What is the Design Sprint methodology? 

A Design Sprint is a five-phase process developed by Google Ventures, which combines the principles of design thinking, business strategy, behaviour science, and innovation. When applied correctly, the process allows you to complete projects that would previously have taken months of back-and-forth in a single week. This allows you to launch new products, enter new markets, develop new features, and more, in a streamlined, cost-effective way. 

The Design Sprint methodology offers several benefits that can positively impact businesses across various industries.

Benefits of Design Sprints: 

• Efficiency in Problem-Solving:  Design Sprints condense months of work into a few days, fostering rapid problem-solving and idea generation. This efficiency saves time and resources. 

• User-Centric Solutions: by incorporating user feedback early in the process, Design Sprints prioritize creating solutions that directly address user needs and preferences. 

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: bringing together diverse teams—designers, developers, marketers, etc. – fosters collaboration, allowing multiple perspectives to be considered in creating innovative solutions. 

• Risk Mitigation: testing prototypes and gathering user feedback early helps mitigate the risk of investing time and resources in ideas that may not resonate with users. 

• Alignment and Decision-Making: Design Sprints facilitate alignment among team members, enabling quicker decision-making and consensus-building. 

• Iterative Improvement: the iterative nature of Design Sprints encourages continuous improvement through rapid testing and iteration of ideas. 

What are the Businesses Suitable for Design Sprints: 

• Tech Startups and Product Development: Design Sprints are highly effective for startups aiming to develop and iterate on new products or features quickly. 

• E-commerce and Consumer Products: Companies in e-commerce and consumer goods benefit from Design Sprints to enhance user experiences, refine product designs, or innovate new offerings. 

• Service-Based Businesses: Service-based businesses can utilize Design Sprints to improve customer experiences, develop new service offerings, or streamline internal processes. 

• Marketing and Advertising Agencies: Agencies leverage Design Sprints for campaign ideation, creative concept development, and refining marketing strategies. 

• Corporate Innovation and Problem-Solving: Large corporations use Design Sprints to foster innovation, solve complex problems, and initiate cultural change within the organization. 

• Education and Nonprofits: Even in education and nonprofit sectors, Design Sprints can be applied to improve educational programs, design community engagement initiatives, or develop new services. 

In essence, any business seeking rapid problem-solving, innovation and collaboration can benefit from implementing the Design Sprint methodology. It’s adaptable across industries and scalable to suit the needs of different organizations aiming for swift and effective solutions.  

What are the stages of a Design Sprint: 

Day 1 : Map to understand and choose a target 

• This phase involves unpacking the problem, gathering information, and aligning team perspectives. You could emphasize how this stage sets the foundation for the entire sprint. 

Day 2 : Sketch & Diverge

• Encourage a broad range of ideas during this phase. Mention how diverse perspectives lead to innovative solutions. 

Day 3 : Decide

• Discuss the process of converging on the best ideas and making decisions collectively, highlighting the importance of consensus-building. 

Day 4 : Prototype 

• Emphasize the rapid creation of prototypes to visualize and test ideas quickly, saving time and resources. 

Day 5 : Test with target customers 

• Stress the significance of user testing in validating ideas and obtaining valuable feedback for iterations. 

How does it really apply to businesses? Let’s explore some real business cases!

Blue Bottle Coffee: 

• The Challenge:  Blue Bottle Coffee aimed to revamp its in-store experience and explore new product offerings while maintaining its brand identity. 

• The Design Sprint Approach:  Blue Bottle utilized Design Sprints to ideate and prototype new store layouts, menu offerings, and digital experiences. 

• The Outcome: The Design Sprints led Blue Bottle to create innovative in-store layouts, incorporating elements that enhanced customer interaction and highlighted their coffee-making process. Additionally, they experimented with new product offerings based on customer feedback from the prototypes, boosting sales and customer loyalty. 

Squarespace: 

• The Challenge: Squarespace wanted to improve its website-building tools to enhance user experience and simplify the website creation process for its users. 

• The Design Sprint Approach: Squarespace organized Design Sprints involving UX designers, developers, and product managers to brainstorm and prototype new features. 

• The Outcome: the Design Sprints enabled Squarespace to create and test prototypes of new website-building functionalities. This included intuitive drag-and-drop features, improved templates, and enhanced customer support tools. As a result, user feedback during testing helped refine these features, leading to increased user engagement and a higher conversion rate for the platform. 

These case studies showcase how Design Sprints were instrumental in addressing specific challenges faced by these companies, leading to tangible improvements in user experience, product offerings, and overall business success.

What are the tips for Conducting Successful Design Sprints? 

Experienced Facilitation:  Highlight the importance of having an experienced facilitator to guide the team through the process effectively. 

Diverse Team Collaboration: Emphasize the need for cross-functional teams to ensure diverse perspectives and expertise. 

Challenges and Solutions: 

• Time Constraints: Discuss how strict timeboxing in each phase can be challenging but ultimately fosters creativity and focus. 

• Managing Conflicting Ideas: Highlight strategies for navigating disagreements and converging on the best solutions democratically. 

Do not hesitate to contact Variatys in order to help your company solve problems and find new business ideas! 

In today’s dynamic and interconnected world, leadership extends beyond traditional management skills. A leader’s ability to understand and connect with their team members on an emotional level has become a vital factor in achieving success. This article explores the significance of emotional intelligence (EI) in leadership, drawing insights from the groundbreaking work of psychologist Daniel Goleman.

In today’s ever-changing business landscape, companies need to understand their ability to change. There are currently systems that rate companies on 9 common characteristics and skills. These ratings highlight strengths and weaknesses – and help companies determine their overall readiness for change.

The power of change is a major indicator of performance. High-scoring companies are more profitable, have a stronger capacity for growth, offer better returns on investment to their shareholders, unite higher-rated leaders and corporate cultures, and have more engaged employees.

In an ever-changing world, businesses cannot hope to thrive without understanding their own ability to change.

What type of business are you in?

To better understand your company’s change archetype, ask yourself these questions:

In search of refocusing

The strength of these companies lies in their energy. They have had many successes. They are constantly innovating and their employees are able to accomplish a lot. However, like young children playing football, all employees want the ball. This group clearly has weaknesses in direction and connection purpose.

To address this, leaders in this group should focus on the big picture, connecting business activities to mission and strategy. They must define an ambitious plan and then tell the story again of how the people of the company can turn this ambition into reality. It can also be useful to identify key initiatives and assign them to agile teams, able to connect different disciplines, functions and departments of the company.

Stucked and skeptical

Companies recognize in this archetype have good ideas and have achieved many successes in the past, but a significant part of their change is confined to the local level. They tend to underestimate the full scope of what they have undertaken. They are generally weak when it comes to action, scaling, and connection. Innovations seem delayed and do not spread within the company. This makes employees demotivated because they wonder why all the efforts made produce such a low impact. No leader can get out of this situation alone. Success can only emerge if leaders rekindle the enthusiasm of employees, starting to tell a new story and convince them that they can achieve it.

Aligned but constrained

In companies in this situation, employees perform as a unit, unite together and are all looking in the same direction. Early success has raised their expectations and they now face strong constraints. These companies do not really have the necessary profiles to embody key positions in the management of the increasing changes and the numerous ruptures that this implies.

To solve these problems, these companies must identify and address the bottlenecks in their capacities. They may need to rearrange their priorities and add resources when necessary. This involves closing skills gaps within the business, bringing in new talent and helping existing talent develop new skills.

Struggling to hold

In this case, the teams are in a grueling race. Every day, participants must adapt to changing, unpredictable terrain and the strategies of their competitors. Companies in this category must better anticipate what awaits them around the corner and learn to adjust their strategies accordingly. To trigger this transformation, they must first take stock. Is their strategic direction still relevant? If not, they need to set new priorities and allocate their resources differently.

Today, more than ever, companies must measure, understand and boost their capacity for change. These are unprecedented times and the challenge for any leader is to build and maintain businesses that will thrive in a world that is constantly accelerating and subject to unpredictable change. In order to boost the power of change, here are 3 key steps:

1. Rely on facts

Identify precisely what you can and must improve. Small changes today are better than big changes later i.e. test, learn and repeat

2. Disrupt the way of working

Address current and future changes not according to separate projects but by reasoning in terms of organizational change.

3. Mobilize managers and leaders

Transformations are the best training ground for the next generation of leaders. In order to disrupt old patterns, it is important to adopt a new approach and decisively improve its capacity for change.

Creating an environment where curiosity is stimulated, where data trumps insights, where everyone can experiment, where testing is conducted ethically, and where managers embrace a new model of leadership.

Case study: Booking.com

End of 2017, just before the start of a busy winter tourist season. The design director at Booking.com offers to test a completely different new homepage for their website.

Exit the many choices of hotels, vacation rentals and destinations, the new version would only display a small window asking the Internet user where he wants to go, on what date and with how many people, and it does not would only offer 3 headings: “accommodation”, “flights” and “car rental”. All other elements (photos, text, buttons and messages) that Booking.com took years to improve would be removed.

The CEO at the time, Gillian Tans, was rather skeptical. Indeed, she fears that this radical change will sow confusion among loyal customers. Lukas Vermeer, then head of the strategic experimentation team, bets a bottle of champagne that it will cause the conversion rate to drop i.e. the number of visitors to the site who actually make a reservation.

The reception was therefore mixed, however the management did not issue a veto. For what ? Because it would have gone against one of the key principles of Booking.com: any employee can test what they want, without having to obtain permission from management.

Booking.com, like many digital companies (Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft), continuously performs more than a thousand rigorous tests, which by some estimates amounts to more than 20,000 tests per year . It is all these experiments that have enabled this Dutch start-up to become in less than 20 years the largest online booking and accommodation platform in the world.

The power of online experimentation is not only for the digital giants, companies that were not born in the digital age such as FedEx and H&M, have also adopted “online testing to identify the best digital touchpoints, design choices, discounts and product recommendations.

Companies with this culture of experimentation remain rare. Indeed, instead of performing hundreds or thousands of online experiments each year, many firms are content with a handful of tests that do not really change things.

If testing is so useful, why aren’t companies doing more of it?

When companies seek to increase their capabilities for online experimentation, they often find that the barriers are not in tools or technology, but rather in behaviors, beliefs and shared values.

For every successful experience, a dozen more will fail, and for many leaders who are focused on efficiency, predictability, and success, those failures are pointless.

However, to innovate well, a company must make experimentation an integral part of its daily life, even when budgets are tight.

This means creating an environment where the curiosity of employees is stimulated, where data is trusted rather than opinions, where any employee can perform tests, where all experiments are carried out in an ethical manner. , and where managers adopt a new model of leadership.

The key points of this case study:

It is corporate culture (not tools or technology) that keeps companies from performing the hundreds, if not thousands, of tests they should perform each year and then apply the results.

It even appears to be less risky to carry out a large number of experiments than a small number. If a company only performs a handful of tests a year, their chances of getting positive results are slim to none. The failure is then resounding.

In a nutshell, to create a corporate culture of experimentation, here are some steps to take:

1. Encourage risk taking: It is important to create an environment where employees are encouraged to take risks and try new things. This can be done by rewarding employees for their innovative ideas and celebrating failures as learning opportunities.
2. Foster collaboration: Collaboration is key to encouraging experimentation. Employees should be encouraged to work together and share their ideas to find innovative solutions.
3. Empower: Employees must have access to the tools and resources needed to experience
4. Establish clear processes: Clear, well-defined processes can help employees experiment effectively. Employees need to know how to come up with ideas, how to test them, and how to evaluate the results.
5. Measure results: It is important to measure the results of experiments to determine their success. Employees should be encouraged to document their results and share their learnings with the entire company.

By following these 5 steps, companies can create a corporate culture of experimentation that encourages sustainable innovation and long-term growth.

How to successfully launch digital tools to improve performance and reduce costs ?

Digital tools are undeniably real levers to reduce the cost to serve. All industries pass through it, even the most conservative ones such as private banks. The CEOs are formal, cost reduction makes it possible to remain competitive while training employees in new working methods.

Nevertheless, digital allows substantial savings only if the processes and working methods change in depth. The target users of digital tools often tend to believe that these tools are additional tools that overlap without seeing how their tasks could gain in efficiency and they, at the same time, in digital competence. Indeed, in a globalized and unstable world, it is important to broaden your range of skills and combine expertise intrinsic to your activity and digital skills.

Still too often digital tools are implemented without real strategies for process change and support in new working methods.

Use case:

A reputable and international bank in Geneva created a “digital” department 3 years ago with the aim of:

• manage the implementation of digital tools
• modernize the bank and its relationship with its customers
• reduce its cost to serve

Despite the relevance of the tools made available to employees, several of the tools put in place have encountered low rates of use by target users and we are going to analyze the causes.

Make tools available that have not had a pilot phase:

For lack of time granted once the product is delivered, it is quite common to see tools deployed without real test phases and especially a pilot phase so that the product is tested by target users. Untested or unproven tools that are put in the hands of users are very quickly faced with rejection from them. Indeed, users believe that a new tool that is put in their hands must work perfectly in order to consider its adoption. Many companies make the mistake of putting digital products in the hands of users that do not work properly in everyday life and this ends up leading the user to not want to use it.
The CEOs of companies are formal, digital is a real lever to reduce the cost to serve, but the challenge is to restore user confidence in digital. All companies are faced with employee criticism of IT teams. These are often seen by employees as slow, expensive and too focused on cyber security issues.

In this specific use case, too often, internal users were critical of the new digital tools put in their hands. Indeed, in addition to having new tools to learn, users were faced with an aging IT which was a source of daily problems (slow systems, problem of data scattered in several systems, etc.).

Make tools available without changing work processes:

When a new tool is made available to users without the work processes changing, it is typical to see that the tools are used very little. Indeed, everyday life attracts users who do not take the time to change their work habits and use digital tools as a lever to increase productivity.
Some change management methodologies are very effective in getting tools adopted and users changing the way they work. Here are some actions that can be put in place with the help of qualified consultants who know how to manage deep transformations:

• Provide individual support and training
• Have driving ambassadors in each team
• Have strong support from management and top management so that processes change in a given time
• Make new ways of working compulsory with a learning period

This last approach was adopted by the management of this Geneva bank for the implementation of the electronic signature and the results were very convincing. There was a 150% increase in the use of e-signature and customers were delighted to be able to receive their contract securely in ATAWAD mode i.e. anytime, anywhere, any device. Indeed, they no longer needed to be at home waiting for registered mail by courier; they could now sign from their smartphone wherever they were. Signing time went from 2 weeks to 2 hours on average. In addition to enabling the teams to gain in efficiency, the bank has also gained in customer satisfaction. This process improvement also had a positive impact on the bank’s ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance). Employees no longer needed to print documents and use couriers to deliver contracts to international customers who live in all corners of the world.

Strong managerial support remains one of the keys to the adoption of digital tools and a real change in the way of working. When management decides to include the adoption of digital tools in the KPIs of employees or to make it mandatory, real adoption is felt and working methods change in depth. Thanks to digitalization, productivity is becoming the norm in the company and frees up time for high value-added tasks that generate profitability.