Design Sprint for Distributed Teams: Aim for Quality, Efficiency and Flexibility
There is no doubt that the Design Sprint might be the new hype everyone is trying to adapt within their Agile environment agenda. Likewise, there is no doubt that it is even more difficult to apply it for distributed teams. In this article, I will share some learnings about how to aim for quality and efficiency when conducting a Design Sprint for a group of people from five different countries, three time zones, and nine hours time difference between them.
Flexibility on Expert Interviews
By respecting the time of our Experts who were distributed in the U.S. & Europe, very soon we realised that we don’t respect our own time. Some of the team members could not do certain time slots because of the time difference between the two continents. In this case, it was clear that we could be flexible with each other between the team members. Thus, we conducted Expert interviews even if not all of us were present at the same very moment. We conducted and recorded these interviews by using a video conferencing tool which provided the team members with flexibility to watch and review any missed interview at a later point.
Tip: make sure you inform the Expert about the recording beforehand and get the Consent form ready for the Expert to sign to be able to record the session
Asynchronous Sketching
Some might argue if that would be the right approach, as the synchronous sketching puts the team under time pressure, thus enhancing creativity and productivity. And I agree! But what if we are distributed throughout half of the world and cannot make the synchronous session for this activity? In this case, there are at least two variants to build confidence in doing something to get the right mindset for an asynchronous sketching exercise:
- Asynchronous ice-/mind-breaker. Either if you are listening to 120bpm for three minutes on your loudspeakers, doing twenty push-ups, or visiting some famous politician’s Twitter account (well, not really.. but you know what I mean) right before the sketching activity, that can increase your productivity and potentially, puts you in the necessary active mindset for conducting this activity. The ice-/mind-breaker can be tailored to meet our own liking and personality because no one else knows better how to get ourselves uplifted than us.
- Respect the time and trust your team members. You need to make it clear for every team member that they need to respect the time allocated for the Crazy-8’s and Solution Sketch and must not exceed it, in order to respect other team members following this time frame. Also, you will not get too attached to your personal sketches, thus, you will be less biased when reviewing them. At the same time, we need to trust each other when it comes to following this rule.
Asynchronous usability testing / final interviews
The approach is similar to the asynchronous Expert interviews previously explained. We had two users in the U.S. and three in Cyprus, so we had to be flexible. We recorded these interviews and watched them whenever we could. That made it easier for everyone to evaluate how the users interact with our prototype respecting our own time and schedule.
Divide the team to work on the tasks within their expertise or best knowledge
Each of us has our stronger and not that strong sides. Some of us are generalists, some of us are experts in one or a few fields. The Design Sprint highlights these aspects in a condensed way. Meaning that, if the person who creates prototypes has never created one before, it will be difficult to be efficient and achieve an appropriate MVP-prototype for testing within the Design Sprint constraints. The same can be said about the final interviews with the users. One needs to know how to approach interviews and its subjects in a meaningful way by showing empathy and asking the right and correct questions in order to get the most out of it. Design Sprint is not the place to experiment with the “let’s see how I do that” type of approach if we want to achieve the best possible outcome.
Learn from the process and be creative
As you might agree, you cannot step into the same river twice. That can be related to a lot of aspects of our lives, including Design Sprints. There can be different projects, team members, settings, mindsets, tools etc. Therefore, each phase of the Design Sprint can be approached with creativity. Whatever happens, we need to adapt to the situation and the environment in order to navigate through and engage with the various circumstances and include them in the process.
What are your thoughts on remote Design Sprint?
