The first version of Youtube was built in four months, Mark Zuckerberg built the first working version of Facebook in a week, the idea for twitter came up in a daylong brainstorming session, and now your big idea to change the world can be built and tested in just 5 days.
Google Ventures, Google’s seed investment arm, has developed a “greatest hits of business strategy, innovation, behavior science, design thinking, and more — packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use.” And they want to share it with all budding entrepreneurs.
It’s called the Design Sprint, a five day process that enables a team answer critical business questions about their ideas through design, prototyping, and testing ideas on customers. The process shortcuts the usual endless debate cycle and compresses months of time into a single week. It has been used by startups like Nest, Foundation Medicine, and Blue Bottle Coffee.
A step by step breakdown of the Design Sprint can be found on the Google Ventures website and a more detailed guide will be published in an upcoming book