Starting new with Design Sprint

When I walked into telecommunication and digital service company Elisa‘s office for the first time two months ago, everything felt new and familiar at the same time. Covid had forced me like many others to work from the home office for quite some time, and it felt great to be back at the office with people working together, post-it notes, kanbans, and drawings of software architectures on whiteboards. Although there were not so many people at the office every day, the cooperation was visible on the walls, and that was what warmed my heart straight away. 

Working together brings joy, like when a colleague is explaining about their expertise, and at the same time draws it on a whiteboard. It’s when you can put your finger on the picture and ask: “Did you mean this part”? A common understanding is being built. The first weeks have been filled with smiles and enthusiasm. I’ve enjoyed drawings and post-it notes because they are easy for anyone to continue on. The same ease of cooperation exists in Miro of course, but there you have to let the smile be heard in your voice. Luckily we have got pretty good at that as well since we are now in January back at the home office again.

Using Design Sprint for better focus

We have many experiments ongoing with the teams for improving ways of working and for me to learn all the new topics. One example is how to improve focus and prioritization by using the Design Sprint method on the way there. I asked for help from two brilliant experts from 8-bit-sheep, Sami Kallinen and Leevi Kokko, and luckily they were available for one day per week for some weeks to come. 

The methodological support of Design Sprint made it quick to start because we’ve all used it for many years, and most importantly the method involves a lot of sparring with Elisa’s experts and leaders without being too much of a burden to many. 

The original Design Sprint forces you to give your full attention for five days in one week to solve your problem. It squeezes the feedback loop very short, from idea to tested solution very quickly. The method can be used in product or service development, or for example when building a data strategy, where ever you can benefit from seeing user reactions beforehand. The creator of Design Sprint Jake Knapp provides thesprintbook.com with detailed information about the method. I’ve also made a blog last year on how to use just day one as a solo from the Design Sprint.

This time we used all five days, but because of resources available used five weeks for it, one day per week. The original idea is to concentrate on Monday to make a Map and choose a target, on Tuesdays to sketch competing ideas, on Wednesday to decide the strongest idea, on Thursday to build a realistic prototype, and on Friday to test it with the users or customers. We modified the days a bit since it’s easy to skip or shorten some phases during the days when you know how it will affect the end result, and Sami is so experienced that I fully trust him in this.

For myself, the biggest surprises quite often come on day four “Thursday” when we are building a prototype or producing results the way we have chosen. I know in advance that I find the phase more difficult than the others, but at the same time, the results are usually always the most positive. What matters is the trust among the participants in the Design Sprint, the best ideas arise when participants dare to bring the craziest ideas and difficult questions to the table. 

Dividing the days into five weeks made the process of course slower, but since I was new in the company, it was better to give me time to collect all the information necessary in between the Desing Sprint days. I was also able to test my ideas and findings during all the weeks with people I know who would give me an honest answer about the quality of the findings.

In the original version, it is important to have different types of skills taking part in the sprint. In this case, I felt that domain knowledge, technical skills and business/user know-how were in good balance. One benefit of including familiar faces is the speed of the development, working is very efficient when the trust and knowledge of each other’s strengths are straight there. With 20 % allocation, I felt we could have a huge much more.

Interviews from different areas of expertise were, like always, a critical part of sense-making. I felt it was a good way to engage brilliant Elisa colleagues in the early stages as interviewees and at the later part with half-hour interviews/user tests. A lot of sparring and great comments have been leading the work and of course, will be needed when we go further in the practice of focusing and prioritizing the work in everyday life with the teams. Elisa has shown to have great agility and flexibility during the whole process.

It’s all about the people

Service design and development requires a strong understanding of people’s needs and preferences for enhancing customer experiences. With enabler services (e.g. common login or customer identity), the same goes for people you work with, as it is crucial to find the right people with whom you can define the most urgent steps for making the customer benefits happen.

Elisians have been a source of joy, with the warm welcomes that I’ve received and the willingness to help. People have been giving many compliments to others behind their backs, and many have said that Elisa needs the skills that I have. It says a lot about company culture when people say these things out loud. Of course, I’ve seen only a small part of Elisa, but still, I believe that this is a good glimpse of the mindset of people.

I’ve also been happy to notice the close relationship with developers, designers and business people. The Design Sprint method emphasizes the importance of diversity in skills and people in the team, and the same goes with working in general. 

One learning in the past couple of years has been, that there are wonderful people in many workplaces. I’ve been told so, but I doubted it a bit before because I had been working in the same media company for so long, and had been able to recruit some great people to work with. But now the journey has shown that there are lovely, smart people in many places. I hope this brings encouragement to people who are thinking of changing their jobs or starting new ones. 

Please don’t hesitate to contact me on Linkedin, Twitter, or here, if you want to share your experiences with Design Sprints or other collaboration methods. Thank you for reading, let’s keep experimenting! 

Photo by Sami Kallinen