Sketching to generate ideas with product teams

Design sprints are a technique used by teams to ideate, prototype and test product ideas in 5 days.  I have been involved in a few of these over the years, and I have always found myself getting the most value out of the sketching part.  So much so that I have started running sketching workshops independently of design sprints with my teams. This post explains how design sprints work and why I find the sketching part to be so useful. It also includes a plan for a 90-minute sketching workshop called crazy 8s that I like to run with teams to generate new ideas.

More about design sprints

Design sprints were popularised by Google, and immortalised in Jake Knapp’s book Sprint. The 5-step process involves:

1. Understanding the user and the problem
2. Sketching solution ideas
3. Deciding which solution to test
4. Prototyping the solution
5. Validating with users

I have found design sprints to be particularly useful for teams:

• with lots of people who can’t usually work together (e.g. people from a different organisation or team)
• who don’t usually get a chance to focus on one thing at a time, and need time to focus on solving a hard problem 
• who want to kick-start their momentum after a period of slow delivery, and get into good habits of delivering faster

In the book, a design sprint lasts 5 days, but 5 days is a long time in tech.  Most of the sprints I have been involved in have tried to do it in less time than this.  There are lots of examples of people trying to do design sprints in 3 days, 2 days or 1 day.

Why I like sketching for ideation

I do not like sketching because I am good at art. When I was in school, a friend who was disappointed by one of his paintings did not want to take one of his artworks home. So I wrote my name on it and gave it to my Mum, who framed it and put it up on the wall. Years later, I had become a punk rocker. That mate was over for band practice. He saw his painting on the wall. And I had to admit to my Mum that my greatest artistic achievement was a fraud. She saw the funny side of it. Anyway, I am about as good at sketching as I am at painting. Which is not very good. If you still doubt that statement, read on to see some examples of my art.

I like sketching because it is accessible, creative, fast and fun.

Accessible: I have never met anyone who cannot sketch well enough to have someone else understand what they are trying to draw during a design sprint  Boxes, squiggles and the occasional word or two on the page are almost always enough to get the point across. If not, everyone always gets a chance to explain what they were thinking when presenting their idea

Creative: sketching unlocks different ways of thinking than those we usually use when communicating in words alone. When people sketch ideas independently and then bring those ideas back to the group, a diverse range of ideas gets generated. I always come away from these sessions with fresh ideas, including new takes on old solutions or brand-new ideas that had not occurred to me before.

Fast: visuals are processed faster than words. With less room for confusion. An hour of ideation will develop more and better ideas with sketching than with writing

Fun: these are fun sessions to facilitate and participate in. Groups of professional adults don’t often stand around and draw things for each other. There is always a lot of laughter in the room, and some nice visuals to put up on the wall at the end. Non-product managers/designers do not always get as involved in ideating solutions as they would like to. I have found that they in particular come away from these sessions feeling positive and energised. 

Part of the reason I find sketching the most valuable part is that I usually work in long-lasting cross-functional teams who have a long history of working on a domain together.  We already have a good understanding of our users, the problems they face, and strategically, which problems our product is aimed at helping them to solve better.  So taking a day out to build a shared understanding feels like overkill. 

Deciding, prototyping and validating are all things we need to do. But we don’t need to pick one idea to prototype, and then test it the next day with 5 users in a usability test. We usually find that it is possible to prototype more than one idea in a week. And more often than not, the best methods to validate ideas do not involve testing a prototype with 5 users. They involve making small changes to our core product, and seeing how real users react to that over the coming weeks.

I am not saying there isn’t value in doing proper design sprints. I am just saying that the sketching part is the bit I tend to get the most value from.

So recently, I have run a few ~90 minute workshops with teams where we just focus on sketching, ideating and a tiny bit of prioritising.

Crazy 8’s – a 60-90 minute sketching & ideation workshop

Below is an agenda for a 60-90 minute sketching workshop I like to run. It is called crazy 8‘s – presumably because each person has 8 boxes to sketch in. This is best run:

• Including the people on the team who will design/deliver the work (can also include some people who aren’t full-time members of the team or are external)
• Close to when the team will have capacity to do something about the ideas (no sense spending time adding items to the backlog which you have no plans to do anything about)

You will need:

• Large sheets of paper folded in half 3 times (to create 8 boxes on the page)
• Pens

Recap of problem (15 mins)

• Recap the problem you are trying to solve / the opportunity you are trying to exploit
• Recap of the users you are doing it for
• Spend WAY more time on this if you plan to ideate in a problem area that is not well known to the team

Warmup (5 mins)

• Pair up. In 30 seconds, draw the person opposite to you without looking at your pen or paper. Everyone holds up their drawings 
• Great little exercise to get everybody to stop worrying about the quality of their drawing! Credit to Conor Delahunty for this idea

Sketching (15 mins)

• Give everybody 15 minutes to sketch out as many ideas as they can
• Some people suggest keeping this section to one minute per sketch, but I prefer to give people a little longer

Lightning demos (1-2 mins per person)

• Each person shares their sketches and briefly explains their ideas

Dot voting (5 mins)

• People draw dots on the sketches to indicate what they think are the ideas we should progress with. Or their favourite sketch from each person.
• Dots on each picture are added up
• (optional) add any questions as post-its on each other’s sketches

Discussion (rest of workshop)

• Walk through the top voted items in turn having a brief discussion about why they are good, how to develop them further
• Do this until you run out of time

Alternatively

• After dot voting or discussion, do another round of sketching, to allow people to build on the ideas of others. Lots of good ideas often come this way! However, doing a second round will probably require more than 90 minutes

Output

• A wide variety of ideas from the team
• A sense of which ideas the team think are worth pursuing