How going 💯% virtual gave us an edge 🙌

This is a story about a Design Sprint. If you’ve never heard of that, you can learn more here or read the book.

Authors: Elisa Goyeneche, Nicole Btesh, Christina Halladay and William Wells

Our ITX design team has been facilitating and learning from Design Sprints since 2016. Our company’s culture promotes distributed team collaboration but until December of last year, most of our design sprints had been conducted in person. We noticed that this didn’t just happen with Design Sprints; whenever we conducted more in-depth workshops, we tended to host in person rather than online.

We wondered if this had more to do with a standard we’d established with our clients, or if this was related to the belief that you cannot be in an online session for more than X number of hours without losing focus and or engagement. As a team, we struggled with this. We had some sessions where half the team were with us physically while, others were connected virtually. In all honesty, it became really hard for those outside the actual room to keep up. On top of that, there was a recurring sentiment that people felt ‘left out’ and that participation could have been a lot better. Some facilitators mentioned that it was hard to sustain engagement of participants both online and in person as it was double the work.

A Turning Point in Our Approach to Design Sprints

As ITX continued to grow and as our team members and clients became increasingly distributed, we found ourselves at a turning point. We noticed another factor that influenced our approach: there was not always enough budget, resources, and time available to hold these long sessions in person. Even more interesting, we discovered that co-located sessions were not always necessary.

It’s incredibly important to provide the same opportunities to our team members and clients alike regardless of their location, so we began thinking about how we might improve the experience and standardize it for everyone.

In November, ITX held a workshop on Design Sprints at our ITXUX 2019 Conference in Portland, OR. The full-day session was led by none other than Jake Knapp himself! Jake offered some great advice about being conscious of trying to have everyone share the space in the same way. We therefore decided to use our Design Sprint process as a case study aimed at improving the entire experience for online workshops by going fully virtual.

Research Makes Perfect

We started by researching everything we could get our hands on about Virtual Design Sprints. At the time (November/December 2019) we couldn’t find that many online resources specifically about running 100% virtual workshops or Design Sprints. But there was plenty of other incredible material out there.

In retrospect, some might argue that it was the world’s response to COVID-19 and social distancing restrictions that expedited and improved the online experience for everyone and established some great practices about what to expect when running sessions completely online.

Once we collected our research, we mapped all of the pain points we had experienced in our own sprints. Here are the main issues we chose to address:

1. In person Design Sprints are already intense experiences. When conducted virtually, the risk of the mental exhaustion is much greater.
2. Maintaining energy and engagement across a screen isn’t easy.
3. The use of technology can be risky in two ways: general technical difficulties and technical competence of participants.
4. Facilitation is not the same in person as it is in a virtual environment. We needed to adapt this towards a virtual background.
5. There was no clearly defined process for doing this virtually. We felt like pioneers in the space.
6. On our team, we had a group of designers with expertise in design sprint facilitation, and we wanted to democratize the process by making this knowledge more accessible to the whole team.

You might notice that throughout this article, we use the word Virtual instead of Remote; this is intentional. While doing research, we uncovered that using the term ‘remote’ may create the perception or feeling of isolation. In contrast, the terms ‘virtual’ or ‘distributed’ are more appropriate and inclusive to all types of employees.

The Process

With years of experience and research in hand, we did a whole lot of planning and experimentation. Our team ran several virtual design sprints, gathering feedback and refining the process each time. The result of this work was a process and a set of tools that are tailored to the virtual environment. Here’s what we did:

• Adapted the 2.0 Design Sprint experience to our own version
• Established a process for everything pre-during-post Virtual Design Sprint
• Created a facilitator guide and facilitator cheat sheet with notes and tips
• Defined communication guidelines and templates for emails/calendars/chats that needed to happen in the various key, strategic moments
• Standardised deliverables

(If you want to know more about what we did in detail, checkout our blog post that covers this)

Basically, we mapped out and defined the facilitator journey in an online environment. From the first kickoff to the last deliverable, we registered every touchpoint to create an easy-to-setup, frictionless process.

The communication strategy, rules, and templates really expedited the day-to-day work for facilitators. Let’s be real, facilitating is all about good communication. And when you have to do everything “virtually,” there are a lot of different types of communications that need to be addressed.

At first, we struggled with people not reading emails or reviewing the homework we sent them. After several iterations with this, we found our sweet spot by combining emails with the reinforcement of key messages through chats and quick touch-base meetings to ensure everyone was up to date with everything Design Sprint related.

For instance, we discovered that it was key to meet the day before the sprint started. This really changed the way our sprints ran. A pre-sprint get-together resulted in a great opportunity to introduce the design sprint framework and familiarize everyone with the tools and technology — and with each other.

We also used this meeting to remind everyone about their offline homework and to make sure everyone was comfortable with the technical tools used during the sessions. This helped to level the playing field for participants, and the sessions ran with fewer interruptions.

Make Information Accessible to All

As previously mentioned, there was an explicit need to democratize sprint knowledge for our team. We have a distributed workforce that spans 2 continents and more than 3 different time zones, and we needed to find a consistent way to make it work for everyone. By installing this standardized process, everyone could sprint without the need to be physically located near our clients or each other. This has led to a lot of internal growth.

The facilitator cheat sheet, which includes a list of activities and exercises complete with timeframes and facilitator tips, has been a great asset in standardizing the sprint setup process for our organization. It helped make the framework approachable and digestible to newbies and non-designers, and bonus — it doubles as training material. Now there wouldn’t be just a few of us facilitating.

By creating and mapping this process, we not only empowered our design team, but have made sprints more accessible for the entire ITX team and our clients.

Virtual Facilitation — No Time to Go Solo

Facilitation is not the same in person as in a virtual environment. A couple questions arose: how might we adapt this? And how different is it from its in-person counterpart? Answer: online facilitation requires multiple people. Our solution was to create a co-pilot role.

Facilitation is all about helping the team achieve a common goal, preventing the team from getting derailed by questions or comments, and managing the energy of the team, at all times. When you have to look at everyone’s cameras, analyse non-verbal communication, manage screen sharing the whiteboard, and make sure everyone’s on point, you can lose track of a thing or two.

Therefore, running a virtual design sprint is no time to “go solo.” We created the trusted co-pilot role to help with support tasks: bring forward all relevant elements of the board, scribe during activities, keep an eye on the clock, and assist with awkward silences, to name a few.

The facilitator is then able to focus on their presentation. The co-pilot is also prepared to run the design sprint in case of technical difficulties or if the facilitator becomes otherwise unavailable.

Co-piloting is also great on-the-job training. Before an individual can co-pilot, we have them shadow the facilitator for a design sprint. After co-piloting a few sprints, people felt more prepared to move into the facilitation role. This created a facilitation training cycle.

Pro-tip for online facilitation: If you’re using Zoom or another video conferencing tool that allows you to “pause” the screen while you are sharing, we recommend you pause when moving/jumping between Miro frames to avoid participant distraction (and motion sickness). We noticed that participants tend to get sidetracked whenever the facilitator bounces between sections in the virtual whiteboard. This pausing technique really did the trick to keep the participants’ attention. One of our colleagues and workshop pro offered this tip, and it works incredibly!

Translating the Design Sprint Journey to a Virtual Environment

The first approach we used to translate the in-person activities to virtual ones was to focus on the objective for each activity and understand how we might obtain the same results while online.

Take for example the 4 Part Sketch exercises. These are a series of exercises that serve to remind the participants of everything that’s been accomplished in the sprint and to shift their minds into a lateral thinking state with the crazy 8’s before jumping to the final sketch. By reinforcing the process and objectives to the participants, we made sure they could successfully complete the process offline and create amazing sketches.

The second approach was to rely on the rules and mindset of the Design Sprint. In his books and workshops, Jake explains his thoughts about the creative process and how he believes people come up with truly innovative ideas. Most people, he points out, need some time for ideas to be able to set and not everyone performs similarly in brainstorming sessions.

And you know what? We agree!

Activities like brainstorming or focus groups will always reflect the voices and ideas of the people who are innate leaders or who are more outspoken. The concept of working alone, but together was key for us to bring these activities online.

Therefore, we used the Note-n-vote / Note-n-Map directions to go through the more complex sprint activities: the map and the storyboard. Working on those activities first alone and then together, had a positive impact on the alignment of the team, the effectiveness of the activity, time management, and the democratization of the space and giving everyone a voice.

Some Final Thoughts

We love experiments at ITX, and as we all know, a lot of experiments fail. That’s the point! While we did anticipate a good outcome from this particular initiative, we were surprised with just how positive the response was. As we facilitated more and more Virtual Design Sprints, a palpable buzz grew among our team and our clients.

Designers were asking to participate and get involved, and because the sessions were more flexible and accessible, this was now a real possibility regardless of the designer’s location or allocation at the time.

We also saw a significant uptick in our clients’ interest in Design Sprints. Specifically, we got requests to learn more about them, to discuss a new challenge to gauge if it might be a good candidate for the framework, and to understand how to request that a Design Sprint be planned.

Since going fully virtual, we have nearly tripled the number of Design Sprints that we run each quarter.

Side note: we are clearly on the Design Sprint bandwagon, and we invite everyone to join us, but this is the part where it’s important to reiterate that Design Sprints are not the answer to everything. We are just lucky to have a lot of big, complex challenges!

At any rate, more Design Sprints has meant more clarity and more alignment. Armed with a tool that we can now use in any applicable scenario, we are able to guide our clients toward making better, more informed decisions. We can help them to prepare a plan; to put a stake in the ground.

One of the biggest wins is that we’re able to better leverage our talented crew. We can forge stronger relationships among all of our team members and clients, not just the ones who physically work together or are able to get on a plane. As a widely distributed and remote-first company, we want to ‘walk the talk’ and Virtual Design Sprints offered a logical step in that direction.

Furthermore, we’re able to use our resources more effectively. Bringing together a group of smart and busy people for a week can be both challenging and expensive. For us, an in-person Design Sprint might be a good investment for a project kickoff or to facilitate bonding on a team. However, we now have the tools to quickly spin up a Virtual Design Sprint. This is especially useful when focusing on new challenges that arise within an existing project or team.

Whatever the case may be, we’re prepared to rise to the occasion! We’re happy to share our work on Virtual Design Sprints with the hope that it might inspire others to try something new or help them to adapt to a rapidly changing workforce and world.

Lastly, we know we have more to learn, and we’d love to hear your candid feedback. Check out our Virtual Design Sprint Miro Template featured in Miro’s Miroverse; take it for a spin, and let us know what you think!

Thanks for reading!