Design Sprint: A Practical Guidebook for Building Great Digital Products

With more than 500 new apps entering the market every day, what does it take to build a successful digital product? You can greatly reduce your risk of failure with design sprints, a process that enables your team to prototype and test a digital product idea within a week. This practical guide shows you exactly what a design sprint involves and how you can incorporate the process into your organization.

Design sprints not only let you test digital product ideas before you pour too many resources into a project, they also help everyone get on board--whether they’re team members, decision makers, or potential users. You’ll know within days whether a particular product idea is worth pursuing.

Design sprints enable you to:

• Clarify the problem at hand, and identify the needs of potential users
• Explore solutions through brainstorming and sketching exercises
• Distill your ideas into one or two solutions that you can test
• Prototype your solution and bring it to life
• Test the prototype with people who would use it

The CEO and Co-Founder of Boston-Based User Experience Agency Fresh Tilled Soil, Richard wears the strategic hat around the office. He’s worked his way up the web marketing food chain, starting with online ad sales at MultiChoice, Africa’s largest TV and Internet media business. Richard was in the thick of it during the heady dot-com years, founding Acceleration, an international e-marketing business headquartered in London. He has never met a whiteboard he didn’t like.

In a world of hyper-specialization, C. Todd stands in the intersections and sees the connections that revolve around us. As an Innovation Architect at Constant Contact’s InnoLoft, he facilitates product and service design sprints for a wide range of external startups and internal product teams. C. Todd is also a member of the adjunct faculty at Madrid’s prestigious IE Business School where he teaches courses on Creativity, Innovation, Design-Thinking and Communication.

After a career in user experience design and research at companies like Microsoft and Nuance, Trace then became a developer at Pivotal Labs, and is now a Managing Director at thoughtbot. He has facilitated numerous product design sprints, and is an author and maintainer of thoughtbot’s design sprint methodology repository. He’s brought Lean and Agile methodology to many large companies and small startups, helping teams to focus, prioritize, and become happy and productive.