Reduce risk and validate your product early through a Product Design Sprint

Product Design Sprints are essential starting points when kicking off a new feature, workflow, product, business, or solving problems with an existing product. You build a common understanding of the problem with the team and get an early indication of the market fit for the solution.

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Remote Design Sprints

Run a remote Design Sprint to validate your business

There’s never been a better time for innovation as new opportunities call for new solutions. Jump ahead of your competition by validating your new product and idea with a Product Design Sprint held completely remote. You will work with our team for an intensive five phase process to rapidly ideate, test, and validate as we run through a series of exercises that will position your business in the best possible spot to succeed. Ready to change the world in the comfort of your own home?

Reduce Product Risk

Save money by learning before you build, not once you get to market

A Product Design Sprint reduces the inherent risks in successfully bringing products to market. We’re able to get some initial validation for that solution by rapidly building an understanding of the problem, coming up with varied solutions, prototyping and testing our assumptions early.

Build Team Understanding

Your whole team, aligned with one purpose

Participating in a Design Sprint orients your entire team and aims efforts at hitting clearly defined goals. The schedule and design exercise allows all members to participate and have equal say in what is prototyped.

What is a Product Design Sprint?

A 5-phase exercise which uses design thinking to validate or invalidate our riskiest assumptions and guide future work

Phase 1: Understand

Develop a common understanding of the working context including the problem, the business, the customer, the value proposition, and how success will be determined

Phase 2: Diverge

Generate insights and potential solutions to our customer’s problems.

Phase 3: Converge

Come up with a realistic prototyping storyboard and develop an assumptions table to guide our prototyping and testing phases.

Phase 4: Prototype

Build a prototype that can be tested with existing or potential customers. 

Phase 5: Test

Test the prototype with existing or potential customers.

Quote about thoughtbot integrating into the buisness

We had a good sense of the business model and we knew our storefront was going to be a website. I was not a tech person and design and development were going to be a key part of building the business.

Hunter Gorham
CEO and Founder Joydrive

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Product Design Sprint Deliverables

What we deliver during a Product Design Sprint

Early validation for your product

During the sprint we decide what to test, how we’re going to test it and then run a handful of interviews to validate our assumptions. You gain invaluable insights into the mind of your customers in a concise timeframe.

Team understanding and alignment

The sprint is designed to get all team members aligned on both why and how we’re going to solve problems. We generate ideas together which fuels innovation. Because we working together, you’ll get buy-in from your whole team.

A prototype and recorded interviews

You will have recordings of the interviews and the prototype that we created but the most important deliverable is the understanding you get at the end of the sprint. We’ve had several client’s use the prototype to secure funding from investors to continue to move their product forward.

Quote from founder of Escape the City

We bet everything (90% of our cash) on hiring thoughtbot and working on improving the core tech of the product. It was a very risky decision, but our bet paid off.

Dominic Jackman
CEO and co-founder, Escape the City

Read the case study

Blog Posts

We share how we approach Product Design Sprints on our blog

How D&D Made Me Better at Facilitating Design Sprints

Insight into how nerdy collaborative board games can help you level up your skills as a facilitator of product design sprints.

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Ways I’ve experimented with Design Sprints to make them more sustainable.

I’ve found facilitating a product design sprint really draining for my team and me. Here are a few things that we’ve tried to make them more sustainable.

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My First Product Design Sprint

Product Design Sprints are great for validating ideas and concepts, and developers can both learn and add a lot to them.

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Let's Talk

What does success look like for your Product Design Sprint project?