What to expect from facilitating your first Design Sprint

Photo from the Design Sprint I had a chance to facilitate and organise for Submer Technologies.

Running your first design sprint can be overwhelming. It can be even harder to wear a hat of a facilitator unapologetically considering you are organising the sprint at your company. In this short blog article I will try to share my perspective on running my first design sprint and most importantly what to consider if you are doing it in your full time work environment which is a startup.

Social Dynamics
One of the hurdles to overcome are social group dynamics. You can expect that every day dynamics will be expressed in the sprint as well considering there are only company employees as key participants. People will follow their normal group behaviour, so most people will agree with the CEO or a superior. This can be tricky, because it’s important to let every participant have a voice. By understanding those aspects you can try to prepare and organize the sprint area to have enough space for participants to create sketches privately. As well remember to keep a neutral perspective as a Facilitator, as your job is to keep the group moving proactively.

Finding users
Finding the right users might be hard. The key point of this situation is to try and organise the users’ way before the sprint. Because along that process you might find out you don’t have a budget for paid users or that you don’t have many leads on organising users for free through company contacts and in this case it’s better to start sooner rather than later. You don’t want to end up with nothing and by starting sooner you are increasing the chances that your colleagues will lead you to the right people and you will be able to adjust. Which might mean conducting testing remotely instead of in person to cut the costs or do it for the convenience of both parties.

Adjust
Don’t worry if tasks are being completed in a shorter amount of time. For example if  instead of 2h it took 1 h. Try to remember that this is a possibility and as long as you think you have what you will need you can move forward.

Stay on track
If you have never worked in a startup I think it’s important to mention that most of the teams are usually very proactive and fascinated about each process of the product. Open discussion tasks like setting long term goals and discussing what might go wrong can take longer due to the motivation. The sprint team will get excited about the future and there might be no visible end to it. Your task is to make the team close each task and move on to another one. In some cases you will hear some objections. But remind the team that you as a facilitator have the final goal in mind of the sprint and if they would like to continue with that topic irrelevant to the sprint, you can help them. Shortly write down what they were discussing so they can continue this topic at a different time, outside of the sprint. Do your best to show that you all have a similar goal - finishing the sprint.

Expect no help
This sounds rough, but startup companies tend to have a lot on their plate all the time. It’s likely you are the only Designer on the team so expect the worst and hope for the best. Which means that even in a scenario a lot of your colleagues signed up to help you during creation of the prototype or conducting usability testings you might end up alone. Be prepared for this and don’t take it personally. Just take what you can get.


As a closing statement I think it’s important to mention that you will make some mistakes along the process and that’s ok. Do your best and enjoy the Design Sprint, no one will expect perfection from you, as you shouldn’t from the participants. Try to practice communicating clearly to the team. Keep in mind that for most team members  this is their first sprint and it can be quite overwhelming. Ask frequently if everything is clear and remember to start with the introduction about the sprint so everyone will be on the same page. 

I hope this will help you with your next sprint and lower your anxiety about it.
Good luck!

Paulina Gołębiowska