When each of us thrive, we all thrive, and from this spirit my Sprint For Good program was born. The program is a way to bring deserving organizations and missions a chance to meaningfully move their business, product and/or service forward. That includes the opportunity to participate in full-blown Design Sprints, Strategic Planning Sessions, and more.

Struggling to make progress, launch a new idea or hit business objectives? There’s usually a solution, and it often takes a workshop or planning session to lead you and your team to it. To get started, take this quiz to find out which workshop option is right for your business.

Use these approaches and navigational tools to help eliminate surprises, and align the team so everyone is on a similar page heading into the Design Sprint. Humans are creatures of habit, so taking some of the uncertainty out of this major schedule change help folks show up with positive attitudes ready to work toward an outcome.

Testing is arguably one of the most critical parts of the Design Sprint process. If you’re running a remote process, here’s a straightforward and streamlined way to stay organized and collect this key feedback from testers.

The most remarkable part about facilitating a Design Sprint is the ability to move from stuck to prototype in a handful of days regardless of the specifics, team politics, or challenges. Here are three steps to get there.

Do you really need five whole days for a Design Sprint? It might seem like a lot of time initially, but the truth is that five days really isn’t that much time if it keeps you from investing months, maybe even a year, in something that isn't right. What I love about the five-day timeframe of a Design Sprint is that it offers enough breathing room to really explore the problem space then design and prototype an awesome solution without cutting corners just for the sake of saving a few hours.

Have you decided to lead your first Design Sprint and need some support? Or, maybe you’ve done it before and are looking for ways to make the experience even smoother and more productive. Every situation may be unique, but the DNA of the Design Sprint is hardwired to guide effective outcomes. With that in mind, and thanks to my own trial and error, I’ve honed in on what I think are the key pillars for a successful Design Sprint.

We know Design Sprints are excellent at getting teams from stuck to prototype, but why is the process so foolproof? Whether you’re a Fortune-100 company or a startup, the recipe for a Design Sprint makes an impact thanks to a few key ingredients.

Jackie partnered with Sprint book author, John Zeratsky, in 2018 & 2019 to bring Design Sprint bootcamps to Minneapolis. They were a ton of fun and we intended to bring it back to in 2020 to multiple cities but a global pandemic got in the way. In 2020, Jackie worked with John and Jake Knapp to offer the bootcamp online during three virtual workshops.

I am often asked to have coffee with people who are thinking about starting their own thing. They want to go solo, fly free, run their own show. Sometimes they are interested in focusing on Design Sprints, but often they are interested in something adjacent: digital strategy, digital transformation, product leadership, brand strategy, etc. Here’s my advice.

Using tested tools and frameworks takes the guesswork out of the “how” and provides a recipe to follow. But they aren’t enough. You can have the best hammer and nails but if you are too afraid to swing the hammer and make the birdhouse because it might be ugly, you’ll just have a pile of tools and no place for birds to live. When we create, we bring something new into the world. Fear arises when we think about doing anything new. New is unknown. New is novel. New is scary. Our brains want us to stay in the safe zone.

There’s been a lot written about the Design Sprint; why it works, the methods, facilitation techniques and how to use Sprints inside an org but I was interested in learning more about the process of designing the process (so meta, right?) from this conversation with John Zeratsky (JZ), co-author of SPRINT.