UX Glossary · D
Design sprint
Also: Google Ventures sprint · GV sprint
A time-boxed process, classically five days, from problem to tested prototype.
A design sprint compresses the path from problem to validated answer into a fixed, short period. Jake Knapp developed the format at Google Ventures and published it in Sprint in 2016. The classic structure runs five days:
- Map the problem and pick a target
- Sketch competing solutions individually
- Decide on one to build
- Prototype it, at whatever fidelity fools a user for an hour
- Test with five participants
Note that it is not a Scrum sprint, despite the name collision.
What it is actually for
The value is not speed, it is avoiding the cost of building the wrong thing. A week spent learning that the concept does not work is a week; the same lesson after a quarter of engineering is a quarter.
It works best on a question that is genuinely open and consequential. It works badly as a substitute for continuous discovery, and a team running a sprint every month is usually avoiding a research practice rather than doing one.
What people get wrong
Skipping the test. A sprint that ends at a prototype has produced an opinion in higher fidelity, which is precisely what the format was designed to prevent.
Five days is also not sacred. Four-day and two-day variants are common and fine, so long as the decision and the test survive the compression.