Design Sprint Intensive
The Design Sprint is a proven five-day process for solving critical product questions through rapid prototyping and real customer feedback. No long cycles. No endless debate. Just clear answers, fast.
What Is a Design Sprint?
Developed by GV (Google Ventures) and refined across hundreds of product teams, the Design Sprint compresses what normally takes months — alignment, ideation, prototyping, testing — into a single structured week.
Instead of launching something and hoping for the best, you build a realistic prototype on Thursday, put it in front of real users on Friday, and walk away with actual evidence to guide your next move.
Companies like Slack, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Foundation Medicine have used Design Sprints to cut through ambiguity, pressure-test ideas, and avoid expensive mistakes before committing to a full build.
The Process
Each day of a Design Sprint has a clear purpose, a defined set of activities, and a concrete output. Here's what the week looks like.
Map the problem space, align on a long-term goal, and identify the specific challenge the sprint will tackle.
Each team member independently sketches solutions — diverging before converging to avoid groupthink and surface the best ideas.
Critique sketches, choose the most promising solutions, and turn the winner into a step-by-step storyboard for the prototype.
Build a realistic but surface-level prototype — just realistic enough that users can interact with it and give you meaningful feedback.
Five real users interact with your prototype while the team observes. By 5pm, you'll know whether your idea works — and why.
Why It Works
Most teams get stuck in one of three places: too much debate, too little customer input, or too much time spent building before validating. The Design Sprint is engineered to break all three patterns.
Structured daily activities replace open-ended meetings. When the day ends, you move forward — not backward into the same debate.
By Friday you have actual data from real people — not a survey, not an internal opinion poll. Evidence that tells you what to build next.
Every team member sketches alone before the group converges. This surfaces ideas that would never survive a traditional brainstorm.
A realistic prototype — built in a day — lets you validate your riskiest assumptions before committing engineering time to a full build.
What You'll Walk Away With
By the end of the sprint, your team will have more than good vibes and a whiteboard full of sticky notes.
Alignment on what you're solving, who you're solving it for, and what success looks like — across the whole team.
A realistic, clickable artifact that users have already interacted with — not a wireframe gathering dust in Figma.
Five structured interviews with people outside your building — and a clear pattern of what worked, what didn't, and why.
Whether it's a full build, a pivot, or another sprint — you'll leave with a decision grounded in evidence, not opinion.
Who It's For
Design Sprints work best with a small cross-functional group — typically 5–7 people. You need the right mix of perspective, decision-making authority, and craft in the room.
Owns the problem definition and has the authority to make real decisions during the sprint — not just report back to someone else.
Leads prototype construction on Thursday and brings a user-centered perspective to the ideation and critique phases.
Reality-checks feasibility during ideation and helps ensure the prototype is believable and testable within the sprint timeframe.
Domain specialists — in customer success, sales, or a specific functional area — who can contribute critical context on Monday.
A founder, VP, or senior leader who can commit to acting on what the team learns — and who's present for Monday's goal-setting.
Workshop Details
Every sprint starts with a conversation about your team's challenge. Let's talk about whether this is the right format for where you are right now — and what a sprint could realistically help you learn.
Start the Conversation → See All WorkshopsThe Design Sprint methodology was developed by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz at GV (Google Ventures) and is documented in the book Sprint. Phase Won facilitates sprints using this proven framework.
A Design Sprint puts real answers in your team's hands in five days. Let's talk about your challenge.
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