Official 5-Day Design Sprint

 

Use our five-day sprint process to help your team solve problems and test out new ideas.

About the official Remote 5-day Design Sprint template

What Is a Design Sprint?

The big idea with the Design Sprint is to build and test a prototype in just five days. You'll take a small team, clear the schedule for a week, and rapidly progress from problem to tested solution using a proven step-by-step checklist. It's like fast-forwarding into the future. 

Why use this Design Sprint template

The experts who literally wrote the book on design sprints created this template, just for Miro. First, facilitator Steph Cruchon of Design Sprint Ltd gathered the agency’s combined experience of physical design sprints and looked for ways to make it efficient and enjoyable in a remote setting. At the same time, the creators of the methodology at Google, Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, teamed up with Jackie Colburn to write an in-depth guide to run full five-day remote design sprints. 

Together, they created this official template for remote sprints, invested personally in writing crystal clear instructions, and even added new exercises that don’t appear in the Sprint book but were part of their workshops. This template works hand in hand with the book and will help you run excellent 100% remote design sprints.

How to use the Design Sprint template

Using the Design Sprint template is easy. Typically how it works is, the facilitator will prep the event before guiding participants through the one big goal for each day of the sprint – to map, sketch, decide, prototype, or test. 

For those new to participating in Design Sprints, one of the biggest challenges will be to trust the process. Remember that times it will be overwhelming but that’s part of the process and it’ll all work out. 

Miro’s whiteboard tool is the perfect canvas to use for your design sprint — remotely or in person. Here’s one way to use it when you're preparing for your next sprint:

1. Get started by selecting this Design Sprint template.

2. Read the  for advice on tools, preparation, facilitation, and modified tactics. 

3. Give the sprint a name. E.g. “User signup flow.”

4. Clarify the goal of the sprint. E.g. “To improve the user’s experience as they sign up.”

5. Ensure you get the right people in the room and assign the roles within the team. Make sure to clarify and brief the role of the facilitator and decider in advance.

6. Then take the template to the session, because you’re ready to get started!

Invite your team to start collaborating, and don’t forget to share the finished product with the wider company. Be sure to tell everyone about the process and help them understand what you’ve explored and learned about the topic.

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Discipline 4: Create a Cadence of Accountability

 

Accountability breeds response-ability.

Each team engages in a simple weekly process that highlights successes, analyzes failures, and course-corrects as necessary, creating the ultimate performance-management system.

The cadence of accountability is a rhythm of regular and frequent team meetings that focus on the Wildly Important Goal®. These meetings happen weekly, sometimes daily. They ideally last no more than 20 minutes. In that brief time, team members hold each other accountable for commitments made to move the score.

The secret to Discipline 4, in addition to the weekly cadence, are the commitments that team members create in the meeting. One by one, team members answer a simple question, “What are the one or two most important things I can do this week that will have the biggest impact on the scoreboard?” In the meeting, each team member reports first if they met last week’s commitments, second if the commitments move the lead or lag measures on the scoreboard, and finally which commitments they will make for the upcoming week.

People are more likely to commit to their own ideas than to orders from above. When individuals commit to fellow team members instead of only to the boss, the commitment goes beyond professional job performance to become a personal promise. When the team sees they are having a direct impact on the Wildly Important Goal, they know they are winning, and nothing drives morale and engagement more than winning.

Create a cadence of accountability

With Discipline 4, teams share accountability. Commitments are not only made between leaders and their teams; they are made between individuals on the teams. By keeping weekly commitments, team members influence the lead measure which in turn is predictive of success on the lag measure of the WIG®.

Where do you find people who are passionately committed to their work? You find them working for leaders who are passionately committed to them.

— Jim Huling, Co-author of The 4 Disciplines of Execution

Where execution actually happens

The fourth discipline is to create a cadence of accountability, a frequently recurring cycle of accounting for past performance and planning to move the score forward. Discipline 4 is where execution happens. Disciplines 1, 2, and 3 set up the game but until you apply Discipline 4, your team isn't in the game. 

This is the discipline that brings the team members together.

In Discipline 4, your team meets at least weekly in a WIG session. This meeting lasts no longer than 20 to 30 minutes, has a set agenda and goes quickly, establishing your weekly rhythm of accountability for driving progress toward the WIG.

Here's the three-part agenda for a WIG session and the kind of language you should be hearing in the session:

1. Account: Report on commitments.

"I committed to make a personal call to three customers who gave us lower scores. I did, and here's what I learned..."

2. Review the scoreboard: Learn from successes and failures. 

"Our lag measure is green, but we've got a challenge with one of our lead measures that just fell to yellow. Here's what happened..."

3. Plan: Clear the path and make new commitments.

"I'll meet with Bob on our numbers and come back next week with at least three ideas for helping us improve."

To prepare for the meeting, every team member thinks about the same question: "What are the one or two most important things I can do this week to impact the lead measures?"

The WIG session should move at a fast pace. The WIG session also gives the team the chance to process what they've learned. You should often ask each team member "What can I do this week to clear the path for you?"

Each commitment must meet two standards:

1. The commitment must represent a specific deliverable.
2. The commitment must influence the lead measure. 

If you simply tell your team what to do, they will learn little. What you ultimately want is for each member of your team to take personal ownership of the commitments they make. 

A Different Kind of Accountability

The accountability created in a WIG session is not organizational, it's personal. Instead of accountability to a broad outcome you can't influence, it's accountability to a weekly commitment that you yourself made and that is within your power to keep. When members of the team see their peers consistently following through on the commitments they make, they learn that the people they work with can be trusted to follow through. When this happens, performance improves dramatically. 

The WIG session encourages experimentation with fresh ideas. It engages everyone in problem-solving and promotes shared learning. 4DX produces results not from the exercise of authority, but from the fundamental desire of each individual team member to feel significant, to do work that matters and, ultimately, to win.

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The 4 Disciplines Of Execution®. Discipline 3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard

 

People and teams play differently when they are keeping score.

The right kind of scoreboard motivate players to win. People play differently when they are keeping score. If you doubt this, watch a group of teenagers playing basketball. See how the game changes the minute scorekeeping begins.

The lag and lead measures won’t have much meaning to the team unless they can see the progress in real time. Bowling through a curtain is not that much fun. Discipline 3 is the discipline of engagement. People perform best when they are emotionally engaged, and the highest level of engagement comes when people know whether they are winning or losing.

The best scoreboard is designed for and often by the players. A player’s scoreboard is quite different from the complex scoreboard that coaches love to make.

Keep a compelling scoreboard

The scoreboard is not just for the leaders. The scoreboard is for the whole team. To drive execution, you need a players’ scoreboard with a few simple graphs indicating where you need to be and where you are right now.

With a successful scoreboard, anyone looking at it can determine in five seconds or less whether the team is winning or losing.

Great teams know at every moment whether or not they are winning. They must know, otherwise, they don’t know what they have to do to win the game.

— Chris McChesney, Co-author of The 4 Disciplines of Execution

People Play Differently When Keeping Score

The third discipline is to make sure everyone knows the score at all times so that they can tell whether or not they're winning. This is the discipline of engagement. If the lead and lag measures are not captured on a visual scoreboard and updated regularly, they will disappear into the whirlwind.

People disengage when they don't know the score. 

Great teams know, at every moment, whether or not they're winning. They must know, otherwise, they don't know what they have to do to win the game. A compelling scoreboard tells the team where they are and where they should be, information essential to team problem solving and decision-making. 

When team members themselves are keeping score, they truly understand the connection between their performance and reaching their goal, and this changes the level at which they play. 

Four questions to create a compelling scoreboard

1. Is it simple?

Think about how many pieces of data the coach is tracking on the sideline. Coaches need this data to manage the game, but the scoreboard on the field shows only the data needed to play the game. 

2. Can I see it easily?

It has to be visible to the team. The results become personally important to the team when the scoreboard is displayed where it can be seen by everyone. 

3. Does it show lead and lag measures?

The lead measure is what the team can affect. The lag measure is the result they want. 

4. Can I tell at a glance if I'm winning?

If you can' tell within five seconds whether you're winning or losing, you haven't passed this test.

The 4 Disciplines and Team Engagement

Many believe that engagement drives results, and so do we. However, we know now that the results drive engagement. Nothing affects morale and engagement more powerfully than when a person feels that they are winning. 

People will work for money and they will quit over money, but many teams are filled with people who are both well paid and miserable in their jobs. 

A winning team doesn't need artificial morale-boosting. All the psyching up and rah-rah exercises companies do to raise morale aren't nearly as effective in engaging people as the satisfaction that comes from executing with excellence a goal that really matters. 

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Gain a deeper understanding of the skills, processes, and disciplines that are essential to strategy execution. Register to attend a complimentary 4 Disciplines of Execution webcast. 

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The difference is where the progress is found

Michael Cardus

Note the differences between any hypothetical solutions and the complaint. – Steve de Shazer – Clues pp 99

IN EARLIER POSTS I SHARE 4 USEFUL AREAS TO LOOK FOR PROGRESS CLUES OF CHANGE:

1. Change happens when it seems reasonable
2. Exception to the norm is change
3. Change through a small nudge
4. Digger deeper taints change through assumptions

Noticing what is different and putting difference to work is a task of leadership. When leaders notice what is different and are able to put difference to work they are noticing how change happens, where change matters and what difference it makes to the team.

We become myopic and solipsistic when challenged and resisted. A wonderful response that works, otherwise it would not happen. This can be a counter-intuitive. In some change efforts the idea is bad and resistance is what’s needed. As a leader being thoughtful about difference and a bad idea are a useful leadership capacity.

As you listen to the change documenting, actually writing down, differences teams and people share between the change that seems reasonable and the complaint / resistance may create enough of a landscape to make the next decision.

The difference is where the progress clues are found.