Course 1 Week 3 is all about design sprint and its 5 phases. That's it. So let's hop right on into it.

Week 3: Joining Design Sprints

Introduction to Design Sprints

1. Every object around us started off as a design problem. The process of converting a design problem into a user-centered product is called Design Sprint.
2. A design sprint is a time-bound process with five phases typically spread out over five full, eight-hour days (each phase takes one whole day).
3. When do you need a design sprint:
   • Are there many potential solutions to your design challenge?
   • Does a design challenge require people from cross-functional teams to weigh in?
   • Is the design challenge's scope broad enough for a sprint?
4. Design sprints are useful because:
   • Saves time
   • Effectively cut the decision-making process
   • Creates an effective path to bring a product to market
   • Sprints prioritizes the user
   • Allows you to fast forward into the future to test your product and get customer reactions before making any expensive decisions

Five phases of Design Sprint

1. Understand: The team takes time to learn from experts and engage in creative discussions with a lot of different people from other departments and industries to clearly understand the design challenge.
2. Ideate: Come up with ideas and build off of them to create solutions. Also start planning for phase 5 testing.
3. Decide: Decide on the most viable solution
4. Prototype
5. Testing

The Google Design Sprint Kit is an open-source resource for anyone who is learning about or running design sprints. Read some of the case studies to dive deeper into how people go about design sprints.

Plan Design Sprints

1. User research: You don't have to detail-out a specific problem right away. But getting a rough idea of what your sprint will focus on will help you decide which research methods make the most sense.
2. Call in the experts: You'll listen to these info-packed talks during the understand phase of the sprint, to get a firm grasp of the design problem and your users.
3. Find the right space
4. Gather supplies
5. Establish the rules of the sprint: Figuring out the ground rules in advance sets the tone for the sprint, gets everyone on the same page, and helps your team stay focused.
6. Planning Introductions: Pretty important since sprints involve cross-functional teams that may have never met before. Use Icebreakers to get comfortable with each other.
7. Post-sprint Planning: Thinking about what will happen after the sprint wraps up, like how your team might use what you've learned to achieve other goals.

The Design Sprint Brief

The sprint brief is a document that you'll share with all of your attendees to help them prepare for the sprint. Start with the design sprint challenge, identify the key deliverables, logistics (where the sprint will happen and when it will be held, who all are attending, name of the sprint leader), approvers for required permissions, list of resources required, project overview where you should explain the current status of the project, call out roadblocks, state early wins (if any), and outline the estimated launch plan, and finally an hour-by-hour sprint schedule including break-time)

Design Sprint Retrospective

The retrospective is a collaborative critique of the team's design sprint. It is done usually immediately following the sprint so that everyone's thoughts are fresh. The goal is to make sure everyone who took part in the sprint has a chance to give feedback. The two key questions to ask are:

1. What went well?
   • Which tools saved you the most time and effort?
   • When did you feel the most satisfaction?
   • What helped you make your best contribution to the team during this sprint?
2. What can be improved?
   • What went wrong that caught you off guard?
   • Which problems came up the most often?
   • When do you think we experienced the biggest challenge as a team?
3. Examine the sprint’s outcome or final product, and ask questions like:
   • Did the team overestimate or underestimate the work required to complete the design?
   • Did an external factor derail your productivity?
   • Does the final design actually solve the user problem?
4. These questions can be helpful to ask for the next sprint:
   • What did you discover during the sprint that you’re still wondering about?
   • How could the current process be holding the team back from creating better solutions?

That concludes all the major points of week 3. Next up is week 4 which is the last part of course 1.