I've led several design sprints as well as teach and coach colleagues on design sprint methodology
Design Sprint Facilitator
I have led several design sprints for clients, both remote and in person, to speed up discovery, provide real customer insight and create team alignment. It's a great way to massively increase the speed of discovery and give teams a taste of the power of design thinking.
As well as running design sprints I lead design sprint training and coach others on effective facilitation.
The Challenge
People's Postcode Lottery is a charity providing £millions in prizes in the UK each week. The PPL team were looking to redesign the portal used by their customer support agents to support sales calls to customers. The existing portal didn't provide the information needed for speed, customer satisfaction and risk management.
I facilitated a design sprint to design and test an improved portal.
The Process
- Problem framing with the key stakeholder to clarify the challenge and top level metrics for success.
- Planned the design sprint, ensuring suitable participants for the sprint, experts were available for advice, customers were booked in for testing and leadership would attend the playback.
- Created and socialised materials to prep the sprint team
- Led a 4 day, remote sprint 2.0, facilitating the team in designing and testing new solutions.
- Led the design phase of the sprint to help bring the ideas to life in a testable Figma prototype.
- Conducted a retro to gather feedback from the Sprint team
- Attended the playback to leadership
The Outcome
Within a single week, the sprint helped to define the direction of the new customer portal, aligning the team and securing leadership buy in for the next phase of the customer support portal.
Tested designs with customer feedback quantitatively confirming this would improve their experience.
Excellent buy in and alignment to the process from the sprint team NPS score for the sprint of 9.5.
Leadership buy-in to move forward with the new ideas generated from the sprint.
Anna White
Senior Product Owner - People's Postcode Lottery
Simon is a highly talented remote facilitator and design sprint expert. He did a fantastic job taking the sprint team on the sprint journey. He explained all activities so that the team was empowered to drive the ideation. The pace was perfect! Fast enough to make great progress but also providing enough space to allow the team to really grapple with the problem.
This led to a really useful result which has helped set our vision for the customer portal.
Key takeaways
I love design sprints! They're great fun and highly productive. I recommend this technique for teams with a large challenge who want to bring direction, team alignment and energy. It's also a great introduction to design thinking for people not familiar with this way of working.
The key to success is the preparation: Framing the problem, bringing together the correct stakeholders for the sprint team. ensuring full participation over the 4 days, real customers for testing on day 4 and a leadership playback to show what was learned. With these things in place, design sprints can be hugely valuable.