A Design Sprint that I planned and facilitated, that launched a successful product, and inspired how the whole Product Team uses collaborative creative problem-solving techniques going forward.

Situation

Following a thorough research study, we identified a huge opportunity to offer insightful data to school leaders. We suspected that we had a subset of data we could make use of with very little effort, and we also knew that it would be a major infrastructure piece to build a complete data warehouse.

Objective

We wanted to see if we could provide a solution to the key user needs within the subset of data that we had available.

We needed to work together cross-functionally to define a solution that could deliver something to market in time for our key selling period a few months later.

Approach

I planned a 3-day Design Sprint inviting representatives from across the business to participate and influence the direction of this product.

• Day 1 of the Design Sprint involved knowledge sharing including empathising with our persona, the business potential, findings from preliminary tech investigations.

• Day 1 also included idea generation around ‘How might we…?’ questions, with sketching and dot voting activities to converge around our strongest ideas.

• Day 2 was dedicated to engineering discussions, exploring what data we could access relatively easily and cross referencing against our top ideas from Day 1.

• Day 3 was dedicated to front-end development explorations into what options we had for visualising our preferred solutions.

• I was responsible for documenting our process, communicating our decisions and following up on actions, ensuring the project retained momentum after the sprint.

Challenges

• Encouraging engineering leads to take an active participatory role, rather than a passive observatory role. I engaged them by showcasing how we could explore technical approaches as part of the workshop, and how their insights could unlock new possibilities.

• Facilitating back-end engineering problem-solving workshops as it’s not my area of expertise. I overcame this by making sure to communicate what the desired outcomes of the workshop were, and encouraged getting towards them bit by bit.

Outcomes

• A clearly defined minimum viable product that met user needs and was achievable with the data that we had.

• A solution that we could start selling in our key sales period.

• Positive feedback from concept validation and user testing.

• The beginnings of a vision that indicated where the project might evolve over time.

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