Week 1: Sprint Workshop with Jake Knapp

Standing Next to One of World’s Tallest Designers

This past month, I filled myself with experiences participating in the 2017 Italia Innovation Program in Treviso, Italy … and with lots of gelato.

Over the course of 4-weeks, we were exposed to workshops led by industry leaders from IDEO, Google Ventures, and business/design schools across the country. We were also paired up with an Italian company, such as De’Longhi; Barilla; and illy, to explore and ideate solutions for the companies’ respective challenges.

I was selected to work with De’Longhi Group — a small domestic appliance manufacturer with sub-brands De’Longhi, Kenwood, and Braun.

De’Longhi provided us with three challenges:

1. Improve the in-store customer purchasing experience.
2. Communicate the technology behind De’Longhi products to the regular consumer.
3. Change the brand perception from metal home comfort products to personal well-being products.

I explored and built user-centric solutions with the help of four team members Sonja, Clair, Allison, and Marco from Harvard, Parsons, and Glasgow University and mentors Jake Knapp (Google Ventures), Bill Burnett (Stanford d.School), Mitch Sinclair (IDEO), and Vincent Stanley (Patagonia), among others.

For the first week, we had the chance to participate in a 2-day Sprint workshop with Jake Knapp.

The Sprint

Image Credit: GV

The Sprint is a process that helps teams, companies, and people solve problems and test new ideas in five days. This phenomenal process was built at Google Ventures to help companies quickly ideate & test with users. Jake Knapp joined the program to help us quickly flesh out ideas to solve our companies’ challenges.

Monday

To get started, we had to pick a facilitator and a decider. Allison and I served as facilitators and Sonja served as the decider. The facilitator’s job is to take notes on any discussion that happens while the decider’s job is to make tough decisions to end lengthy discussions. With our roles, we got started.

HMW (How Might We)

Some of Our HMW’s

We started off with How Might We’s. The purpose of these are to reframe problems as opportunity statements. As Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO states:

The ‘how’ part assumes there are solutions out there — it provides creative confidence. ‘Might’ says we can put ideas out there that might work or might not — either way, it’s OK. And the ‘we’ part says we’re going to do it together and build on each other’s ideas. — Harvard Business Review

Ask the Experts

Because nobody knows everything, we shared info about De’Longhi Group and personal well-being. Here are some key takeaways:

1. Temperature is the most important factor for comfort.
2. 75% of small domestic appliances are sold in store.
3. De’Longhi is B2B and does not own the shops where products are sold.
4. Space is often limited within stores.

Long Term Goal

Being super optimistic and looking 12–18 months into the future, we decided that our long term goal was:

Help people live better daily lives by interacting with De’Longhi home comfort products.

Metric

To measure the success of our long term goal, we established our metrics. If we could associate De’Longhi with wellness, more people will purchase its products. We also believed that if we communicated the technology successfully, competitor consumers will convert to De’Longhi and leave positive reviews. Here are our metrics:

• Increase in-store sales by 20%
• Increase conversion rates of competitor consumers by 10%
• Increase in positive feedback such as online customer reviews.

Sprint Questions

For this part, we got pessimistic. We thought about things that could go wrong. Some included:

1. Is heating/cooling/air quality an aspect of personal well-being?
2. Do people even care about personal well-being?

Map, Sort HMW’s & Target

Our Map with Sorted HMW’s & Target Areas

We listed the customers and key players on the left side and wrote our end goal on the right. Then we created a flowchart to show how our customers interacted with the product.

We established four actors in our flow: e-commerce customers, in-store customers, distributors (e.g. BestBuy), and sales associates. Our end goal was the sale of the De’Longhi product.

There were many instances where end customers and the retail business interacted with each other. Customers could go online to read online reviews or go into a store to talk with a sale associate and test out the product.

After looking at our map, we placed HMW’s where they belonged. Then individually, we placed red post-its on areas that we would like to test. Sonja decided to focus on where the in-store customers interacted with the products.

Tuesday & Wednesday

The De’Longhi Team

Lightning Demos

We looked at a range of companies that were associated with wellness and had great customer service. Then we captured good ideas by quickly sketching them out.

Some of the companies that came up in ours were: JetBlue, Soulcycle, Sweetgreen, Blue Apron, Dyson, and boutique stores in Paris. Here are some takeaways from these companies:

1. Sweetgreen presented wellness colors within their brand.
2. Soulcycle had promotions for customers to try a class at a discounted price.
3. JetBlue provided affordable yet comfortable flights.
4. Boutique stores in Paris did not force customers to purchase goods but treated them well with great customer service.

Sketch

Our Solution Sketches

This section was broken down into 4 parts and completed individually:

1. Notes — Within 20 minutes, we gathered notes from Monday’s exercises and put it onto one page.
2. Ideas — Within 20 minutes, we brainstormed ideas and circled the most promising ones.
3. Crazy 8's — We folded a sheet of paper into 8 sections and spent 1 minute sketching variations of one of the selected ideas.
4. Solution Sketch — Within 30–90 minutes, we created a three-panel storyboard. It had to be self-explanatory and anonymous.

I sketched a “De’Longhi Test Room,” a mock living room that would be placed within a retail store for customers to sit inside and enjoy the De’Longhi product. A camera inside would capture the facial expressions and voices of enjoyment/relaxation to replay to the customers after the experience.

Structured Decision Making

After placing our solution sketches onto the wall, we had to make a decision on which solutions we will prototype. Here are the steps we followed to make the decision:

1. Put dots on ideas that you think are valuable.
2. Have a 3 minute discussion about each solution. If you created the idea, you cannot talk.
3. At the end of the discussion, the creator can clarify any parts of the sketch.
4. Each person silently chooses a favorite idea but the decider gets to make the final decision.

For our team, we decided unanimously on Marco’s idea of an interactive awareness installation. Its purpose was to communicate that temperature is the basis for comfort. This installation could be placed in stores, museums, or in the streets. Then Sonja, the decider chose Clair’s idea of placing De’Longhi machines in local furniture stores to help customers experience the product in a more comfortable setting with couches.

Unfortunately, our Sprint with Jake Knapp ended here because of time. Though our team came up with useful ideas that would help us in the later weeks, this was not our final solution process.

Q&A

What are some books you suggest on reading?

The Sprint Book (Jake Knapp), Made to Stick (Chip & Dan Heath), Getting Real (37 Signals)

How should we prototype & test in the upcoming days?

Credit: Jake Knapp

Use Keynote. It is really fast and easy to prototype and the output is “just right.” For testing, remember that the users are not experts on the product. The reaction of the users is very important. Keep them thinking out loud as you ask who/what/where/when/why/how questions. Watch the Five-Act Interview.

What I Learned

1. Group brainstorms don’t work — oftentimes, people may over/undervalue depending on the team members. Work individually.
2. Consensus sucks — one person (the decider) should make the final decision so that risky ideas exist and live.
3. Getting started > perfection — it is more important to get started than worrying about how to make things perfect.
4. During sketches, concrete is better than abstract — be clear about what you are sketching, you can do this by using words on the page.

Looking Forward

Though I have never tried a Sprint before, I think it went fairly well. Oftentimes when I go through design processes, it is very hard to make a decision. Having a decider during the Sprint helped a lot when there were tough decisions.

The most difficult part of my Sprint experience was on the second day when we had to do Crazy 8 sketches. Creating a new version of an idea every minute was challenging; I would end up tweaking a minor detail. I hope to better open up my mind in future Sprints.

Overall, I enjoyed the Sprint workshop and would love to do one with a team in the future. I think it is a great way to quickly test ideas and gather feedback.

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This is a summary of my experience participating in a 2-day Sprint workshop with Jake Knapp. I was not directly working for De’Longhi Group but through the Italia Innovation Program.