How do use design sprint to build better products

One of my goals for this year is to read lot of books and the kinds of books I want to read are not limited to technology and business, but cover other topics like mathematics, product, politics, and personal memoirs.

Here is my list so far:

Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg PhD

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne

Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction by Timothy Gowers

Production-Read​y Microservices: Building Standardized Systems Across an Engineering Organization by Susan J. Fowler

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff

Rework by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Braden Kowitz

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil

The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political Leadership in the Modern Age by Archie Brown

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight

String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis: A Library of America Special Publication by David Foster Wallace, John Jeremiah Sullivan

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition by Robert B. Cialdini

The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition by Don Norman

Coding Games in Scratch by Jon Woodcock

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein

For the last 2 weeks, I have been reading Sprint by Google folks. In my last project, we had two great ideas and we were not sure if our customers will accept these ideas. So our design agency ran the modified versions of the Google Sprints (instead of 5 days our sprints was 2 weeks). I was not able to participate but become very interested in the outcomes the team were able to achieve in 2 weeks. I found this book and wanted to get in depth view of how the idea was born and how to run the Sprints and why do Sprints work.

The book is a light read and provides very good details on the how and the why part. It starts of with how and why the current process of Brainstorming doesn’t work and places focus on the individuals to produce results working against a deadline and not working together which was quite opposite of what we have been told every time. The book goes into details on what should happen each day of the week and how we need to trust the process to get the desired results. The most revelation for me was the prototyping day on Thursday which is devoted to building a prototype by faking it, which I did not expected but I can relate to why this is necessary. In our project, we faked one idea using Invision and the other big idea was to built by our dev team. As I think through now, may be we could have avoided the expensive 2 week build affair.

The book focuses heavily on the startup world and kind of makes sense as startups have limited resources and have a big idea that they are not sure if that will work. There are not many examples or concrete evidence on whether any big companies have adapted this process.

However, I believe this process can work in big companies if executed well. Most important in a big company is to get your decider and the sponsor to believe that the outcome will have greater impact and we can get customer feedback within a week rather than build for 6 months and then hope that the customers will love or for that matter use our product. I plan to use this in my next project and I will keep you all posted on how that turns out..

For now, I recommend this book to anyone who wants to build great products but don’t know if your idea is good.

M