Guest: Charbel Semaan, Product Designer
How many times have you and your team spent countless hours building, bug fixing, and finally releasing a new feature only to hear feedback from a customer that it’s not what they wanted? Or worse, they don’t say anything. Why?
Because they aren’t even using the new feature! Back to the drawing board.
Yet again, you’ll spend weeks or months building and tweaking, and nothing changes. You just keep missing the target, asking for more time, money, and resources. But it doesn’t help, and people just end up burning out building the wrong thing.
What if I told you that the problem in your product development process is that you are spending too much time, money, and resources and need to cut back?
OK, I’ll give you a minute to shake your head at me…
Sometimes when we have too much, it causes us to go in a lot of different directions. Or worse, we go in no direction at all because we’re stuck in a decision deadlock! We lose sight of our customers and end up building just for the sake of building, thinking that we know what problem we are solving—but we don’t. As a result, our product debt keeps growing and redesigns don’t help.
So how can we stop building the wrong thing and solving the wrong problem? We can start by constraining the amount of time we have to help us focus on uncovering and solving one problem at a time.
And in today’s episode, we’re going to dive into the framework behind this new approach, called product design sprints. To help us out, I’ve invited Charbel Semaan, who has been a product designer for the last 20 years and recently launched his brand, Made in Public.
If you’re eager to get an idea out, worried about how long it’s going to take your team to execute, and concerned about wasting time, money, and other resources, then you owe it to yourself to watch!
Here’s what you’ll learn in this episode:
Once you’ve watched today’s episode, Charbel and I want to know if there’s something that you’ve been stuck on? Maybe a decision deadlock when it comes to a product or a service, or even something in your personal life. Let us know what it is in the comments below.
You can listen to this episode of Build on iTunes. Please take a moment to leave us a review. Your positive review will help us get featured in News & Noteworthy and bring more exposure to the work we’re doing, as well as the talented guests we feature!
Poornima Vijayashanker: Eager to get an idea out there but worried about how long it’s going to take you and your team to execute? Well, in today’s Build episode, we’re going to show you how you can embrace design sprints as a way to test your ideas and get your prototype out there faster. Welcome to Build, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I’m your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode, innovators and I debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech.
One misconception a lot of us fall prey to is this need to do a massive build out before we launch a product. The results, unfortunately, are that we end up spending a lot of time, money, and energy possibly building the wrong thing. As a result, customers don’t want it, teams burn out, and companies lose sight of their business goals. In today’s episode, we’re going to tackle this misconception, share with you how you can embrace design sprints to help you iterate faster and get your prototypes out there, and in future episodes, we’ll talk about how you can evangelize design sprints within your organization and handle any pushback that you might get from your teammates or stakeholders. To help us out, I’ve invited Charbel Semaan, who has been a product designer for the last 20 years and recently launched his brand, Made in Public. Thanks for joining us today, Charbel.
Charbel Semaan: Thanks for having me.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: I’m excited to be here.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. For our audiences out there, let’s start by digging into your background a little. I know you’ve been a designer for the last 20 years and recently started Made in Public, but walk us through that evolution.
Charbel Semaan: Sure. I started out as a designer, self-taught, when I was 15 and fell in love with it. I continued to design through college, would dabble with side projects, and never formally studied it and was formally trained, but continued to develop my skills as much as I could. I’ve had this interesting blend of design specialties throughout my career. I’ve done product design, brand design. I’ve done curriculum design for training programs. Bringing all of that together, I’ve realized I’ve broadened my career or widened my career. What I enjoy most is using design as a way to solve problems as a methodology, and I also enjoy teaching it. I enjoy teaching designs so people can embrace it in whatever area of work they do.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, that’s great. Now, what does Made in Public do?
Charbel Semaan: Made in Public now combines all of that and I get to run my own side-project design sprints. I run sprints publicly so people can see what it’s like to go through the process of going from idea to action in a very short amount of time.
And then in that way, as well, I use it as a way to teach. I really like to teach design through live experiments.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Let’s dive into today’s topic of design sprints. Before we talk about what design sprints are, let’s maybe start with that product design background that you have and showcase what you saw was broken and why the need, maybe, for a new process.
Charbel Semaan: Sure. I think part of it is…there may not always be something that’s broken, per se. I think design thinking has influenced my career heavily, and I’ve learned a lot through what IDEO has put out into the world and other great design firms out there. I think design sprints, in some ways, is a derivative of design thinking. It’s another way of thinking about the design process.
What it can help guard against or help avoid are things like decision deadlock. Or it helps guard against overthinking what the big thing should be and helps you pair down because of constraints. You have five steps, and according to the Google Ventures-inspired design sprint and Jake Knapp and the author, the co-authors, the five-day approach constrains you so you’re not trying to build something that could take you five months.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Charbel Semaan: Really, you’re trying to create something in five days.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Let’s talk about what that looks like. What is that design sprint over those five days?
Charbel Semaan: Sure. The first step of the five steps, or five days depending on if you want to compress it even further, the first step is to understand. Map and understand and unpack the problem you’re trying to solve and for whom you’re solving it.
I think for anybody who’s creating any kind of product, it’s always essential to get down to: what problem am I solving, and who has the problem?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: And do I understand that person and their journey and how they first might interact with my product all the way through to the interaction and to the end result, or what I like to call the desired outcome? What’s the desired outcome that they want after using your product? What is it solving?
Poornima Vijayashanker: It’s one person. A lot of times, we have multiple users or multiple personas, but in this design sprint, we’re going to limit ourselves to one persona.
Charbel Semaan: You can. It’s important in that unpacking and understanding to understand: who might the other people be?
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Charbel Semaan: If there are multiple people, acknowledging that and having an understanding and awareness of that is great. Then you might, through the rest of the course of the sprint, you might say, “We’re only going to focus on this one particular person or particular user of the product, because that’s basically the breadth that we have.” We can’t really do much more. We know we’ve got other folks, but we’re at least going to focus this sprint on this person.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Got it.
Charbel Semaan: And then that leads to, when you understand the problem, and you understand that person and how they’re facing that problem, then the second step is to sketch. This is a fun part where…this is where most people want to get into brainstorming and get a lot of ideas on the table. One of the things I like to say—and I borrow this from what I’ve learned through IDEO—is to think with your hands.
Now you get to actually get pen to paper, pen to Post-its, and you get to sketch a variety of solutions. If you’ve got about six or so people in this room with you, even if you’re running it with a co-founder or you’re running it solo, this is where you get a chance to get a number, a variety of sketches out on the table or out on paper.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Charbel Semaan: The third step is to decide. You go through all the sketches that you’ve laid out, and through a number of exercises, like noting and voting and dot voting. There are a number of different ways to approach it…you actually decide: what will the blueprint be for your prototype?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: And then the prototype is the fourth step.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yep.
Charbel Semaan: That’s where you actually get to create a realistic version of what you want this product to be, or the service, for that matter, and you get it out to real users by the fifth step or the fifth day. That’s where folks get to interact with what you’ve created, the prototype, and then you can learn and observe and understand what you can improve, or did you—and this is a key part—did you validate your hypothesis? Did you validate or invalidate what you had sought out to figure out?
Poornima Vijayashanker: There’s a few things going on. Let’s kind of unpack them in more detail. The first is, you mentioned this concept of voting and dot voting, which I like the concept a lot. I’ve started implementing it. But maybe for our audience out there who’s not familiar, we can shed some like into what that is.
Charbel Semaan: Sure. One of the exercises after you’ve gone through sketching…let’s say you’re in a room with about six people. You’re running the sprint with six people.
All six people have generated really interesting ideas and really interesting concepts or mock-ups of what the product might be. Dot voting and noting and voting, especially if you’ve decided ahead of time—and hopefully you have—who the decider is. There will be one person who’s going to be the decider, and they get the majority vote, or they get extra votes.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right. Two votes.
Charbel Semaan: Or extra dates. Exactly.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: One of the things that’s fun is doing what’s called a museum gallery, where everyone’s mock-ups on their 8-1/2 x 11 sheets of paper and Post-its go up on the wall. Everyone has a chance to review everyone else’s mock-ups. You can vote with dots, like a marker and dots, on the elements or aspects that you find compelling or you find interesting. When it comes to decision time after the voting and whatnot, you actually get to distill the best ideas from the entire group. That’s one of my favorite aspects of the sprint, is that…some people say, “Oh, I’m not very creative.”
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Charbel Semaan: Or, “I’m not the designer.” Or, “I’m not the engineer. I’m a technical person.”
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: What I have found is when you bring a collective creative together like that, then sometimes the best ideas come from someone you might not expect to come from.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Charbel Semaan: Then the voting allows for decision making, because you can’t do all the features. The voting helps you distill it down to some of the key elements that you want to focus on for the prototype.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Let’s talk about who needs to be involved in this process. We’ve already kind of mentioned that designers, engineers are great, people who are going to be building out that final prototype, but who, aside from them, needs to be involved?
Charbel Semaan: Great question. I found what’s very important is to have someone who is part of the overall decision-making process. That can either be one of the founders or any of the founders or all of the founders, someone who’s at a VP level or a C-suite level, depending on the structure of your organization and how large your organization is.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So maybe whoever understands the business goals?
Charbel Semaan: The business goals, for sure, and anyone who is even involved in sort of the direction and vision of the overall business.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Charbel Semaan: Certainly the people who would be doing the building itself and the designing itself, and definitely folks who are involved in the business side of things.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Why? I mean, doesn’t that feel like they’re micromanaging? Shouldn’t they just trust their designers and engineers and let them run free?
Charbel Semaan: Yeah. It’s a great question. One of the key principles of design that I’ve embodied and believe in so much is this two-part or two-fold aspect of inclusivity and collaboration.
You want to be inclusive and collaborative, and that avoids this waterfall effect where…if just the engineers and the devs and the designers are in the room, and the so-called business folks are out of the room, then it becomes this, “Now let’s go back and take it to them and show them this, get approval, and then…” But when folks are in the room together, that’s when those ideas can come out. More often than not, an idea gets sparked from one person, and especially if you embrace this yes/and approach.
It’s like, “Oh, that’s a great idea. You know, what if we also did this.” Or, “Could we also try this?” “I didn’t think of that. That’s great. OK.” And then you get back to that voting and say, “Great. We can’t do it all, but let’s distill them.” You actually have a richer conversation and a richer collaborative experience when you include more aspects of the business.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. I think that’s great that you’re bringing all these people to the table, involving them in the process. Now, that’s obviously a lot of overhead, right, for a founder or for a VP or some of these people to come in and sit in on a five-day design sprint. I’m sure there’s going to be some pushback around it, which we’re going to get to in the next episode. But for the purpose of this episode, how do we kind of constrain the time so that they don’t feel like they’re sitting in on a whole-day session?
Charbel Semaan: Right. I think there are a couple of ways of approaching it. One is to think about design sprints more as a mindset, or an approach. The pushback I hear a lot is this five-day—”We don’t have five full days to have six critical members of our team…” I completely understand that. It makes a lot of sense. The response I often share to that is, “Would you rather invest up front in those five days, where all five or six of you or seven of you can come in, and you’re investing that time, which is money. I understand. Would you rather invest that and have the opportunity to come out with something that yields you a real opportunity to engage with a real prototype with real people in five days instead of five months?”
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: Instead of five months of a bloated product that you’re not even sure is actually something that the people want or are going to use or pay for.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Charbel Semaan: You haven’t validated. You may have those silos that you mentioned earlier. There tends to be tension. I mean, we’ve experienced it where there’s tension between engineering and design and product and marketing and sales, etc. And you mentioned earlier about the business folks. It can be the founders. It can be the head of sales. It can be anyone who’s involved in key elements of the business. When you bring them together for those five days, you tend to circumvent a lot of wasted money, wasted time, and I come back to decision deadlock. That’s a key thing I’ve noticed, is the inability to get through that decision, that blocker, that keeps them from—
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. Let’s talk about that. Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: Sure. The key thing about the sprint…and whether it’s five days…sometimes it can be compressed to three if done well. I’ve tried one. It’s very hard.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: It’s extremely challenging to do it in one day. I don’t always recommend that. But the key part about the decision deadlock in the sprint—when you’re using the sprint as a methodology, as an approach and a mindset, as opposed to fixating on the number of days and time—is it’s going so fast, and there are so many constraints, that constraints lead to clarity.
You don’t have a whole lot of time to spend on, should it be this way, or should it be that way? You’re simply saying, “Here are the ways. Let’s pick one, and let’s try it. We’re going to find out if it’s validated or not—”
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Charbel Semaan: “—and then we can run another one again.”
Poornima Vijayashanker: I see. That’s great. Yeah, because I think that’s actually…I was going to ask the question around scope creep, but it sounds like if you’re whittling things down, it becomes very obvious what that particular thing is that you’re building, whether it’s a feature or whatnot, and what the problem is that you’re solving versus all these other problems that might be tangential.
Charbel Semaan: Right.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, you get that real level of focus, but I’m sure unifying people around what that one thing is is a challenge.
Charbel Semaan: It is. That’s why it’s important at the start of the sprint for me, as a facilitator, to first get permission and to get that commitment from everyone that I’m here to facilitate. I’m here to guide the process and really help extract or be able to foster and cultivate their ability to create and to go validate what it is they’re trying to find out. The second part is having that decider in the room. When everyone agrees and commits to who the decider is…and for that decider to be convicted in their decisions and to truly commit to, “Lot of these things are great things we can do. We could save them for another sprint. We’re really going to hone in on and focus on this particular aspect.”
Poornima Vijayashanker: I could imagine that whoever the decider is needs to have done their homework and be really wedded to the customers, the problem. Are there ever times where they’re not sure? They may need to say, “Oh, you know what? It’s two problems here. Not really sure which one. I need another day to go back and do research, or a week,” in which case, now you’re holding up the sprint.
Charbel Semaan: Yes. Great point. Again, the beauty here is, because you’re aiming for that fifth step or that fifth day to get the prototype in front of users, to take another day, which will turn into a week, as you said, is not helping anyone.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: Instead, note that you’ve got this second thing that you might want to do, or you think you have a hunch that maybe that’s also a problem. It very well could be, and that’s perfectly fine. Just let it be there.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: Pick one and go with it, and get to that fifth day or get to that fifth step. Get the feedback. Learn from it. And observe how folks are interacting with it, whether it’s a feature, like you said, or it’s the entire mock-up of a product, and then iterate and do it again.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK. Yeah, so then there’s not a lot of leeway for ambiguity, and you have to get comfortable making those firm decisions to keep the sprint moving forward.
Charbel Semaan: Absolutely. I think that’s the key part, is to be convicted in your decisions and to keep moving forward, because this is a sprint.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, yeah.
Charbel Semaan: You’re just getting to that finish line.
Poornima Vijayashanker: We’ve talked about these five days. Day one is sort of this brainstorming session.
Charbel Semaan: Day one’s actually unpacking and understanding.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Charbel Semaan: You want to have a good understanding of the problem and who has the problem. Then you go into sketching a variety of solutions. The third day, you decide what you’re going to prototype. The fourth day is the actual prototyping. And the fifth day is getting that prototype in front of real people.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK. How do you know, once you’ve done these five days and put something out there, whether or not the sprint was successful?
Charbel Semaan: That can vary sometimes from team to team and people to people, and depending on the product and service. What I like to anchor to, though, is, did you get some level of a lightbulb moment or an a-ha moment?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: Did you learn something? If you didn’t learn anything by the end of the sprint, then you may not have understood the problem as deeply as you thought you did, and you may not have understood the person for who you’re solving it for.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Nice.
Charbel Semaan: I like to measure it in terms of, on one hand, there’s the analytical side.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Sure.
Charbel Semaan: Like, do we get buy-in, or do we get people who are turning into customers saying, “If you’re going to launch that and that actual product in the next two weeks or month, OK, here’s my preorder”? Great. On the other side of it, have you learned something from it?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Mm-hmm. Even if it’s an epic fail here, nobody likes it, they thought the feature was just crap, there’s insight there where it’s like, “Hey, we’re not going to be building that.”
Charbel Semaan: Right.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Or, “We’re not going to flesh that out in greater detail.”
Charbel Semaan: Like the majority of my products and ideas. I’ve learned something, though, or the team has learned something. If it’s an epic fail, great. And this goes back to what I mentioned earlier. Would you rather have the epic fail and realize that in five days, or five months later after you spent tens of thousands of dollars or more? If you’re outsourcing it, tens of thousands or more. If you’ve got an internal team, and you’ve got all your engineering and design and development time and dollars, that a-ha moment can go on the positive. Let’s keep moving forward with this. We’re onto something…or it’s the, “OK, start over. But at least we only spent five days doing it.”
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right. Yeah. I think that time investment is great. I think even in those epic failures, a couple things develop. You now have a process with your team. There’s some comradery and some communication barriers that have been broken down. Then there’s still some interesting customer insights. A customer telling you, “Hey, I didn’t like this feature. What I was really looking for was X, Y, Z,” that’s a valuable conversation to have.
Just kind of developing, like you said, that confidence around, “OK, I’m going to practice active listening for what it is they’re looking for.”
Charbel Semaan: Great point. There are two things that…
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: You just triggered a couple of thoughts for me. One is on the team communication and bonding front. What I’ve noticed is the team ends up developing a common language and a common baseline or foundation to work with. The next time, I’ll hear something like, “Well, why don’t we go sketch this? Let’s go sketch some…we’re talking about a lot of ideas or a lot of ways that we could do this feature. Let’s just sketch them out, and let’s vote on them.” Right? “And let’s make sure one of us is the decider,” or whatever it might be. The other part that you mentioned around the lessons that you’ll learn from the actual people who are interacting with is, more often than not in my experience, folks don’t simply say, “I don’t like that feature.”
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: Or, “That didn’t solve my problem. Thanks. Bye.”
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Charbel Semaan: They’re usually walking through. And if you’re facilitating that empathy interview and that observation time, you’re asking questions like, “Could you walk through, think out loud, while you’re engaging with this?” More often than not, they’re going to say something like, “Well, this confuses me. I’m not sure what this does. I kind of wish it would do this.”
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: Or you could ask, “Well, what do you wish it would do for you?” You’re going to learn so much more. It’s not a binary: they didn’t like it and you’re going to walk away.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Charbel Semaan: You’re still going to learn so much, like you said.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK. We’ve run a sprint. We got some feedback. Maybe it was successful. Maybe it was not successful. But what’s the next step?
Charbel Semaan: The next step, I think, is to understand: what did you get out of this? What was the yield? Did you learn something about what’s working, and you want to double down on that?
You can double down on that in your existing product development methodology, whatever you have. Maybe it’s agile, or whatever it might be.
If it’s something that turned out to not work out so well, it was a failure—if you want to call it that—then you could think about, “Well, could we run a sprint on one of those other ideas that we sketched out?” Or taking what we learned from the people who interacted with it, it turns out, we had that in some of the sketches. Why don’t we incorporate that next?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh, nice. Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: You may not run another five-day sprint the following week, but you now are so much more informed about your existing product development cycle that you could start to pull in some stories, if you run agile, or whatever your approach is.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK. The idea is to use design sprints for moments where you’ve got a lot of ideas, you’re not sure which one to execute on, and really for that quicker design feedback, but not as a standalone methodology for every week, we’re doing a design sprint.
Charbel Semaan: I don’t think so.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: Yeah. I think it works out better in the way you described it. I think, particularly, sprints are great when you start to notice a little bit of that clog.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Charbel Semaan: You’re getting to that decision deadlock, or you’ve got a problem you want to solve, but you’re just grinding on it.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Charbel Semaan: The sprint allows you to just get moving. It allows you to go from thinking to action.
Same when you have a new idea. You’ve got lots of new ways that you think…well, we think we might be able to roll out a feature that could generate another hundred grand in revenue. Or we think we could branch off the product. There’s this whole other market, and that could be a million-dollar product on its own or more. Well, run a sprint on it instead of thinking about it or figuring out, “could it be? Should it be? What do we do with it?”
Poornima Vijayashanker: I’m sure other teams—maybe marketing, sales, customer support, all these other teams out there—are probably going to start embracing design and using it. Have you seen the design sprints used for other things?
Charbel Semaan: Yeah. Actually, this is my favorite part.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: It’s not just for product teams, at least anymore. Two favorite examples of mine, where teams that you might not expect have used design sprints and they’ve used them successfully: learning and development team at Medallia used a design sprint. We ran a design sprint to think about: how could we start scaling training across the entire company through video and through online learning? We ran a sprint where we had a scrappy video set up in one of the small corner offices, and we got out an example, a prototype, of a training video on a completely low, tight budget. It showed a proof of concept to the team and the entire organization what’s possible.
My other favorite example is my friend Brian Bautista at SoundHound. He’s the customer support person and customer success for SoundHound, and he’s been transitioning, actually, and has officially transitioned to the product marketing team because of a prototype and a sprint that we ran.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Cool.
Charbel Semaan: Not necessarily on the product itself, but he was helping educate on the product and wanted to ensure that people were using SoundHound and Hound in the best possible way. What he wanted to do was test a new type of video. It was more personable. Could showcase a little bit more of the humanity of the brand and the personality of the brand. In eight hours, believe it or not—
Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh, cool.
Charbel Semaan: —ran a prototype on what that video could be, takes it to his VP of marketing, and she loved it and greenlit more videos.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Well, thank you so much, Charbel, for teaching us about design sprints today.
Charbel Semaan: My pleasure.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. For all of you out there who are watching and listening, Charbel and I want to know, is there something that you’ve been stuck on? Maybe a decision deadlock when it comes to a product or a service, or even something in your personal life. Let us know what it is in the comments below this video. That’s it for today’s episode of Build. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode, where we’ll dive into how you can evangelize design sprints at your organization. Ciao for now.
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