Sprinting in California

By Mark Connolly on Nov 14, 2016 1 min read

I’m in Mountain View, California, right now, attending the Google Developer Experts Summit, an annual gathering of, well, Google Developer Experts. (My expertise in this context is, as some readers may guess, in UX.) It’s a chance to meet and learn from the many people who are a part of this global group. One session on the program that I’m excited about in particular is the full day Design Sprint Master Academy that’s happening on day two of the summit tomorrow.

Design sprints have become fairly visible in the last few years, especially the approach used at Google Ventures as outlined in the book Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days. While many of the constituent parts have been well known to the broader design and software development communities for years, there’s a real value in the way that they’ve been pulled together into a coherent whole here.

The workshop/academy that I’m attending here is an immersion in the Google approach. It’s being run by Kai Haley, who spoke at Fluxible this past September and also ran a half-day workshop on the same topic. The workshop/academy promises to be good fun, and I’m looking forward to using what I learn here in design sprints with Zeitspace clients.

Mark Connolly

Written by Mark Connolly

Mark Connolly is a partner at Zeitspace. You can find him at @uxmark@mstdn.ca