It has been close to 2 years since Vipra Technology was born to help small-to-medium-sized companies and startups realize their dreams! Over this time, we have been refining our product design services to deliver fast impactful benefits to our clients. One such key service is the Design Sprint; being a popular technique, we have embraced it and refined it into our very own bespoke solution framework.
What is a Design Sprint?
A Design Sprint is a five-step (ideally 5-day) workshop that helps businesses launch disruptive digital products or services within no time! This is accomplished through quick idea validation, fast prototyping, and testing. It can help you solve complex challenges with a fraction of the resources.
The Sprint is a collaborative methodology for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and user research. The process includes a set of approaches influenced by best practices in business, design thinking, user research, and psychology. This article is not meant to be a tutorial on how to run a Design Sprint (for this, we refer the reader to this resource here).
In this article, we focus on the need and importance of Design Sprints to a business and how we have leveraged this powerful tool to support small-to-medium-sized companies and startups.
Why is it important for a business?
This activity engages the entire team (both product and business-facing individuals) and empowers all contributors to share ideas, risks, and doubts that can affect the final results. The collaborative approach enables you to get answers to complicated problems within a short time. This would be harder and more expensive with traditional product development approaches. Such a group brainstorming session is more effective than analyzing the problem by individuals separately. You skip unnecessary meetings, misunderstandings, and loads of email correspondence. During the Sprint, there is no opportunity for such inefficiencies to grow. As a result, the business saves time, money, and stress.
The sprint itself is meant to be short, agile, and easily adapted to the complexity of a project. It speeds up new product or feature discovery. It is a perfect method to create an MVP within a blink of an eye. Which can be used to validate ideas with investors, customers, and other stakeholders. Enormous companies like Google, P&G, AirBnB, and Spotify are using this methodology to transform their companies and build competitive advantage, without huge failures along the way.
Companies tend to underestimate the value of the user-centered approach. This often leads to misunderstandings and missing market needs. From the Design Sprint perspective, it is one of the most important pillars in this framework. That means that during the workshops members have to act with empathy and remain aware of the customer’s needs. What’s more, the integral part of this process is listening, trust, and building meaningful relationships with users. This approach builds products from a user’s perspective and with their needs in mind. This will ultimately lead to an innovative and successful digital product.
The Design Sprint at Vipra
Here at Vipra, we have been employing the design sprint framework for clients from a wide range of domains and industries such as Pharmaceuticals, Fintech, Health, and Supply Chain. These relatively inexpensive activities have delivered tremendous value to these businesses, accelerating their journey forward to a successful future. For instance, one of our clients Planet Nourish worked with us over a design sprint, the outcomes of which propelled them to win the top 5 in Artificial Intelligence in the Top 100 Asian Stars in UK Tech hosted by Diversity UK and Eversheds Sutherland.
If you are interested in running a design sprint of your own, Vipra Technology is here to support you by being your digital partner on your journey. Contact us to see what we can do for you!
