By Google Ventures

The Design Sprint is a 5-day process to help you identify and solve a critical business problem through rapid ideation and prototyping. The Design Sprint was popularized by Google Ventures and has been used by countless companies to solve a wide range of challenges. The sprint can be adapted to suit many product teams and problems, though the core mechanics remain largely consistent.

The Sprint begins by the team brainstorming and identifying a key problem or challenge to focus on. The next step is to spend time sketching out ideas and solutions to solve that problem. Once the brainstorming is completed the team must then prioritize and converge on a single testable idea. The team will then develop a high-fidelity prototype of the solution and in the final step test that solution with real customers.

=== The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. Developed at GV, it’s a “greatest hits” of business strategy, innovation, behavior science, design thinking, and more—packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use.

Working together in a sprint, you can shortcut the endless-debate cycle and compress months of time into a single week. Instead of waiting to launch a minimal product to understand if an idea is any good, you’ll get clear data from a realistic prototype. The sprint gives you a superpower: You can fast-forward into the future to see your finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitments.

This page is a DIY guide for running your own sprint. On Monday, you’ll map out the problem and pick an important place to focus. On Tuesday, you’ll sketch competing solutions on paper. On Wednesday, you’ll make difficult decisions and turn your ideas into a testable hypothesis. On Thursday, you’ll hammer out a high-fidelity prototype. And on Friday, you’ll test it with real live humans.

Find out more here: gv.com