Design sprint: Day 1

We were quite pumped up on Monday morning to start our discovery journey for the design sprint. On Monday morning it felt that week will be long time to push things forward. Facilitator had provided all the needed stuff like markers, whiteboards and post-its in the room. My part as a product manager was to provide business objectives, key results and findings from the customer interviews.

Our journey started with Start at the end thinking. Some of us had already been involved into discussions about the topic and some just had their first thoughts about it. I found out that it was pretty hard to jump right in to the outcome we wish we have in the future. It made thinking easier when we moved on to list sprint open questions.

It took almost to the lunch time and drawing the map to feel like we are really moving forward. It also initiated right kind of discussion and visualized the problem setting.

Early afternoon was reserved for the short expert interviews. Especially developer(s) found these different view we had during the interview important. Comments were that this was the first time to hear this many insights and views about stuff.

How-might-we exercise was good to have and worked well to rephrase the questions were were having already in this point. Slight problem was that most of us also listed stuff that was discussed in the interviews but were not inside of the design sprint scope. It took quite amount of time to organize and label those HMV:s.

Main outcome for Monday was to pick a target and the most important pain point from how-might-we’s and place it in the map to identify what is the most interesting point to be solved. One of the developers had to leave bit earlier so there was just two regular participants, facilitator and decider still left. I felt that the outcome was exactly the right one but some questions were rise about the small amount of total votes (10). Winner had three votes and I believe we made the right decision. It was also easy to find that place from the map and head to Tuesday with this outcome.