How DesignOps Enables The Design Sprint Process

A design sprint is a five-day time-constrained process involving design stakeholders engaging in design thinking to prototype, test, and create products rapidly. 

They do this by clearly defining goals, validating assumptions, and planning product roadmaps before commencing development. 

It is a popular and effective method to bring services, features, or new products to the market in a short time, addressing all product-related problems through rapid prototyping and usability testing. 

Sprints have proven to be an excellent path to reduce the time to create a realistic prototype from months to a mere week by leveraging precise customer feedback data. 

With rising competitiveness in the current global market, design sprints and DesignOps have become excellent practices that give businesses a fighting chance to expedite product design, implementation, and launch ahead of competitors.

Also, read The complete guide to design sprints.

As an approach that encourages organizational design thinking, DesignOps streamlines the design process through standardization, collaboration, and creating a unified design language between all stakeholders. 

Teams actively engaged in DesignOps are instrumental in organizing and running effective design sprints by optimizing workflows, assigning projects, setting timelines, and eliminating bottlenecks that could potentially hinder the sprint’s progress. 

DesignOps enables design-led businesses to perform expedited product delivery into the hands of the customer through sprints, which are similar to agile product development. 

While there are many sprint iterations, like the Google sprint, the design sprint process is a popularly employed methodology amongst design-led companies. A DesignOps team is also responsible for maintaining the preset time constraints of a design sprint, and the sprint teams don’t undergo any delays jeopardizing its success. 

Teams encouraged to adapt DesignOps’ mindsets and practices often contribute to the most effective design sprints. 

The key factor defining the success of design sprints is good preparation and recognizing the logistical work involved. 

This is where DesignOps plays a vital role in executing design sprints as it allows teams to allocate resources, create assets, map the right competencies, standardize guidelines, plan project delivery, project management, and sprint management. 

A well-structured DesignOps platform can allow businesses to achieve this quickly and transparently across all organizational actors. Attaining visibility, predictability, and avoiding reworks are the primary advantages of using a DesignOps platform for your sprints. 

Let us take a closer look at what DesignOps harness design sprints to achieve: 

For a design sprint process to work correctly, it requires cooperation from all design and non-design actors involved. Adapting a progressive design thinking mindset is crucial for teams to perform effective sprints. 

DesignOps goes a long way in implementing design thinking in organizations with varying philosophies, as it is increasingly gaining recognition as a concept synonymous with increased design quality and efficiency. 

Design thinking and socializing the product design cycle, DesignOps ensures that everyone involved in the sprint actively understands their project roles. 

Furthermore, it allows leaders to have real-time visibility of what each stakeholder is doing at any given time during the five days process.

The design sprint process often requires in-depth scrutiny from design leaders and managers to achieve tasks promptly and avoid delays. DesignOps makes this easy as it helps design workflows set timelines and assign projects to all stakeholders. 

Overall, DesignOps provides transparency to the entire sprint process, where management can maintain a close eye on the progress of teams from day one to five. 

Identifying and rectifying any perceivable issues is simplistic through the vast array of tools and visibility offered by capable DesignOps platforms, thus increasing your probability of achieving sprint success.

Standardization is a significant feature of DesignOps that lays the much-needed groundwork required for sprint teams to perform their assigned daily tasks. 

It is a process where introducing design and non-design standards reduces redundancies and complexities in the workflow, allowing for a smooth progression of achieving daily goals and tasks. 

Sprint teams engaging in DesignOps practices are relieved from the stress of tedious, repetitive tasks to focus more on design and achieving product-oriented sprint goals. 

DesignOps helps map out all the essential tools that design teams require to achieve high-quality outcomes from the sprint and unifies the workforce under one common design language.

An essential requirement for design sprints is for the extensive list of stakeholders, such as sprint teams, deciders, facilitators, design experts, and the like, to communicate and collaborate toward achieving their goals.

Achieving this level of collaboration can be tricky because it requires creating a coworking environment between design and non-design actors that don’t speak the same design language. 

Through DesignOps and standardization, a standard uniform language is established throughout the organization, allowing for smoother and seamless communication between all the sprint stakeholders to work toward achieving common sprint goals and timelines. 

Most DesignOps platforms provide teams with the tools and tech stacks crucial to attaining seamless collaboration and transparency between stakeholders.

The most prominent feature of DesignOps is its ability to simplify the design workflow and rid it of all non-standardized redundancies and unnecessary complexities. 

A smooth workflow is a known parameter that increases design efficiency, quality, and speed and translates to excellent outcomes. It also allows design teams to focus less on tasks that fall outside their area of expertise and focus more on what matters, design. 

Providing your sprints with a streamlined DesignOps workflow also creates a smoother working environment where teams can effectively accomplish the timebound daily goals of the five-day sprint.

Design sprints can be an intensive exercise that majorly depends on the quality and capabilities of the design teams and their members. So before you start your sprint, it is crucial to assemble the right team with optimal diversity, mindsets, and skillsets. 

The team must also be open to clearing the entire work week ahead of the sprint and promptly prioritize completing the assigned daily objectives. 

To create a sprint team that satisfies all these requirements, one must go beyond the traditional hiring processes to a suitable product-oriented onboarding solution. 

This is where DesignOps steps in with its project-dependent hiring process that identifies precisely what sort of talent the project’s success demands. 

DesignOps optimally helps businesses onboard the right team members by addressing individual project necessities and perceivable team weaknesses. 

If you are having trouble planning your design sprint, it would be wise to consider introducing DesignOps and its associated design thinking methodologies into your operations. 

Imagine you are finding it difficult to implement your design sprint. It is beneficial to know that several DesignOps platforms are available out there that can significantly help boost the success and efficiency of your sprints with increased operation management capabilities.

Check out the design sprint module and its processes at the dock of our renowned Cubyts platform. 

Cubyts has created a module that gives you a template with optimized design processes for your design sprint management, readily accessible to anyone embracing our platform. 

You can now plan, devise, and implement your design sprints with utmost ease through our design sprint module. 

Our platform allows you to track and manage your design sprint’s progress in real-time, ensuring that your teams always strike their goals. 

Before you manually try to conduct your design sprint, we urge you to sign up and try our platform and get a detailed and free look into what our design sprint template can help you achieve.