Design sprints: Innovation accelerator or innovation theatre?

A design sprint is where a small team progresses from selecting a problem to ideating, building, and testing a prototype in five days. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Multi-day workshops, under many names and guises, are nothing new in the design and innovation industry. I recall being asked, as a product manager for Unilever back in 2000, to ‘Hot House’ a problem we had on one of our ice cream brands with a cross-functional team.

Another time, working for Heineken subsidiary DB Breweries in the mid-2000s, our chief marketing officer asked us to take a less elaborate approach to innovation and fast-track some ideas. We undertook a series of 13-hour innovation workshops where we started at 8.00am with a selected opportunity area and progressed to ideation and then building and testing a set of concepts (paper prototypes) by 9.00pm. We were congratulated for our fast turnaround of some ‘exciting’ new concepts.

During this period of innovation at DB Breweries we had a three-from-five success rate in new product launches — a pretty good strike rate. The two unsuccessful launches both came from those 13-hour design sprints!

Cheaper, better, faster

The five-day design sprint from Google Ventures has popularised this accelerated method, and it is easy to see why. Innovation teams are often under pressure to innovate cheaper, better, and faster. 

This pressure is partly driven by senior management, who are also often more comfortable in the tangible and visible development and build stages, under pressure themselves to deliver short-term results. When under pressure they see the less tangible and fuzzy front-end stages of innovation as all too elaborate. Design sprints are faster!

From my experience it is also quite common for most of us to naturally jump to the solution and excitedly want to start prototyping and building our ideas, making design sprints an even more attractive option.

Unfortunately, cheaper, and faster rarely make good bedfellows for better!

Design sprint critique

Blocking out focused and dedicated time in your calendar for innovation is critically important and a key tenet of the five-day design sprint. 

The five-day design sprint looks like this:

• Monday: select a problem or opportunity;
• Tuesday: sketch solutions;
• Wednesday: decide on the best solutions;
• Thursday: build a realistic prototype; and
• Friday: test with target customers.

The five steps, techniques, and tools of the design sprint, albeit missing two key stages from design thinking, are very good and I have adopted a few like ‘time to develop ideas independently’ and Crazy 8s in my practice.

The missing stages are customer discovery research and insight generation, known as ’empathise’ and ‘define’ in design thinking. If this is completed prior, then this is not an issue. However, while the creators of the design sprint support completing customer research before a sprint, they state they usually don’t have time to do it. Is this because it is then no longer a five-day exercise, making it harder to sell?

In my experience spending at least one day conducting some customer empathy fieldwork and another day distilling and crafting customer needs and insights is time well spent. And then allowing a little bit of incubation time between insight generation and ideation can be fruitful to the quantity and quality of ideas generated in the workshops. 

This experience is supported in a study of 2000 product innovation projects, by Robert G. Cooper that identified the number one reason why innovations fail is because of “a lack of thoroughness in identifying real needs in the marketplace”, with teams often “making assumptions in order to justify the project”. Essentially, teams are inventing solutions for non-existent needs.

Unfortunately, with the desire for speed and believing they can achieve results in five days, enthusiastic and less experienced innovators tend to apply the method like a cookie cutter and skip these critical stages, even on the more challenging innovation projects.

In my opinion, a further weakness of the design sprint method for innovation is the condensing and rushing of the most important phases of innovation. From their research, Cooper identified nine success factors of innovation:

1. A unique, superior, and differentiated product with good value for money for the customer;
2. A strong market orientation — the voice of customer built-in;
3. A sharp, early, fact-based product definition before development begins;
4. Solid up-front homework — doing the front-end activities well;
5. True cross-functional teams — empowered, resourced, accountable, dedicated leader;
6. Leverage — where the product builds on the business’s technology and marketing competencies;
7. Market attractiveness — size, growth, margins;
8. Quality of the launch effort — well planned, properly resourced; and
9. Technological competencies and quality of execution of technological activities.

As you can see, five of the nine success factors are related to the front end of the innovation process, with a further two being equally attributable to both the front and back end. Of the five directly attributable to the front end, according to Cooper’s research, the first four have the biggest effect on success overall.

So, why would anyone in their right mind sprint the most important phases of innovation? Unfortunately, because it is a bright shiny new thing, and one gets transfixed by the fun and theatre of it, and we can sell a faster and cheaper (but not necessarily better) way of innovating to our bosses and stakeholders.

Respect the front end of innovation

I’d like to propose an alternative approach to faster and cheaper — it is called ‘better leads to faster and cheaper’. By doing the front end of innovation better, not only will we increase our chances at innovation success, but we’ll also reduce the number of failures and amount of rework in the more time- and resource-intensive middle and back-end stages of the innovation process. Thus, saving teams both time (faster) and money (cheaper). Furthermore, Cooper found that those teams who executed the front end of innovation projects in a high-quality fashion achieved more than double the success rate, double the profitability, and double the market share of those projects that did these stages poorly.

When to use a design sprint approach

Not for big, hairy wicked problems and not for evolutionary and revolutionary innovation. I’d consider it for incremental innovation and improvements where the problem is known.

In summary, the design sprint tools, and methods can be useful. What is questionable, though, is skipping and condensing what are the critical stages of innovation into five days and using it on important innovation challenges that demand and deserve deeper and more rigorous thinking and work.

Working in innovation and design is tough. You’re often operating under time pressure to deliver in an environment of uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. It requires resilience and drive. There will be times when you’re put under pressure to go for the quick-fix approach, but we must stand up for, endorse, and sell the benefits of doing the front end of innovation properly and rigorously. Innovation is rarely a sprint!

Nathan Baird is the founder of customer-driven innovation and growth firm Methodry and the author of Innovator’s Playbook: How to create great products, services, and experiences that your customers will love!