Six ways to improve your meetings using Design Sprint techniques
How to run a productive meeting and engage your audience using a few Design Sprint tools.
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Have you been through this situation? You're invited to a one-hour meeting to decide the next steps of a project in your company. There are 12 people in a room: four of them start talking about their ideas and points of view and the other eight don’t even have the time to say anything. The meeting ends and you leave the room without knowing exactly what was it for. You think of buying an “I Survived Another Meeting That Should Have Been An Email” mug to decorate your desk.
After running a few Design Sprints with my co-workers at OLX (hi there, André Ferreira Dias and Hayssa Schuab), I realized that some of the tools used in the process are also effective ways to run healthy, productive and engaging meetings.
Not familiar with Design Sprints?
According to Google, Design Sprint is:
“…a proven methodology for solving problems through designing, prototyping, and testing ideas with users. Design Sprints quickly align teams under a shared vision with clearly defined goals and deliverables.”
It is all about creating an environment that provides clear communication and alignment: two important things that are often missing in many meetings.
1. Define a good problem statement
As we all know, having the correct problem definition is a key success factor for all projects. However, it is not uncommon for people to have different views of business problems that needs to be solved.
That’s why day one of Design Sprint is all about framing and re-framing the problem statement.
No matter how little time you have, be sure to set aside a few minutes for a problem-framing exercise with the whole team.
There isn’t an exact recipe for it, but here's an article with some helpful activities that I’m eager to try:
2. Invite stakeholders to strengthen ties with the team
The biggest strength of a typical Design Sprint is having the whole team aware of decisions and aligned throughout the sprint steps. Getting early buy-in from stakeholders helps build trust between all parties.
If you're planning activities to find the most appropriate path to follow, be sure to invite the main stakeholders to a meeting. Anyone who is an important decision maker should be there at some point.
In our experience, having stakeholders in the same room as the development team helped create a great sense of collaboration and team alignment.
3. Ideas should stand on their own
Some people are great at selling ideas. In a typical brainstorming session, the ideas of an introvert person may not be noticed.
That’s why, in a Design Sprint, anonymous sketches are displayed on the walls. Even when discussing propositions, idea owners should remain silent, without saying anything to defend their solutions.
Jake Knapp describes the process as follows:
First, people talk about what they liked, then we ask the person who drew it if we missed anything important. Usually the best, most popular ideas are the ones people can understand without an explanation, so the author of the storyboard often doesn’t have anything else to add. This process works far better than letting people explain their ideas first — which almost always uses up a lot of time.
4. With post-its, everyone is invited to contribute
A simple technique to get everyone participating is to ask them to write their ideas on post-its. In sprints, everyone has a few minutes to think about the proposed activity and write the ideas on post-its.
They are shared with the group only after everyone has contributed. The facilitator can collect the post-its, read them aloud and have the team help group them in themes.
5. Dotmocracy is a great way to highlight ideas that stand out
If the purpose of the activity is to generate ideas or sketches, using dot voting is a great way to avoid lengthy discussions. Team preferences get visually highlighted and discussions become much more focused.
Stick the solutions to the walls and distribute the same number of dots to participants. For more detailed and rich discussions, instruct them to vote on parts of the idea instead of the whole.
The facilitator can walk through the canvases and look for areas with more dots to stimulate discussion and ask the whole team’s opinion on them.
6. Timebox your meeting activities
A sprint cuts out ineffective discussions by timeboxing activities. If your meeting has different stages, a great way to get everyone focused is having a schedule and sharing it with the team.
By knowing the goals and the time dedicated to each activity, people will tend to be more objective and straight to the point.
Final words
If these tips are useful, it might be a good idea to read the entire process in The Sprint Book and get detailed information on how to run the sessions and workshops.
However, when preparing for your workshop/meeting, don’t be afraid to adapt tools to your own reality. Look up for references, talk to other people about their experiences and be brave; everyone is experimenting and there are no bulletproof recipes.
Thanks for reading! I hope you have enjoyed. I would love to hear any other thoughts or experiences on this topic. 😉
Say hello at amw.alice@gmail.com or contact me on Linkedin.