the foundation of your business can be laid to inspire innovation in business. After evaluating key business resources, such as strategy execution, business culture, and opportunities that can help you realize the right and actionable plan for your business.

Different people have different interpretations of the word sprint. The approach all about brings together small groups of people to co-create and come up with solutions. The best thing about this methodology that it helps creates a synergy between the managers and employees in a homogenous fashion.

So how does Strategy Sprint speeds up the entire process? The reason why corporates are under a lot of pressure nowadays is that they all are under attack of dozens of startups. They all want a piece of cake. Startups are known for disrupting corporate firms and often fail to comprehend with the disruption.

Innovation Strategy Sprint is where the innovation team breaks down the core business activities and designs a blueprint that is ready to be executed. It allows the team in your organization to take a break from their traditional activities and invest time in developing an innovative blueprint ready to be executed. The sprint will incorporate five core elements:

·     Discovering the status quo, i.e., a brief warm-up before you are ready to go, just like they do in sports.

·     Corporate Mission Definition: In this stage, teams will develop the goals that you are looking to achieve through innovation.

·     Designing the blueprint: how will you reach your goals?

·     Sitting with the stakeholders: this phase involves the first step of co-creation where you engage with the stakeholders, and the first blueprint is agreed upon.

·     Delivering Strategy: once the blueprint is validated, it is put into practice.

Marketing Sprint

A Marketing Sprint has the same process as the Strategy Sprint. It involves different teams in an organization to come together on a single platform, ensuring there is no problem in addressing the consumer’s needs. However, there are a few things that you need to understand before designing your next marketing strategy.

1.    Why: Why does your business exist? What is the purpose of this brand? And the reason people would prefer you over others. These are some of the most crucial questions that need to be answered.

2.    Goals: What are the long-term marketing goals that you have set for yourself? What do you want to achieve?

3.    Problems and Desires: what are the problems your customers are facing and how you seek to address them?

4.    Key Metrics: How do you measure your success?

5.    Remarkable Factor: What makes you stand out from all the other competitors? What do you have that cannot be copied?

6.    Unique value proposition: How do you articulate the solutions and benefits to your customers?

7.    Channels: what are the channels that can help or you will choose for your customers to interact? (Social media, advertisements, print media etc.)

8.    Customer Segmentation: Who are you targeting or looking to influence? Who is going to decide if your business is worth the investment?

These are some of the crucial questions that are included in the marketing strategy sprint and are highly significant. Asking these questions will create a straight path for you to succeed.

Product Sprint

Any design is a process that is continuous and ongoing. It requires constant and iterative efforts that lead to the creation of a better product. Organizations use technologies and devices to interact with their customers to understand how they feel about a certain product or service.

Understanding those needs can help you add value to your products and make them more attractive to the customers. Customers nowadays can switch brands and leave loyalties behind to get a better consumer experience.

Times have changed now, and people want the best value for what they spent. On the five-day workshop, we will look at the five phases in the Product Sprint process:

1.    Understand – Learn what consumers need and how can you help them given your technological capacity.

2.    Diverge – Our focus is on exploring and generating as many ideas as we can. The first action needs to be reviewing the solutions that already exist.

3.    Converge – All the ideas should be pooled together, and the best ones should be chosen for making a prototype.

4.    Prototype – Time to turn the idea into reality and to make a realistic model. This process involves looking at the idea from the perspective of the customer.

5.    Test – Here, you test the ideas with the real users. This is a highly important target that needs to be addressed. The technical experts and the stakeholders validate this stage.

Business Design Sprint

Your business model is the starting point for business innovation

The business model is nothing more than a holistic and systematic structure that shows how you can generate more profits, revenues, and leads. It gives a logical description of how the customers and businesses interact. The business innovation model is all about making thoughtful changes to the existing business model to increase customer satisfaction and gain a significant edge over potential competitors.

Rethinking the way you do business from selling products to subscription-based service experiences? We specify requirements for recurring revenue streams, ongoing client relationships, and sustain service operations. The desired outcome of our 2-4 Days business design sprint is to achieve:

• Market and competitor analysis to discover untapped differentiation opportunities
• Business model design and hypotheses testing to ensure the viability
• Re-engineering your operations to transform the new way of doing business

The reason why so many businesses are adopting this methodology is that it is quick, fast and, most importantly, it is fairly straight forward in terms of creating new ideas and solving problems. If you were to hire a consultant for your innovation process, it could take months, if not years, to begin with. On the other hand, a design sprint approach allows you to create and test a new solution in less than a week.

Bottom Line!

All in all, design thinking can be applied to serve different business applications, and there is no denying it can be a useful methodology to use in today’s business world.

Given this understanding, it is safe to say that design thinking is not just about thinking outside the box, but also on its edge, flag, and under the bar code as well.

We understand, for some of you, the process might be a bit more complex, but it will undoubtedly speed up your entire execution and learning process radically. I can help you minimize your time from roughly one year to exactly one week.

Get in touch and learn what help we can offer to help your business reach unimaginable heights.

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This blog is originally posted at Thinkinova’s blog.

If you are interested to learn more about our services and how we help companies in business innovation and strategy, please visit our company website Thinkinova, and follow us on LinkedIn, keep an eye out for future blogs. Thinkinova is a strategic business design boutique based in Dubai, UAE.