Why Are Design Sprints Useful to Product Managers?

Having originated from the need to solve a big product need fast, it’s safe to say design sprints are a natural fit for product managers looking to build better products, craft memorable experiences and solve pressing product questions faster. 

Why are design sprints useful to product managers you ask? Product managers benefit from design sprints because the intense 5 day process allows product teams to quickly identify the key problems, align around a specific goal, create a host of viable solutions, design a realistic prototype, and validate the hypothesis based on real user feedback. This makes it a fantastic way of testing ideas and concepts at low cost, fast.

Read on to see the specific ways product managers can benefit from adding design sprints to their product toolbox.

Why do product managers find design sprints useful?

1. They validate your product hypothesis early

Often, the biggest problem when teams are proposing an idea or launching a new product is that they assume they already know what their customers want. It’s a self-given sense of assurance that what you design and build is exactly what’s needed, without really talking to the person who will be using it (not very UX orientated of them!).

This is where design sprints come in handy; they help teams answer those big challenging questions without having to actually launch the product to great cost through a strictly defined process. 

Ultimately, the product manager can create backlogs based on validated user needs that solve genuine business problems based on actual findings, rather than those based on gut feeling (that could turn out to be expensive flops). This has the side benefit of reassuring your product team that they are on the right track and that the idea is worth their time and effort. 

4. The team expands beyond the product team

Expanding on the previous point, design sprints provide the opportunity for everyone to contribute to the success of a product. This is because decision making is democratic and nobody in the team holds a passive role in the sprint. The success of the process relies upon the diversity of a team, aligning on the big problem and knuckling down to get ideas together.

According to Douglas Ferguson, Founder of Voltage Control, the entire team benefits and learns from working collaboratively, ‘”Simply getting people talking, disconnected by an organisation’s complex structure, is an undervalued part of the Design Sprint process.” 

As all individuals in the team are given equal responsibility for effective decision making, there is less pressure on the product manager to make the decisions alone or use their sole expertise to make decisions. 

5. Product managers can embed the prototyping mindset

Plenty of product teams still run on the ‘spec it, build it, launch’ mindset. That can be perfectly fine for some, but where we’re testing big bets and want an indication of user sentiment before going all in, the prototyping mindset is the go-to approach.

Prototyping has the advantages of:

• Being lower cost to produce (don’t require a single line of code)
• Being realistic enough to gather feedback
• Being early enough that you can iron out any problem areas or usability issues through minimal testing (around 5 tests can find 85% of all usability issues)

Because design sprints produce tangible results quickly from prototypes, team’s can reprogram their backlogs according to what will make the biggest impact for end users and trim any unnecessary features. 

6. They emphasise how important design is to product success

When a product comes to mind, we often think about what it does. The functionality.

But what often goes under the radar is how usable something is, the journey customers go to get from A to B, and how things feel to use.

When you consider that 88% of users would not return to a product if they had a bad experience, how something is designed is critical to it’s overall success when live.

Design sprints build in an emphasis on good design in multiple ways:

• You start with mapping out the user journey, giving a good insight into user expectations, where the company needs to act, etc., which all plays a role in how you build your digital experience too
• Teams will storyboard out the chosen solution, meaning you’re not going straight to coding while winging it
• You gather usability test results and recordings of actual users that can be used to iterate on the existing prototype

7. You never fail a design sprint (and it’s just the beginning)

Even if the design sprint does not end with a prototype that’s validated to be the right thing, it does not mean it is necessarily a failure.

Design sprints often leave product teams with 3 possible outcomes:

• Hypothesis proven: Concept seems to be positively received by the users, proving the hypothesis. Make improvements based on the feedback and retest in follow up sprints to prepare towards formal development
• Hypothesis partially proven/unproven: Feedback seems to not give the full picture of if the concept will work. May require additional testers or further tweaks to verify
• Hypothesis disproven: Concept seems to be negatively received by users, showing the hypothesis to be false. Teams can go back to the drawing board with the feedback received and prepare for a new sprint with a concept that accounts for the information gained

Teams may end a sprint with more questions than answers, but being able to address these questions before a launch means that product managers get to see the bigger picture through the users eyes and allow the feedback to guide the next big step.

How Can Design Sprints Benefit Product Managers?

This table summarises some of the key benefits design sprints have for product managers. 

How Involved Should a Product Manager Be in the Design Sprint Process?

Whilst the design sprint is primarily based around collaborative working, the product manager is still expected to lead in the understanding of the business and prioritising decisions in the sprint. After all, the product manager, also known as the ‘Decider’ is ultimately responsible for making the final judgement call. They should be available at all times during the process to share insight, manage information appropriately and ensure all tasks are completed.  

To find out more about the responsibilities and qualities of the product manager, be sure to take a look at our recent blog.