Would Seniors Rent Units in a $30 Million Townhome Community Development in Niagara Falls? This is a story about a Design Sprint. If you’ve never heard of that, you can learn more here or read the book. Intro In May 2018, a real estate developer approached me to determine if they should build a $30 million townhome community for active seniors aged 59–74 in Niagara Falls, Canada. Why? A year prior, the developer built a retirement residence in a different city but only managed to achieve a 50% occupancy rate. Why? A desk research report provided by their bank’s financing partner ..read more

Applying the core tenets of the Design Sprint to determine my life’s direction Photo by Maksym Ostrozhynskyy on Unsplash We’d diverged and converged on a concept over a series of two-hour sessions over the course of two months. The concept was her life, her business, and what she was going to do next. A year prior, I’d piloted the same process with a dear friend who had just been through a health crisis and was on the brink of something good. What would she decide? What would she do? She’d come for the weekend, and together, we’d worked through the sessions I’d been inspired to desig ..read more

Why Shorten the Design Sprint Process? At Phaidra, working effectively together in an all-remote environment is extremely important. Collaboration and open communication are important attributes that define our culture. Creating a shortened version of the Design Sprint process seemed like a better solution than the traditional whiteboard / take-home assignments because every candidate is given the same amount of time, everyone begins with the same amount of information, and everyone learns together. We felt this gave everyone the most accurate representation of collaboration and open comm ..read more

This is the story of a startup called Phaidra, who makes an advanced A.I. that helps industrial plants save huge amounts on their energy bills. Last year my VC firm Character invested in Phaidra, then ran Design Sprints to help them find product-market fit. Today, Phaidra is announcing a $25M Series A. So this post is a bit of a brag because I’m stoked that the sprints worked and I’m proud as heck of the Phaidra team. But more than anything, I hope this behind-the-scenes case study might be useful to anyone who’d like to use Design Sprints for product-market fit. I’ve led a lot of Design Spri ..read more

When running virtual Design Sprints (or, really any other kind of workshop), Miro or MURAL* should primarily be used as a presentation tool rather than a collaboration tool. In this blog, I will unpack why this is my conviction and provide a framework that will equip any facilitator, project manager, or leader of any virtual meeting, workshop, or Sprints to determine just how collaborative to make their virtual whiteboard experience. *or Figjam, Lucidspark, Stormboard, Google Slides, Canva Presentations, etc. — the framework applies to all digital collaborative tools‍ https://medium.com/media ..read more

Hi, my name is Mehdi, I’m a UX Designer and I’m managing a design team within Capgemini Belgium. Today, I am glad to share with you the Handicap International (HI) Design story that changed my perspective on how to run a design project. The Context The Belgian HI website saw a traffic drop of 70% over one year, the bounce rate was huge, and overall digital engagement was poor. On top of that HI was looking for new ways to engage with their users and to gain loyalty of their younger supporters. The Challenge Boost the donation rate & improve digital ways of working within HI in just 4 ..read more

The 7 things I learned when I used Design Sprint methods to help my kids plan for my wife’s birthday If you’ve never heard of Design Sprints, you can learn more here or read the book. Today is my wife’s 30th birthday, and I wanted our two “older” kids to be involved (sorry 1-year-old son, maybe when you’re older). At 4 and 2 years old, they’re full of fun, thoughtful, imaginative ideas… so I used Design Sprint activities to help them plan and execute a fun birthday morning. The one gift my wife will NEVER get from me is my ceasing from wearing visors.The steps: Get mom out ..read more

Discover how we helped a social enterprise promote its mental health support platform We are a small branding studio called Brandenstein that uses Design Sprint and Brand Sprint to help social impact businesses overcome the struggles of finding the needed support from their partners at a faster rate. Our branding process is based on the Design Sprint process and takes 7 weeks. As the Design Sprint is a five-day process, it represents only one week in our process and all the other ones are similar to it. In March, a non-profit organization from the UK called Mindsum came to us t ..read more

Why they happen, even to experienced facilitators, and how you can prevent them Photo by William Iven on Unsplash This is a story about a Design Sprint. If you’ve never heard of Design Sprints, you can learn more here or read the book. Design Sprints are one of the best ways to make a giant leap forward with your product, based on real data rather than guesswork. However, running a sprint isn’t as easy as downloading a sprint schedule and following all the exercises. At Parallel, we’ve been running Design Sprints for 6 years now, and we’ve seen everything go wrong. Whether it’s ..read more

This case study was an assignment project I did as part of springboard’s UI/UX program using a modified version of GV’s design sprint process Platform: IOS application Role: Bitesize UX provided the prompt for this project; my role was to synthesize the research data, brainstorm, design, and test the solutions. What is Tiny Tales? Tiny Tales is an app that helps parents find great books and short stories to read to their young children. https://medium.com/media/5050bb6ac41d782c3face5226a1b0fcd/href Scroll down to know more ⬇⬇⬇ ?Problem statement- Finding the right book to read ..read more