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In case you missed it, we're big fans of both toys and Design Sprints. We firmly believe that there's a place for both to benefit your company and product. So when we had a little free time on our hands, we decided to put our money where our mouths are and develop a toy to support your efforts (and ours) around creating your next Design Sprint. (If you're not familiar with, or need a refresher on, what a Design Sprint is — read here.)

Design Sprints are an amazing tool for fast learning and beautiful failures. We use this process often at Apollo 21 to help guide clients through definition and validation of an idea. The process is valuable in that it involves a variety of team members and levels the playing field for the presentation of ideas — it helps remove internal politics from the conversation.

One of the biggest concerns we hear about when executing a Sprint is productively fitting the process into the time available for any given team. Some teams only have a day or two in which to learn as much as possible. Others have time for a full five-day Design Sprint, but their key stakeholder (who's usually the Decider) can only pop in from time to time throughout the process. And we understand that taking four to five days out of the team's schedule to execute a Sprint can be disruptive to ongoing efforts.

That said, we also don't want to let time constraints become an excuse for not executing this otherwise extremely worthwhile process. We've developed a number of variations on the Sprint process that we can call upon to ensure value based on availability. To help other teams solve this time issue, we created the Design Sprint Builder (affectionately known as D.S.B.01).

The Design Sprint Builder is a tool that helps your team plan the perfect Design Sprint based on your available time-frame and that of your Decider. By answering just a few questions, the D.S.B.01 will generate a custom Design Sprint schedule that fits your needs and time availability and deliver a step-by-step execution plan to help you follow that schedule.

Of course, if you're limited to a half or even a single full day, you're not going to get through an entire Design Sprint. Rather, D.S.B.01 will pare down the Sprint process to fit your constraints, leaving you open to return to the exploration of your problem and complete further steps of the Design Sprint process in the future.

Who is D.S.B.01 for?

We've already discussed who can benefit from a Design Sprint (hint: it's anyone ranging from early-stage startups to corporate innovation teams). The Design Sprint Builder will aid teams of all sizes and backgrounds in bringing this valuable process to your internal workflow. The tool assumes that you'll have a Facilitator on-hand and that you're aware of the benefits a Design Sprint can bring to your team, but if that's not the case, you can schedule time with the team at Apollo 21 to arrange outside assistance and perspective.

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