Run five-day design sprint with customer testing

Run five-day compressed design-market fit testing cycle

When you have one critical business question, a committed team, and 5 uninterrupted days — not for iterative continuous product development or remote teams without synchronous time.

• · Big challenge (important problem statement)
• · Decision-maker and 4-7 person team (diverse expertise)
• · Dedicated room with whiteboards
• · Customer contact list for Friday user testing

• · Monday: Long-term goal, sprint questions, customer journey map, target customer/moment
• · Tuesday: 4-step sketch solutions (individual, not group)
• · Wednesday: Storyboarded solution prototype plan
• · Thursday: Tested prototype (hi-fi mockup or interactive demo)
• · Friday: User testing results, decision on direction

• · Prototyping tool (Figma, Adobe XD, or paper)
• · Customer recruiting channel
• · Whiteboard or Miro

• · 5 full days (10am-5pm) uninterrupted time
• · One designated Sprint Master to facilitate and keep time
• · Right team assembled: decision maker + diverse expertise
• · Big enough problem to justify full week focus

• · Falls apart if team is interrupted or leaves early
• · Weak if no customers recruited for Friday testing — becomes group-think validation
• · Loses momentum if decision maker doesn't attend all days
• · Can produce polished prototypes that test poorly (group consensus ≠ customer validation)

• · Developed at Google Ventures, used by Google, Slack, Airbnb, hundreds of startups
• · Explicit 5-step time-boxed sequence with Monday output, Tuesday output, etc.
• · HMW (How Might We) exercise designed to convert expert insights into opportunity-framed problems
• · Scoring rubric: 0-10 rating for adherence to framework (structure, time-boxing, prototyping, user testing)
• · Detailed facilitation notes for Monday (Start at the End, Map, Ask Experts, HMW, Pick Target)