The design sprint method has developed into a powerful tool for innovation.
What nobody documents is everything that happens around it – before Day 1, inside the room, and after the energy dissipates. That’s what separates a sprint that produces a mediocre outcome from one that changes the direction into something that becomes a breakthrough.
I recently sat down with Rob Hamblen founder of digital product design company Be The Leap in Berlin. Rob has a significant career in digital innovation having led sprints for clients including Adidas, HSBC, Twitter, and Udacity, and was Product Design Director at AJ&Smart and Creative Director UX at IBM.
Rob is also a contributor to Innovation in Action. What he brought to our conversation is exactly what he brings to his client work: expert, field-tested thinking that you won’t find in any design sprint handbook.
Here are three insights Rob has learned that transforms a sprint from one that simply produces a deliverable into one that actually shifts the needle.
The right problem fit for a sprint
To get the best from the sprint, it needs to focus effort on the right type of problem.
For example: “You’d never do a sprint to fix a misplaced call to action on a landing page. You’d just move it up.”
The challenge has to be genuinely complex – something the organisation already suspects needs to change but doesn’t yet know how to execute.”
What he’s looking for is the client who already has “an inkling that something needs to happen” – who senses that something in their product or customer experience needs to shift, but lacks the clarity or confidence to act on it.
That’s the right starting condition.
The implication for anyone commissioning this work: before the sprint begins, ask whether the brief in front of you is the real problem or the version of it that felt safe enough to write down.
Those are often very different questions. A sprint can only focus on the question it’s given so it’s important that it is big enough to matter.
The sprint always starts with a warm-up
Most practitioners prepare the process before a sprint. Rob prepares the people.
He spends several days before a sprint talking individually to every participant on the client side. Not so much to brief them. But to understand and learn from them.
Rob and his team spend time to consider questions like – Who carries informal authority in the room? Who is anxious about looking foolish in front of peers? Who didn’t fully choose to be there? Are we addressing the right problem? What are the assumptions already baked-in?
Because of this pre-work, Rob says ‘We are able to work magic because we have good empathy with people – and we can only do that once we get to know them.’
Alongside this, Rob adds a design thinking component before any sprint begins – speaking with three to five real customers or people from adjacent industries facing similar friction to understand where genuine pain points lie.
He calls what comes out of these conversations “loaded assumptions.” Not blind guesses. Informed starting positions built from people close to the problem sharing insightful perspectives.
The gap between a team that prepares and one that doesn’t is visible when the ideas being generated are grounded in something real rather than the room’s best collective guess.
To sprint or not to sprint?
A sprint applied to the wrong challenge doesn’t just underdeliver; it also wastes time. It actively erodes confidence in the process, the team, and the investment.
So Rob is selective about when a sprint is actually the right tool.
“It doesn’t always have to be a design sprint. There may be other issues that need to be resolved. That’s where we find we actually get a better fit for the challenge of the customer.”
When clients come to Be The Leap with a product that’s underperforming but they can’t identify exactly why, Rob will often recommend a product audit first – a process of putting the product directly in front of customers to identify where it’s creating friction and what needs fixing before committing to a sprint.
Rob explains, “The product audit was basically created to put it in front of customers so that they could tell us where it was tripping up. And then I would be able to dissect what would be a priority, urgency or a requirement that needed fixing immediately.”
For senior leaders who commission innovation work, the right question to ask a practitioner before you book the room is not “Can you run a sprint for us?” It’s “Is a sprint actually what we need?”
Want to go deeper?
The full conversation with Rob – covering the evolution of design sprints, the product audit, the iteration sprint, enterprise design thinking, and his views on AI in innovation work – is now live on my YouTube channel.
Watch the full interview here.
You can find out more about Rob and his work at Be The Leap
Rob is a contributor to Innovation in Action, the book I’ve co-authored with Christian Walsh.
If this resonates with the challenges you’re navigating, Innovation in Action is now available to order.
Register your purchase to receive original DUCTRI tool templates, expert insight videos, including Rob, and live group training sessions with Christian and me.
Thank you to Rob for sharing so generously in this conversation and in the book.
One question worth sitting with before your next sprint: Is the challenge in your brief the real problem – or the safe version of it?
Vaughan