Respond to priority challenges in record time. The Enterprise Design Sprint format makes GV-style Design Sprints from the agile startup world enterprise-compatible. Engage your stakeholders, identify strategic options, and rapidly co-design, test and build innovative solutions. Compress weeks of work into just a few days.
Running an Enterprise Design Sprint enables diverse teams to co-create solutions for the enterprise's most important and urgent strategic challenges. It is designed for rapid team onboarding, developing a shared understanding of a complex problem space, taking into account a variety of inputs. Teams then work through a fast paced workshop format, to unpack and reframe the challenge at hand, make sense of key insights and data, and develop and test potential solutions within just two to four days.
When moving too slowly in enterprise environments, the best work can suffer from a lack of impact: even the best ideas will fail if changing stakeholder priorities, sudden reorganization or unforeseen market dynamics hit. An Enterprise Design Sprint will speed up the process from insight to solution, co-creating solutions to making major leaps on key challenges in a fraction of the time usually allocated to classic project work. As a collaborative tool easy to be deployed and adapted, it is designed to bring in everyone needed, make sense of even the messiest problem, and together go through a rapid co-creation workshop using a custom set of tried and tested activities.
Plan for an Enterprise Design Sprint for any significant challenge that requires your team to act quickly. Bring together team members and meet decision-makers to turn a loose problem into a formulated challenge definition using the Stack to discuss and prioritize aspects based on the key questions to be resolved. This makes it easy to select an appropriate Sprint Flavour and customize the workshop format: Sprint team, duration, activities and desired outputs. Do research using a quick Scan and turn available inputs into baseline Scenarios and visual mappings that underpin the workshop activities. Run the Sprint workshop and capture concepts and ideas, solution prototypes and results from first validation. Highlight top performing outputs within your organization and integrate them into a System for transformation, tracing impact to Sprint results.
Get the Enterprise Design Sprint Kit Book a free mentoring sessionThe Enterprise Design Sprint approach uses set of variables to adapt GV’s original Design Sprint Methodology to environments facing enterprise and market complexity. It allows to go beyond the original scope of digital products in the startup world, and make the approach work for strategic challenges in complex environments. The four Enterprise Design Sprint flavours are designed to respond to real world situations in enterprises. They enable teams to adapt the format to best deliver on their challenge, including participant selection and recruiting, duration, activity planning, tools and deliverables, and expected results.
Flavours make it easy to choose the flavour best adapted to your challenge at hand, and come up with a fitting workshop format. They provide you with a rough initial plan depending on your key purpose: Engagement of various teams and key people, facilitating Strategy development, driving innovation through Experimentation, or developing a roadmap for Realization
Engagement Sprint
Coming together: a challenge requires different teams and stakeholders to collaborate towards a common goal. An Engagement Sprint combines a short workshop format over 1-2 days with up to 35 participants. A core team designs and facilitates the workshop, but all participants are involved in pre-sprint preparation activities such as research, domain expert identification or inspiration. The Sprint workshop itself is focused on developing a shared view on the problems to be solved and potential solutions to be explored afterwards.
Strategy Sprint
Something came up: a priority challenge demands a strategic response. The Strategy Sprint flavour is designed to enable decision-makers, domain experts and stakeholders to rapidly get into the necessary level of detail to understand such a strategic challenge, converge on potential courses of action, and validate them for maximum impact and limited externalities. The Sprint workshop itself is limited to just the key people implicated in the decision-making, and runs over 2-3 days. It results in a strategy artefact that to be shared and adopted by the organization.
Experimentation Sprint
What to invest in: this Sprint flavour is designed to rapidly develop a set of relevant solutions for a given challenge, the closest to the original GV-Style Design Sprint. The team validates these candidates against various criteria to be determined based on key success factors identified in the enterprise environment. This can include fit with the market ecosystem, internal capabilities and operating model, organization or brand culture. It results in validated solutions and a plan for action.
Realization Sprint
How to get there: a Realization Sprint is about making an ambitious endeavour happen, bringing together everyone involved to remove barriers, address risks and come up with a shared roadmap. Over 4-6 days, the Sprint team works in small groups based on key topics and expertise. Dependencies are clearly identified as part of the preparation and planning, with handovers and regular cross-team sharing sessions ensuring coherence between solutions.
Engaging a diverse stakeholder community, clarifying a fuzzy challenge, dealing with domain and organization complexity and bringing it home to extract a validated solution: running an Enterprise Design Sprint is not just an exercise. Other than facilitating the workshop itself, running an impactful Enterprise Design Sprint requires proper preparation and follow-up.
