So how did this fast-paced workshop help us gain clarity and develop a strategy for the year ahead? And how can your business use a design sprint to smash out your goals in 2022?

At StudioC, we love to practice what we preach. So this year we decided to start the year off with a design sprint, which is a process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas.

Google Ventures created the concept of a business sprint, using IDEO's design-thinking approach, to solve difficult problems fast. We've adapted their model to create a flexible and fun way to help businesses move quickly and effectively towards their goals.

We like to start a design sprint by understanding the desired endpoint - that is what tangible progress or creative output we want to achieve. For StudioC, our goal was to create an actionable business plan, something that we could lean on to make decisions and track our progress, rather than a jargony book that just sits on a shelf gathering dust.

We also had some practical outcomes that we wanted to create along the way - a refresh of our logo, branding and website, a marketing plan, and some new systems for our growing team.

Our sprint included a range of activities, including:

By the end of the four days, we'd smashed out a detailed business canvas, created a new logo and brand design, prototyped a new website design, brainstormed loads of marketing ideas, and made a plan to reach our personal and business goals for 2022. All this while building our team around a shared vision for the future and having some fun along the way. It was epic!

We love design sprints because of their bias to action. We don't just talk about things; we brainstorm ideas and then we move swiftly to create things. It may just be a first cut, but it's a start. And putting something out there for feedback is better than trying to make it perfect the first time round!

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So how can you use a design sprint to achieve your business goals this year?

Here are some suggestions to get you started.

• Think about what tangible things you'd like to achieve during the sprint. This could be producing a business canvas or business plan, but are there other small jobs you can tick off along the way? Including tangible goals will add to your team's sense of accomplishment and feeling that the time spent was worthwhile.
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• Do you have an area of your business that feels stuck? This could be an ideal area to focus on during a sprint.
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• Are there times your team struggles to communicate or work together? Can you use the sprint to hone in on ways to improve this? Or to understand one another better?
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• A sprint is typically customer-centric, so what do you not know about your customers that would help you serve them? How could you introduce user testing into your sprint?

If you're keen to learn more about design sprints and how the process could help your business, get in touch! We run fully customised design sprints to suit your needs.

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