What is Design sprint?
A design sprint is a structured five-day process for rapidly prototyping and testing a solution to a specific problem. Developed at Google Ventures by Jake Knapp, it compresses months of debate and development into a focused week of ideation, prototyping, and user testing.
How it works
Day 1: Map the problem and choose a target. Day 2: Sketch competing solutions individually. Day 3: Decide on the best approach and create a storyboard. Day 4: Build a realistic prototype (looks real but is not functional). Day 5: Test the prototype with five real users and observe what works and what fails. The format prevents design-by-committee, forces rapid decisions, and produces validated learning before engineering resources are committed.
Applied example
A health tech company unsure whether patients want a symptom tracker or a doctor-messaging feature runs a design sprint. By Friday, they have watched five patients interact with a prototype and discovered that what patients actually want is appointment scheduling, saving months of building the wrong feature.
Why it matters
Design sprints reduce the risk of building products nobody wants by front-loading user feedback and making it cheap to fail and iterate.
