Boost your UX Career with the Design Sprint

Career advancement in UX is not a straight-forward matter. It’s no wonder – the field is relatively new, and the requirements for the roles keep morphing and evolving, leaving UX designers puzzled: Where will my career go?  Where can it go? And how do I level up if the demands if the roles keep changing constantly?? 

While there’s no way to predict the future with a 100% certainty (that we know of…), there are some strong trends that make it pretty clear where the market is moving towards. As the UX industry gets more saturated with skilled designers, merely delivering on your direct responsibilities and getting better at your craft isn’t going to cut it. 

Businesses will need designers who are able to look past their direct job description, and can connect business strategy and goals to the product development process. If you are able to solve big business challenges and build products and services that are in line with the growth trajectory of your company, you’ll be able to progress much quicker, but best of all–you’ll be seen as a strategic partner rather than a mere executor.

How exactly do you do that? By learning how to facilitate.

Being a Good Facilitator is Key to Being a Good Designer

Designers naturally end up facilitating A LOT over the course of their professional lives. The most common context is trying to balance the requirements of several different departments, aligning your team on a feature, or presenting and collecting feedback on the research you have conducted. 

The better, more effective those sessions are - the smoother your design process will be. 

But here’s the thing: Working together efficiently is an inherently challenging thing for people to do. Working-style differences, politics that always creep into any group setting, and asymmetrical knowledge are just parts of the overall problem. The underlying issue, however, is that conventional collaboration scenarios don’t address that! 

A cross-functional team gets together in a room, and members just start throwing out ideas. Often it turns into a war of who can speak the loudest, or who is the most senior in the room. Or it goes to the other extreme, where no one wants to make a decision without the entire group being on board.

So how do you address that? By learning effective facilitation skills and becoming a facilitator.

Having a foundation in facilitation helps you throughout the entire design process.

It helps you to gather requirements, constraints, and expectations from stakeholders at the start of the project, have more fruitful collaborative design sessions, and have streamlined processes for iteration. 

Besides, once you’re seen as the person who can come in and help others do their work better and with less annoyance, you’ll be sought after for every project. It’s a GREAT career move because you become the catalyst for getting work done better.

Workshops are the easiest, most effective way to facilitate ANY design discussion. They’re a great tool for facilitating design decision-making,  future-proofing your career, and fostering a culture of corporate innovation.  

There’s just one caveat…

Not all workshops are equally as effective. And nothing takes the wind out of your sails quite like a disastrous facilitation experience. 

The good news is: there’s an existing tried and tested  recipe for an effective workshop that will yield great results 100% of the time–the Design Sprint.

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What’s a Design Sprint?

In a nutshell, the Design Sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. It was developed at Google Ventures to help startups make better decisions (without wasting a ton of money).

It’s a  a systemised formulaic workshop , a “greatest hits” of business strategy, innovation, behavior science, and design thinking—packaged neatly into a step-by-step process that any team can use. The Design Sprint allows for cross functional teams to come together, align on a challenge, come up with a variety of solutions (all without the usual hassle of navigating groupthink and office politics!) and ultimately...make decisions faster and better than ever before. 

There’s a reason all of the Silicon Valley giants like Google, Slack, and Twitter swear by Design Sprint–it’s a fast, intense, and proven way to guide a team to an actionable solution. So instead of dabbling into workshops that might or might not work, you can start practicing a method that has been proven effective by hundreds of companies already. 

But even though the process itself sounds cool, you're probably wondering...How exactly will it help you stand out from the crowd and get ahead?

Well...

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The Design Sprint is a MASSIVE time and money saver

Imagine investing thousands of dollars and good six months into a new project that ends up getting no traction… (you can practically hear the company’s bank account draining, right?) 

That’s where the Design Sprint comes into play to save the day.

It was invented at Google Ventures with the sole purpose of giving startups a safe way to test ideas before pouring time and investment into a project that might be a flop. 

The process fully covers the key stages of validating any idea: defining the problem, devising solutions and testing those solutions with real people. 

At the end of a Sprint, your team will be left with a tested prototype and a clear idea of whether you should pursue the new idea or not.  

So guess who’ll get promoted- the person who can save the company tons of money!

Say ‘bye-bye’ to wasting time and money on ideas that would’ve failed and ‘hello’ to stellar growth.