Overview

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Typically, clients and managers don't want to pay for design (or strategy) -- they want ‘results’! Too often, this leads to solutions that just don’t make sense and aren’t valuable to anyone.

Design sprints allow you to meet client's desire for quick, specific outcomes while making time to do things right. In this course, we'll show you how to plan and run situation-appropriate sprints to avoid waste and deliver value sooner. You'll explore how to do this across customer discovery, testing with Learn Startup, usability testing, and product architecture.

As a Project Management Institute (PMI®) Registered Education Provider, the University of Virginia Darden School of Business has been approved by PMI to issue 25 professional development units (PDUs) for this course, which focuses on core competencies recognized by PMI. (Provider #2122)

This course is supported by the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Batten Institute’s mission is to improve the world through entrepreneurship and innovation: www.batteninstitute.org.

Syllabus

Your Next Design Sprint
-The role of the design sprint is to make (just enough) room to discover what will be valuable to your user before you start spending a lot of money to build a product. Given the failure rate of new products, this is a critical process--and surprisingly hard to sell to clients and managers. In this module, you'll learn how to plan and run effective design sprints that allow you the space to discover and still keep your team on track. By staying focused on outcomes in a defined time frame, you'll prove the value of design sprints to clients and managers.

Testing Problem Scenarios in Design Sprints
-Even if we deliver the perfectly built solution (on time, on budget, beautifully designed), if it solves a problem that doesn’t exist, we've failed. You can avoid poor outcomes with a very moderate time commitment. In this module, you’ll learn how to plan and manage a one-week design sprint to find out what really matters to your customer (or user).

Testing Motivation in Design Sprints
-None of us want to waste our time creating something no one wants, and yet just asking people what they want doesn't yield accurate results. Instead, you need to systematically assess user motivation so you can zero in on software implementations worth building. In this module, you'll learn to test user motivation with Lean Startup in a design sprint. You'll define key assumptions/hypotheses and brainstorm test vehicles for your peer-reviewed assignment. Plan to spend time reviewing your peers' assignments as well--it's a great way to learn and helps everyone get feedback quickly.

Testing Usability in Design Sprints
-The paradox of good usability is that while it's simple for the user, getting to that level of simplicity is somewhat complex. In this module, you'll learn how to focus your usability objectives, identify interface patterns, and test alternative interface patterns- all without having to develop software. Naturally, we'll encapsulate this in a nice, tidy 1-week design sprint.

Testing Approach and Architecture in Design Sprints
-In software design, you have a lot of choices about what tools to use. Making the right choice is important because, in practice, there often aren’t that many really great alternatives. In this module, you’ll learn how to manage toward smart decisions and good choices. You'll also complete a peer-reviewed assignment to help you think through how to run each sprint and to determine which sprint to run next. Remember to review your peers' assignments promptly so they can earn their course certificate!