How to Run A Design Sprint in A Covid-19 World

Design sprints are wonderful for helping teams build great products. They help people scale ideas during close collaboration. A big part of their process is to collaborate by drawing things. Today, I had a chance to kick off a full design sprint in our new Covid-19 world.

The Team

The team I was on consisted of domain experts, a software engineer, 3 UX engineers, and a pm.

Our Setup

Communication - Google Hangouts for the win! It is still the best video chat tool I have used to date!

Our work horse - Our team used Miro.com to conduct our Sprint.

Our Process

We broke up our Miro board in days, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday and followed the core processes. During these stages, I included what worked and what didn't work.

The Question and Answer Session

• What didn't work well ○ Miro has a small learning curve. Before you start your, make sure everyone can make a "How might we…" notes. We should run through a sample session to make sure everyone can do it. ○ Stop after one question and answer to make sure people have entered their notes. Have fun with It! ○ Stop moving cursors when your time is done! It is distracting. It should be like in school when teachers say "pencil's down."

• What worked great ○ Categorization Process - Worked great. ○ Miro was simple and easy to use. ○ Great quote: "I think this is incredibly useful gets the entire team on the same page visually and creates client accountability at an early stage"