Solve Business Problems Quickly with The Familiar’s Remote Design Sprints
Sixty Second Summary
Whatever challenge your organisation faces, a Remote Design Sprint is a low-cost, low-risk way to identify, understand and work to resolve that problem. At the end of a two-week Remote Design Sprint, you and your team will have all you need to attack your problems head on.
Looking to run your own Remote Design Sprints?
As well as facilitating Remote Design Sprints, The Familiar offers coaching and shadowing opportunities for those who would like to run their own Remote Design Sprints. If you’re interested in these opportunities, contact Sam, our workshop lead.
Full Article - 4 Minute Read
Benefits of The Familiar’s Remote Design Sprint
Led by two experienced workshop facilitators, our Remote Design Sprints are designed to get the most out of everyone in attendance.
Workshop sessions take place in the morning and last for about 4 hours, giving your team plenty of time to do their homework as well as rest and recuperate for the next day.
As the inventors of Sprinty, the best-in-class workshop toolkits, all of our Remote Design Sprints are provided with the latest kits.
When to do a Remote Design Sprint
The best time to start a Remote Design Sprint is when you’ve begun to identify a problem that may be getting between your organisation and success. The second best time is now.
The Structure of a Remote Design Sprint
From first contact to delivered prototype, a Remote Design Sprint can take as little as four weeks to complete. This process includes a couple of Pre-Sprint preparation sessions as well as the two-week Design Sprint itself.
Before the Sprint
Before the Remote Design Sprint, we’ll run a couple of preparatory sessions with you, to ensure that everyone knows what they’re about to go through, what’s expected of them, and what the results will be.
Firstly, we’ll help you recruit your Design Sprint Team. This should constitute a Decider (someone who is actually able to make decisions that may involve some budget spend), as well as 5 or fewer people with diverse skills to make up the core team.
Once we know the team, we’ll run two sessions. The first will be a quick 30-minute “Ice Breaker” session to introduce ourselves to the team, get everyone involved with a short activity, and make sure everyone is familiar with the tools we’ll be using during the sprint (Mural, Zoom, etc).
The second session will be a longer session, where we’ll work to properly identify the challenge you and your organisation is facing. It’s during this workshop that we’ll lock down the problem definition that we’ll use to drive us during the Remote Design Sprint itself.
During the Sprint
The Remote Design Sprint itself typically takes two weeks to complete. One week is focussed on understanding the problem, picking it apart, and coming up with ideas on how to solve it. The second is focussed on creating a prototype solution, testing it with real users, and running an end-of-Sprint retrospective with everyone to understand how the Sprint has gone.
After the Sprint
After the Sprint, we’ll send you a report outlining what happened during the Sprint, what was learnt from our user testing, insights from the retrospective, and key learnings and to take forward.
About two weeks after the Remote Design Sprint, we’ll book a quick “coffee call” between us and the Design Sprint Team. During this session, we’ll discuss with them how things have gone since their Remote Design Sprint.
This coffee call is a great opportunity to start identifying other problems that may require a Remote Design Sprint to solve them.
The results of a Remote Design Sprint
At the end of the Remote Design Sprint, you’ll have:
- A greater understanding of the most organisation-critical problem you face
- A working, tested prototype of a solution to the problem
- A report outlining what was done and what we suggest to do next
- A newly upskilled team armed with a framework for creative problem solving
At The Familiar, we run Design Sprints internally when we face a challenge to or uncertainty within our business.
Late last year, we faced uncertainty about launching our own product line. What would the product look like? What would it do? What would it be called?
In the week before Christmas break, we set up a mini Design Sprint focussed on this very problem. During the process, we identified the core themes of what we wanted to deliver, we created a prototype solution, and we tested it with real customers.
The result of that Design Sprint is Sprinty, our workshop toolkits brand, which is now available at www.sprinty.xyz and whose toolkits power Remote Design Sprints with The Familiar.
How to Start a Remote Design Sprint
Now you understand what’s involved with a Remote Design Sprint, the next step is to email [email protected] or call +44(0)1227 206 206 to talk to Martin or Sam about booking in your first (or next) Remote Design Sprint with The Familiar.