Design Sprint Workshop — Austin, TX — September 13th
Jake is a fantastic guy and what he has accomplished is stunning. From the outside, it may seem confusing how he does it all. Traveling the globe teaching and presenting the Design Sprint process, writing Make Time, writing fiction, promoting books, and being a dedicated father. Make Time, Jake’s new book, provides a glimpse into how he does this.
That said, I’m still amazed at how Jake is going to pull off this next feat. Jake and Voltage Control hosted an all-day event in Austin last year and it was so successful we wanted to do it again. Given everything he is juggling right now with the Make Time launch, I thought it was a long shot and was happily surprised when he suggested we run a workshop on September 13th. But what truly shocked me was that he is planning to jog all the way to here!
“After jogging 1762 miles from San Francisco to Austin, TX, I’ll be ready to Sprint!” — Jake Knapp
The Workshop
In this fun, fast-paced, hands-on workshop, you’ll learn the Design Sprint directly from its creator. Jake will rapidly lead you through the process, teaching how the various steps fit together and why and how they work. You’ll get tips and tricks beyond the Sprint book, and you’ll learn how to incorporate these techniques into normal meetings. Jake will give your team a new way of looking at business challenges and the confidence to approach those challenges with renewed energy and optimism. You’ll laugh. You’ll high five. You’ll learn ridiculously useful skills.
“In that one week we cranked through and created the prototype, after having worked on it and gotten no progress for almost two years.” -Jake Knapp
The workshop format is activity-based. Jake won’t just talk at you — you’ll put paper to pen, work with others, and build muscle memory for the sprint activities. And there will be plenty of time for Q&A, so you can learn from Jake’s experience running over 150 Design Sprints with teams at Google and some of the world’s most exciting startups, from consumer to enterprise, from hardware to software, and in fields from healthcare to retail to robotics to agriculture.
You’ll learn how to:
- Lead a team through the Design Sprint process with confidence
- Map out a challenge and choose the most important place to start
- Identify crucial business and product questions to be answered in your sprint
- Sketch a solution with confidence, even if you’re not a designer
- Make smart decisions without lengthy discussion
- Choose the right prototyping method for your product or service
- Test hypotheses before you invest months of work and millions of dollars
- Integrate Design Sprint methods into your product development calendar
Who should attend:
- Founders and executives
- Team leaders and managers
- Product managers
- Marketers
- Designers
- Engineers
- Anyone who wants to have a larger impact on key projects
About the Design Sprint
The Design Sprint is a highly structured five-day process for solving problems and testing new ideas. Invented at Google by Jake Knapp, then perfected with more than 150 startups at Google Ventures, the Design Sprint helps teams solve big problems and test prototype solutions — all in a single week.
Today, the Design Sprint has spread to places like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Airbnb, Uber, IDEO, and LEGO. And it’s not just for companies — Design Sprints have been used by organizations like the United Nations and the European Space Agency; by non-profits, governments, and even museums. Jake’s bestselling book Sprint is available in 22 languages, and smart teams around the world are applying its lessons to give their products and services the best chance of success, and to have a good time along
Day 1 — Map
In the first stage, the team creates a map of their service and chooses one target customer and one target moment to create a tight focus for the sprint. You’ll learn how to set a foundation for this map by setting an optimistic long-term goal and listing pessimistic sprint questions, as well as how to efficiently interview experts on your team.
Day 2 — Sketch
Instead of group brainstorming (which often produces shallow, abstract ideas), the Design Sprint relies on individual work. To create concrete, detailed solutions, everyone sketches. Sketching is normally the exclusive domain of designers, but it offers a unique opportunity for every person on a team to put their solution on a level playing field. You’ll learn how to break down sketching to make it successful for every participant in your sprint.
Day 3 — Decide
Group decisions are a nightmare of sales pitches, arguments, and endless debate. The sprint uses structured decision-making to make the best of everyone’s expertise while shortcutting the baloney. You’ll learn how to coach your own team through making better, faster, more opinionated decisions.
Day 4 — Prototype
The core of the sprint is the development of a realistic prototype in just one day. In the workshop, you’ll learn why this approach is so critical for businesses — and how to choose the right technique to prototype any product or service.
Day 5 — Test
On the final day of every Design Sprint, the team tests their prototype with real target customers. You’ll learn how to structure these interviews to ensure you answer your team’s most pressing questions.
Design Sprints can be adapted for:
- Software
- Hardware
- Services
- Marketing, advertising, and sales
- Internal team processes
About Jake
Jake Knapp the New York Times bestselling author of Sprint. He spent ten years at Google and Google Ventures, where he created the Design Sprint process and ran it over 150 times with companies like Nest, Slack, 23andMe, and Flatiron Health. Today, teams around the world — from Silicon Valley startups to Fortune 500s to schools and governments — are using Design Sprints to solve big problems and test new ideas.
Previously, Jake helped build products like Gmail, Google Hangouts, and Microsoft Encarta, and nowadays, he’s writing new books and hanging around IDEO as a Visiting Fellow. Jake is currently among the world’s tallest designers.
If you’d like to learn more about Jake, check out these excerpts from a conversation I had with Jake last spring. We explored the power of limited time and how time constraints can allow teams to make meaningful progress quickly. Jake also reminded us of the importance of prioritization and that focus helps us get things done. As we discussed prioritizing your time, the conversation naturally veered toward his new book, Make Time. Finally, we spoke about current business trends and how Sprints can improve the current operating model for founders and other pioneers.
“There’s a lot more ideas that people have about business opportunities than there are successful businesses.” -Jake Knapp
