Progress. It's a sprint, not a marathon

The social impact sector demands rapid response to urgent problems, yet, the pace of progress and delivery in the sector can be painfully slow.

Why is this?

Multiple, big, interconnected problems to solve, that are embedded into complex systems and impact vast groups of vulnerable people. Funding fluctuates, strategies shift, processes are cumbersome and accountability for decision making weighs heavy.

All of this leads to analysis paralysis and drains momentum towards the project goal.

The power of a sprint

When a project starts losing momentum, gathering the team for a design sprint is the perfect approach to supercharge it.

The concept of a Design Sprint is not a new one, but it’s a good one. It is a 5 day time-boxed period where teams come together to solve a specific problem through expert interviews, design, prototyping and testing ideas with the intended users.

Do any of these scenarios feel familiar?

• You have a wealth of research and insight, but the ideas aren’t flowing
• You’ve got ideas, but are not sure which to progress
• You have an idea that’s ready to prototype, but are not quite sure how it will work

A design sprint can help teams to translate research and insight into actionable ideas, it can help prioritise which idea to progress, and it can bring those ideas to life through rapid prototyping and testing with users. It ensures consensus and supercharges momentum.

Girl Effect India - A design sprint case study

We’re lucky enough to collaborate with Girl Effect teams across the globe. Recently the Girl Effect India team invited us to support them in defining a direction for a project to disseminate health information to parents of young girls in India.

The team already had a wealth of research surrounding the digital habits of the target audience and their relationship with healthcare. However the team required some dedicated time together to explore, prioritise and test possible solutions.

A Google Ventures style design sprint was the perfect solution to progress the project, so together we spent a week in Delhi tackling the following sprint goal;

Define which digital solution can best help mothers with digital access (and their husbands) to access information about their daughters health (and specifically vaccination) that they consider trustworthy.

Day 1: Understand

We spoke with experts in social and behaviour change, health and digital communication and collectively defined our priority problem to solve. We mapped out the intended user journey, within the wider multimedia ecosystem of our target audience.

Day 2: Ideate

We generated ideas and sketched out solutions for how the user journey might come to life, then shared and discussed what excited us or felt limiting within each idea.

Day 3: Decide

We selected the solution that had the best chance of achieving our goal and then storyboarded how a prototype of that solution might behave.

Day 4: Prototype

We designed and prototyped a key user journey through the solution, in order to test the concept and format with users.

Day 5: Validate

Finally we tested the prototype with our intended users, 7 Mothers and 3 Fathers of young girls in India.

Through expert external facilitation and a structured framework for decision making, the Girl Effect India team were able to design and test a meaningful service for parents of girls, across India. Of course there is plenty more work to be done to bring this service into the hands of users, but the sprint created the clear direction and user validation that the project needed to progress.

Here’s what the Girl Effect India team had to say about the process;

The HIA team are incredible at what they do — facilitators are so practised, thorough with the framework and have the ability to quite quickly develop an understanding of the problem at hand and be able to nudge, push, provoke as and when required. It's something I am in absolute awe of. Thank you for all that you do!

Do you have a project that needs supercharging with a Design Sprint? We run sprints in person, fully remote, or a bit of both, to suit the needs of your team. Get in touch at hello@hereiamstudio.com