The Design Sprint

The Design Sprint is a very actionable framework that allows product development teams to easily put in practice design thinking and user-centered design methodologies. It is at the core of the UX Challenge, the experimental scheme piloted within the 200SMEchallenge project.
Benefits of involving users and customers in the digital product development process (for both co-design and testing purposes) has been pointed out by interaction design academics and design practitioners
since the late seventies. Similarly, investing in user-centric design early on the new project development process proved to highly improve product usability and user experience (UX), with positive business impact on both market value and NPD project costs.

More rencently, business scholars with a solid background in digital product development and digital marketing (and often with direct experience in coaching digital startups) have proposed new business-driven user-centric innovation frameworks. One of this is the Lean Startup method, which addresses the startup boostrap process (somewhat comparable to a NPD process) as an effort to gather “validated knowledge” by iterative tests of MVP (Minimum Viable Products) with end users and customers. More recently, Google Ventures (now GV) provided a hands-on guide for product development teams to build validated solutions to design problems in five steps (a process normally enduring 5 days): the Design Sprint22. Although it is still in its infancy, the Design Sprint has proven to be a bullet-proof user-centric innovation framework for digital companies by making use of design thinking techniques.
The Sprint has now been utilized by GV on more than 500 times amongst products and startups, and it is now freely utilized by innovation intermediaries worldwide. The below figure represents the 5-step Design Sprint process.