Grain Marketplace Novel Concept Design Sprint
Indigo Ag is an AgTech startup with a diverse set of tools for employees at grain silos. I designed and conducted a cross-functional design sprint as a followup to a foundational research study focusing on user's unmet needs.
The Challenge
Our design leadership had just concluded an open-ended design research activity to explore potential new areas of opportunity. I was tasked with taking their high-level list of prioritized findings and developing a collaborative design activity where non-designers could quickly sketch and iterate on potential solutions.
The goal of the design exercise was for stakeholders to generate concepts that could be tested with users to prove out business value. I began by meeting with two other designers to discuss processes that we had used in the past to achieve similar goals. All of us had experience with Google's Design Sprint methodology, so we agreed to base our exercise on this framework–but with a shorter timeframe to protect our participants' calendars.
I created a two-day design sprint schedule including multiple design ideation activities such as "How Might We" statements and Crazy 8s. My peers provided support and feedback based on their previous experience with these exercises. We then scheduled a kickoff call with our participants and ran the design sprint exercise, funneling foundational research insights into product concepts.
I led our participants through the workshop, ensuring that were were able to allow for creative dialogue while staying on schedule. Direct feedback from the sessions was overwhelmingly positive, not only due to the strength of the outputs but also the cross-functional connections participants made.
In the ensuing concept testing, end users consistently ranked our concept highly on a value scale. Through our design sprint we were able to generate a conceptual feature with demonstrated market desire and will be able to make a strong case for investing more time and resources to build it.
