Design Thinking + Lean Startups + Design Sprints

Google gathers three leaders and practitioners of Lean Startup and Design Thinking to discuss how Lean Startup, Design Thinking, and Design Sprint methodologies have helped businesses solve problems better and quicker than they have in the past.

Design Thinking, Lean Startups, and Design Sprints

Click for the link to the YouTube video:

Summary

The conversation focuses on the similarities between design thinking and lean startup ideas and how design sprints are at the intersection of both of those approaches.

The common foundation: understand and empathize with customers, then act on what you learn. To over-simplify the processes they share:

• Learn from customers.
• Design solutions to their problems.
• Make those designs concrete and testable.
• Measure how well you do (by learning from customers).
• Repeat.

Who’s Who?

Eric Ries

Eric Ries of Lean Startup fame is the author of The Lean Startup. He helps businesses put those Lean Startup tenets into practice and is an “Entrepreneur in Residence” for Harvard Business School.

Tim Brown

Tim Brown is the CEO of famed design and consulting firm IDEO, practitioner of Design Thinking, and author of Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation.

Jake Knapp

Jake Knapp is a Google Ventures partner and the creator of a specific type of design sprint that Google Ventures uses to quickly improve companies they invest in.

What Is the Lean Startup Methodology?

“The Lean Startup provides a scientific approach to creating and managing startups and getting a desired product to customers’ hands faster.”
— Eric Ries

A core tenet of Lean Startup is validated learning. Quickly test your assumptions with customers, users, and/or prospects by running experiments. As an innovator dealing with uncertainties, your first job is not to measure progress by how much you build, but instead, by how much you learn about what works and what doesn’t.

What Is Design Thinking?

“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”
— Tim Brown

What Are Design Sprints?

A design sprint is a framework to solve business problems using design in a short amount of time.

“Working together with companies in a sprint, we shortcut the usual endless-debate cycle and compress months of time into a single week. Instead of waiting to launch a minimal product to understand if an idea is any good, teams get great data from a prototype.”
— Jake Knapp