A Forwarding Thinking
Design Sprint Agency

Businesses of any size that are looking to test new concepts, trial new products and features, and ultimately, get vital feedback early in the product development cycle.

How our products and services are designed is of paramount importance to their success. Whether it is a new banking app, the delivery of physical products, or queue management at an airport, the implementation of these processes matters.

In a long-winded way, what we are trying to say is that a design sprint can be beneficial for anyone who is looking to improve their product offering. We have run design sprints for fintech apps, startups, public bodies, and government departments, and have seen them applied successfully in every industry.

If your headquarters has a quiet meeting room you can knuckle down in for a week, we’ll travel to you with all equipment needed! Alternatively, we offer to run Design Sprints from our own offices in Chester and Warrington.

For teams that are spread across different time zones or don’t have a formal office, we also offer Remote Design Sprints, delivering the speed and progress of an in-person sprint, anywhere, anytime.

Your Sprint team should ideally be comprised of circa 7-10 people from multi-disciplinary teams from within your organisation (Sales, Marketing, HR, Finance, Customer Support, Design, Development etc). The crucial part is that your team is made up of experts from all relevant departments who can represent their users, understand their challenges and are familiar with existing processes in order to generate solutions that work for everyone.

You must also allocate a Decider, someone who will make the final decision on your targeted problem, the chosen solution and other big moments. This is ideally someone responsible for the project (a Product Manager, Product Owner or CEO).

If your company outsources your content and product development do not fear. We have in-house designers and copywriters that will work with you throughout your design sprint.

Once we’ve decided on a location, you’ll need to secure commitment from your chosen experts and ensure they’re available for the sprint, assign someone the role of The Decider (the person who will have final say) and bring all of your enthusiasm and energy to the sprint week!

We’ll do the heavy-lifting in recruiting users from your existing customer base or look to recruit user testing participants who match your target demographic.

We’ll line participants up prior to the sprint commencing to ensure a smooth transition from prototype design on day 3 to testing on day 4 ensuring feedback is received in a timely manner.

The design sprint is a tried and tested process that’s been used by hundreds of companies all over the world. It facilitates collaborative thinking to extract, identify and define the core challenges that your business faces before moving into generating solutions that can be validated and tested. Through various workshop exercises you’ll be guided through the process of establishing concepts and ideas, refining them before reviewing together, combining the very best into a tangible solution(s).

Bad ideas aren’t always bad. In any case, only your users can determine whether or not your ideas are bad, however, glaringly awful ideas tend to be eliminated quickly during sprints.

It is important to know what not to do in your next solution if your users did not like your prototype. Ultimately, having built a prototype or prototype feature within 4 days that your users hate is better than spending a lot of money on an expensive product in a drawn out six-month process. So, in this sense, bad ideas are good ideas.