Innovation in Action: Behind the Scenes at Design Sprint Academy

Eating our own dog food: How we develop a new offering at DSA?

Talking to customers is one of the most important things an organization can do, yet it's astonishing how often this critical activity is overlooked. It's through these interactions we find the insights to create better products and solve our customers' biggest challenges.

Listening to our customers (many of whom reading this I hope) revealed a common struggle: earning stakeholders' trust and securing support for innovation projects .

We believe that the root cause is the misalignment between innovation and business goals, so we developed a solution to fix this problem - allowing innovation teams to align their efforts to the business objectives while shedding light for business stakeholders on the value of innovation and its direct impact on achieving their KPIs.

We're in the validation phase, and if the problem resonates, I’d like to invite you to join our research. In return for your insights, you'll gain complimentary access to both the tool and workshop once it’s officially launched—it will be a premium offering.

Register here to contribute and benefit.

In essence, we practice what we preach, developing our own products and services with the same rigor and client-centric approach we recommend.

Client Spotlight: The 4U Problem Framing Workshop in Warsaw

Solving the right problem and aligning stakeholders around them must be one of the main challenges for any organization on the face of Earth.

We already have a solid Problem Framing approach to identify and define problems, and thought the 4Us framework would be a great addition to our process - helping business leaders evaluate and prioritize the problems they just framed, thus making better decisions.

While excited about the potential, we wanted to see if it lives to the hype, so we put it to test last Friday during a Problem Framing Workshop with the IT group of a large company.

During the workshop, the teams surfaced and framed problems impacting customer experience or affecting internal workflows, problems to be solved during the upcoming company-wide innovation hackathon in a few weeks. But without stakeholder buy-in, any solutions are destined to go nowhere, making the hackathon a futile, albeit fun event, further undermining the credibility of future innovation efforts.

The 4Us framework helped teams prioritize high-impact problems and effectively communicate the necessity of immediate action to stakeholders, emphasizing problems with dire consequences and inadequate existing solutions.

It worked like a charm. Now that’s battle tested, it’s been added to our Problem Framing arsenal as a an one-hour problem prioritization and communication workshop with business stakeholders.

On the Horizon: Upcoming AI Projects

How do we get started with AI ?

That’s the question every organization is trying to figure out, or should be trying to as there is an inevitability about AI, which no one will escape. Being ahead in the AI game could mean the difference between leading the market or playing catch-up.

As usual first movers will win, like this customer we begin working with.

Our plan to kickstart AI adoption for them involves a multi-step approach:

First, we'll bring their Executive Leadership Team (ELT) together for an AI Opportunity Mapping workshop. This session is designed not only to educate the leadership on the potential of AI but also to pinpoint where AI could have the most significant impact within their business.

Following this high-level mapping, we'll dive deeper into identified business areas with Problem Framing workshops. These sessions aim to refine these opportunities into actionable AI project ideas.

Then, using AI Design Sprints, teams will rapidly ideate AI solutions, build prototypes and test them with end-customers.

Our approach is guided by a few core principles:

• Avoid the tech-first temptation (e.g ChatGPT for this), instead we go human-first

• Prioritize real customer needs and tangible business cases for AI application to secure stakeholder support

• Mix subject matter experts (from the business) with AI specialists. This ensures that the solutions not only meet customer and business needs but are also technically feasible.

I will share in the next newsletters how this journey is unfolding, lessons learned and outcomes achieved.

Our Last Public Design Sprint Bootcamp: Don’t miss out!

We did our the first Design Sprint Training in 2016. At the time we were the only company outside Google offering it.

Then we added Problem Framing to our training program, a course which we fittingly launched in 2018 at Google, the birth place of design sprints.

Finally we added Advanced Facilitation, as our participants wanted to go beyond learning the process, and gaining more confidence and skills to apply it.

What resulted was a comprehensive all around program teaching creative problem-solving, critical decision-making and facilitation. This program has reached thousands through our open bootcamps in cities like Berlin, London, New York, Bangalore, and Melbourne. Participants have learned, shared, and grown together.

Here’s a short video capturing the program's spirit and the vibrant energy of our bootcamps.

Also our business model shifted, and this program is only available for our corporate customers.

However we want to bid farewell to our public sessions in style with one final bootcamp in London, starting March 11th. It will be hosted in one of the most inspiring innovation spaces imaginable – at YOOX Net-a-Porter. And we've got some exciting 'surprise' AI add-ons and fresh methodologies/frameworks never before shared in any of our previous sessions.

We kept the prices at the 2019 level, so hopefully that will make it easier to join. Below are the booking links, and remember, as a newsletter reader, you’re entitled to an additional 15% discount with the code SprintForward15.

• Design Sprint Training

• Problem Framing Training

• Advanced Facilitation

• Design Sprint Bootcamp (all three courses above)

There won't be any other open public training sessions by DSA this year. So let's join forces to make this an experience to remember.