Over the past few months at Shopify<\/a> I\u2019ve been running weekly design sprints<\/a> to kick off new projects and features. If you haven\u2019t heard of a design sprint before, it\u2019s a 3\u20135 day collaboration of designers, developers, UX researchers, and content strategists where we work together to build several high-fidelity prototypes.<\/p>\n We start every design sprint with a full-day \u201cUnderstanding phase\u201d which is largely guided by a product brief: a concise document that paints a clear picture of the problem space and what we\u2019re trying to accomplish. During the Understanding phase we intentionally don\u2019t go into details about how<\/em> we\u2019re going to solve a problem; the what<\/em> and why<\/em> is what\u2019s critical at this point.<\/p>\n A well-made product brief could be handed to anyone in the company (or even a random person on the street, for that matter) and they would understand exactly what our goals are after reading through it. A few of the most important parts of the product brief are:<\/p>\n Our product briefs are a combined effort by a few individuals who have expansive knowledge of the problem at hand. This is typically one of our UX researchers (who are talking to our users and understanding their pain points on a daily basis), and a PM \/ product lead (who are generally responsible for long-term vision of the product). We also lean on our data team to pull in the important numbers and relevant information that we need to gain valuable insights.<\/p>\n Design Sprints are a fairly new approach to design for us at Shopify. We\u2019re only a few months into this methodology, but the response and results have been quite positive so far. There are several reasons that I think design sprints are a very effective way to approach design:<\/p>\n\n
Why design sprints?<\/h3>\n
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