Design Sprint - a Google Ventures framework.
Have you heard about Design Sprint before?
My intention with this post is not to teach you about it but to share an experience that I had in my previous company. But I recommend you to have a look at it.
We were working for like forever in a legacy system, adding features and fixing bugs, but the web application was running at IE8 only - You probably experiences the same in 2010, but… So at some point, the company decided to look for alternatives to upgrade the system.
Migrate a legacy system is not easy but estimate how many hours to have the first version - without any metrics - well, that’s even harder. But that’s what I was asked for and luckily, at that same week, I just finished reading about Design Sprint and how Google was using the framework to experiment with their ideas before developing the products. So, perhaps, it can be useful for my case as well.
It’s really nice when you work for a company that “buys” your crazy ideas and they bought this one of mine. My plan was simple, I choose 5 coworkers from different areas and with different skills, which I knew will be helpful for our goal. We spent a week inside a room, isolated from the other projects, to focus on producing a navigable UI with our vision of how should the application looks like and in the middle of the process we had some interaction with stakeholders and project managers to validate some of the ideas.
And after that, we were able to map what’s the need to have the first version of a new application, how it should look like and we even created a “magic” number of how much effort will be required. =)
We received great feedback from the customer, from our company, and from our other coworkers. But what makes me feel really proud was to see that group of amazing people working together and enjoying that moment.
What I learned from that experience is that you should never stop learning and trying new things - keep your mind open and hungry!
Learn more about Design sprint with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2vSQPh6MCE