Creating a digital product is exciting… but also overwhelming. Should you just pull some product idea out of thin air and hope it’ll become a blockbuster? Well, good luck with that.

Hope isn’t your best strategy. You should have a proven method to rally your team, vet your ideas, and make sure what you build is what your target market wants.

The good news is that you don’t have to throw spaghetti on the wall and hope that something will stick. A digital product design sprint is a tried-and-true process to help you get started on the right foot.

What Is a Digital Product Design Sprint?

A product design sprint is a time-constrained, five-phase process often conducted as a workshop to help product teams define goals, validate assumptions, and define a product roadmap before the design and development phases. It helps address complex business questions while reducing the risk of introducing a new product or feature to market.

The process allows teams to ideate, design, prototype, and test product ideas with a user-centric approach. You can align team members and stakeholders to a shared vision and a common understanding of the goals and deliverables of the project to ensure that everyone is rowing in the same direction.

It’s important not to confuse a design sprint with a sprint in the agile methodology, even though both aim to achieve meaningful progress within a short time. While an agile sprint is part of an iterative process with multiple sprints, a design sprint is typically a one-time event that occurs early on in a project to help define the business problem and chart the course.

A digital product design sprint aims to decide what business problem your product solves, what the product should be, and most importantly, whether you should build it. It’s most helpful when tackling a big hairy problem, starting with a new business idea, or clarifying your direction for a potentially expensive project.

The Benefits of a Digital Product Design Sprint

A digital product design sprint allows you to develop a hypothesis, prototype a product idea, and test it quickly with a low investment. Here’s why you should incorporate a product design sprint into your digital product development process:

• Explore new ideas and opportunities: The collaborative nature of a product design sprint creates synergies among team members and stakeholders to explore new ideas and solutions you might not have thought of in the past.

• Simplify a problem: The highly focused approach of a product design sprint helps you get to the core of a business challenge, simplify complex problems, and pare down potential solutions to their essential elements.

• Ensure project transparency: By involving stakeholders across the organization, you can get everyone’s buy-in and support to minimize obstacles and resistance down the road.

• Improve speed and efficiency: Product design sprints are short and agile. They cut through slow processes and bureaucracy that often hamper larger organizations. You can achieve faster results with fewer resources.

• Mitigate and reduce risks: A product design sprint offers a safe place to develop ideas quickly and fail fast. You can test ideas with real users before investing in product development to minimize the risk of releasing a dud.

• Create a user-centric design: By baking user testing into the process, a digital product design sprint encourages team members to approach the problem from a user’s perspective from the get-go to pave the way to a successful launch.

How To Conduct a Digital Product Design Sprint

Here’s what a typical five-day product design sprint looks like to help you better understand your business requirements, explore potential product ideas, and pre-validate viable solutions.

Day 1: Understand the Problem

Set the stage for success by understanding the business problem and creating a roadmap for the next few days. Ensure that everyone involved in the sprint has all the necessary information. They should understand the project’s objectives and how the new product should support the company’s long-term goals.

Craft the product vision to help your team stay focused throughout the process and create user personas to identify your audience’s needs, challenges, and desired outcomes. Conduct stakeholder mapping to align the product with stakeholders’ interests and expectations and assess your technological capabilities to ensure that the product vision is executable.

Day 2: Brainstorm Solutions

This phase aims to generate and explore as many ideas as possible — divergence is the name of the game. Start by analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of existing solutions to help the team develop new insights. Let your imagination loose to ideate innovative features and create the ideal user journey. The more, the merrier — we’ll evaluate the ideas later.

You can develop a service blueprint to understand user needs and challenges across the customer journey and provide context to the conversations. You can also map customer touchpoints to business units and systems to identify gaps. Meanwhile, customer journey mapping can show you how current customers interact with your product and services so you can identify critical tasks and uncover opportunities.

Day 3: Select a Solution

Identify the best options (which may be a mashup of a few preliminary ideas,) evaluate them against the objectives you established on day 1, and decide which one to pursue. The team should also wrap their heads around structuring and outlining the system architecture to assess the feasibility and cost implications of building the product.

User story mapping is a great way to help you get into the nuts and bolts of the product idea as you map out the features and user flows from the user’s perspective. The screen-by-screen approach also helps the development team understand the requirements and start assigning story points to gauge the effort needed.

Day 4: Develop a Prototype

Building a prototype in one day means you won’t end up with anything fancy. But you must ensure that it reflects key steps in the user journeys and helps you answer critical questions about the product idea. You can build a paper prototype or a digital one using programs such as Keynote, Sketch, or Figma. This exercise aims to help you visualize your product idea and user experience so you can share it with users and stakeholders.

Day 5: Test With Real Users

Get feedback on your prototype from real users, technical experts, and business stakeholders to validate your product idea and identify areas for improvement. Recruit around five real users who match the user personas and record the sessions to share with the entire team. Prepare a set of questions or tasks, and observe how the testers interact with the prototype to identify potential issues.

Leveraging Insights From Your Digital Product Design Sprint

Your product design sprint should give you a solid understanding of your target audience and how you can solve their problems. To get the most out of the insights, you must follow up with developing a product strategy to turn your product vision into reality and building an audience and revenue model to ensure you’re investing in a product that’ll contribute to your bottom line.

Need some help with your digital product design sprint to nail the most profitable digital product idea? Get in touch to see how we can help.