So what are companies that are growing today doing differently?

How are these companies identifying growth opportunities when others are not?

And how are marketing teams adapting as the pressure to find new growth opportunities continues to increase?.

What are agile & effective marketing teams doing differently?

Companies that are driving innovation & growth at speed have thrown out the old playbooks. Adopting innovation, agile, and design thinking tools. 

And their number one attribute is their ability to pivot at speed.

“69% of Cx0 said their firms failed to be prepared and underinvested in online strategies before the pandemic”

But many companies that had not embedded digital-first thinking and new business models successfully before the pandemic are still struggling. They are finding it difficult to adapt their products or services and to serve customers online. One of the reasons for this is that they are using outdated frameworks & tools to make decisions, validate and execute.

So what is the Design Sprint?

The sprint is a four-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping and testing ideas with customers. Developed at Google Ventures, it’s described as the “greatest hits” of business strategy, innovation, behaviour science, design thinking, and more—packaged into a battle-tested process.

The design sprint gives teams a SUPERPOWER: You can fast-forward into the future to see your finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitments.

Teams with complex problems to solve and multiple stakeholders to engage with, get stuck in the cycle of endless meetings that over time reduce energy, creativity, and momentum.

In 2019 I was working in-house on an SFMC cloud implementation project with an Australian pharma company, with the goal to improve email as a channel.

Unfortunately, the project became centred on the technology not the needs of the marketers and customers. After 4 months not one email had been sent out. I walked away from that project as I believed the team had lost sight of the project goal and had not aligned on what success would look like.

Around that time I came across the Design Sprint – from Google Ventures. It’s a process that compresses months of work, into days. You can certainly understand, based on my most recent experience, why this got my attention.

Since then I’ve immersed myself in learning and using the Design Sprint with clients, With very different outcomes.

I’ve been learning from AJ&Smart, a Berlin-based agency, who, having partnered with Jake Knapp (who wrote the book Sprint), have become the global leaders in using the Design Sprint to help solve BIG challenges for the likes of Lego, Twitter & Slack.

It’s been fantastic to have the AJ&Smart team to lean on as I adapt the Design Sprint for marketing. 

What challenges does the design sprint help solve for teams?

The Design Sprint has been used to enter new markets, design new products, develop new features for users, define marketing strategies, and much more.

If you are asking “How might we reimagine business in the digital age?” then the Design Sprint will provide a proven framework to provide answers.

“The Design Sprint is a tool to stop talking and start doing”

I thought it would be helpful to share some examples of how leading companies (including AJ&Smart) have used the Design Sprint to help marketing teams solve critical challenges.

Example 1:

Client: United Nations World Food Bank

Agency: AJ&Smart

Product; Share The Meal

BIG Problem; End world hunger faster using disruptive technologies. Create a simple, transparent solution that would reduce the friction and “hidden fees” of donating to charities while reducing the complications normally associated with donating to charities.

Design Sprint focus; Increase the “Donation Amount” 

and the Sprint Question they focused on was 

“Can we nudge people to donate for One Week instead of One Day.”

Outcome: Used the Design Sprint to bring the app to market as fast as possible, then to solve very specific challenges the app faced once it exploded in popularity. The app went on to win Google and Apple’s best apps of 2015 as well as gold at the SXSW 2016 and the Webby’s 2016!

Example 2:

Client: Flatiron Health

Agency: Google Ventures

Product; Clinical Trials

BIG Problem; help cancer patients find the right trial fast (cancer patients don’t have time to wait)

Design Sprint focus; to make clinical trials available to anyone who was eligible. “More cancer patients enrolled in clinical trials”

Outcome: helped the team realise that research coordinators (the folks who administered clinical trials) were actually more important than the doctors and patients. By the end of the sprint, they had tested a prototype with this group and gotten enough positive feedback to move forward with the project.

Example 3:

Client: Danone Water

Agency: Board of Innovation

Product; Food & Beverages / Chinese Market

BIG Problem; define a new strategy & develop 6-8 user-validated food and beverage concepts.

Design Sprint focus; in Shanghai with 30 employees from 3 departments (marketing, packaging, and R&D) defined a specific challenge for 3 personas, divided the participants into 3 multidisciplinary teams, and assigned them 1 persona each to test & validate new products.

Outcome: Developed 2-3 new food and beverage concepts validated with feedback from their target consumers along with a ready-to-taste prototype, appealing storyboards, and promotional narratives. Next, the core team proceeded to refine the concepts, with the aim of launching some of these concepts into the Chinese market.

The Design Sprint helps teams move from abstract to concrete, keeps you focused on what is important, & aligns decision making with a clear action plan to implement. They work for teams and companies of any size, from start-ups to multinationals, to not-for-profits.

Have you got a BIG challenge that you need to solve? Would you like your team to gain momentum, focus, and confidence, moving from the abstract to something concrete by validating your ideas? 

Let’s talk about whether this is the right approach for you & your team. Schedule some time in my calendar HERE

*The DNA of Adaptive Organisations / The Economist Intelligence Unit 2020

Divergent is on a mission to transform marketing into the powerhouse we know it can be. Too much potential in marketing teams goes to waste – but it doesn’t have to be that way. 

Through innovation sprints, learning how to execute experiments, and building a culture of reinvention, Divergent harnesses a team’s potential to help them innovate and implement solutions faster that drive business growth.