First Part

Creating a new business or product from scratch is no easy task. During this process, you’ll have to wear lots of hats, from accounting to finance, programming, marketing and sales. In this context, working for several months just to discover whether your product has a market fit or not can certainly turn into an irreversible death penalty.

But don’t panic! You’re not alone. In this article, we’ll introduce you to an effective methodology to help you speed up this process effectively: The Design Sprint for idea validation.To guide you through it, we’ll be using an imaginary product which could have well been a startup’s game changing idea.

Ready for it?

The idea

Imagine one day you realize that some of your co-workers have lots of different outfits for each season of the year. “They must be spending lots of money on buying all those clothes which they only use occasionally!”, you think and, after connecting some dots, you picture the following:

What if we built a subscription service which will deliver a set of outfits for you to wear each week? The clothes will be trendy but still take into account your personal style, preferences, and of course, precise measurements. Just put all the clothes back in the box once the week is over, and get ready to receive new clothes for the following week.

You’re sure the idea has potential but you also know that building a business is hard and you’ll need to invest tons of hours (and money) to find out if may actually be a success. You may have read about Lean Startup and the Customer Development Process, which encourage you to validate your idea at an early stage; but validating an idea can still take months and thousands of dollars.The folks at Xmartlabs told you there was a better way to get real proof, which you can also use to raise seed capital. You definitely wanna know everything about it.

So, what’s the design sprint for idea validation?

The original Design Sprint was developed by the folks at Google Ventures to help their startups design and test solutions for a particular product problem, in just 5 days.

This five-day framework aims to answer critical product questions through design, prototyping — creating a basic sample of your product — and user testing. It’s a “greatest hits” of product strategy, which combines existing business knowledge with design and engineering expertise, in order to launch products faster.

Why should you go through the design sprint for idea validation?

You’ll work with a multidisciplinary team in an agile process, which will help you compress months of discussions into a single week. You’ll get clear data from testing a realistic prototype with target-users, and the knowledge acquired will enable you to make informed decisions regarding the future of your product.

Before getting your hands on it… the team

Before clearing everyone’s agendas for a week you’ll need to assemble the team. Just like in Marvel’s Avengers, your team needs complementing roles which can work together to face a big challenge. In our example, the team is small, so some members will wear more than one hat. The basic areas and roles are as follows:

If you’ve managed to gather a team you already have one of the most important assets to create a successful business. Now it’s time to start your design Sprint, book a week in everyone’s agendas and follow our step by step guide in this post.

Need help to put your project into motion? Drop us a line, we offer remote and on site services, and adjust them according to your needs!