What is Product & Service Design?

In this guide, we will get creative and dive into the design of your product or service. We will do this using an adapted version of a so-called design sprint.

The design sprint method was developed by Jake Knapp from Google Ventures. It is a structured process for quickly generating and designing product or service concepts. In the best case you will work in a team to brainstorm ideas, sketch solutions and draw the storyboard for a product/service. Later, you will prototype and test the idea to arrive at a high-fidelity design concept ready for further development and implementation. 

This method allows for efficient generation of multiple design ideas and fast-paced iteration, avoiding the pitfalls of investing in a single design direction too early. It is a good way to align stakeholders and team members to be on the same page and make the most of the limited time and resources.

While you can always work through this toolkit on your own within the time you need, the design sprint is best conducted in a two-day workshop format with the whole team. 

⚠️So, before starting into this process, you want to get your team together. If you are working as a solopreneur on your project, try to get together some of your peers to assist you in this design sprint for the next two days. In the best case, the design sprint team is multidisciplinary with different skills. It is very helpful and enriching to get different views and ideas.

If you can’t get everyone physically in the same room, don’t worry! You can also get together online using your preferred meeting platform. We’ll provide you with a digital whiteboard template to collaborate online.

So to get prepared for your design sprint:

• Get your team together.
• Find a meeting location or choose your online meeting platform and send out the meeting invites.
• Prepare and share your whiteboard (Step A).

Note: 🍋 Throughout this guide, we will use the example of a food supplement company to better illustrate each task and information.

What is Product & Service Design

Good For?

Product/Service Design is crucial y not only for startup founders as it provides a systematic approach to developing innovative concepts. By engaging in a design sprint, you can:

• Quickly Address Key Business Questions: A design sprint facilitates the rapid exploration of critical business questions within a highly collaborative workshop.
• Mitigate the Risk of Unsuccessful Investments: The design sprint minimizes the risk of investing time and resources in an idea that may not prove successful in the long run.
• Foster Unified Understanding: It fosters a unified understanding of the product challenges among all relevant stakeholders.
• Promote Ownership: A design sprint provides a sense of ownership for all parties involved in the process.

How to Design Your Product or Service Step-by-Step:

Customer journey mapping is a technique used to understand and visualize the interactions and touchpoints that a customer has with a product or service. It maps the different stages of the customer experience, from initial awareness to post-purchase evaluation.

Customer journey mapping can be used to identify areas for improvement in the customer experience and to generate ideas for new features or solutions. The goal is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the customer’s needs, motivations, and behaviors throughout the entire process of interacting with the product or service.

By creating a customer journey map, the team can gain an even deeper understanding of the possible touchpoints and customer’s needs and behaviors as well as pain points related to the product and use this information to inform the design of the product or service. This can lead to a design that is more centered around the user and a better overall customer experience.

You already completed a great deal of work on day 1 when you defined your user personas with their empathy maps as well as their tasks and challenges, pain points and gains. Use those as a starting point.

“How might we” (HMW) questions are a technique used to reframe a problem or challenge in a more open-ended, solution-focused way. The key benefit of using “How might we” questions is that they encourage a more expansive and creative way of thinking about a problem. They are used to generate a wide range of ideas and potential solutions, rather than being constrained by the initial problem statement. Additionally, it can help to build a common understanding among team members, and align on the problem they are trying to solve.

HMW questions are typically formulated as “How might we…?” followed by a brief statement of the problem or challenge.

During a design sprint, HMW questions can be used to guide the team’s thinking and decision-making throughout the process, particularly during the ideation and prototyping stages. The team can use these questions to generate a wide variety of ideas and concepts, and then select the most promising solutions to move forward with.

Welcome back to the second day of your design sprint. Today will be very creative, so grab some sheets of paper and a pen, and get ready to sketch.

We will start with developing the so-called solution sketched.

Solution sketches are created in a 4-step process by the team members individually, then they are collected and shared with the rest of the team and stakeholders. The goal of creating solution sketches is to generate a wide range of ideas and potential solutions, and to identify the most promising concepts to move forward with. The team can use the solution sketches as a starting point for creating more detailed and refined prototypes, or to discuss possible solutions, collect feedback and adjust the solution, it’s a way to speed up the ideation process and to validate or discard concepts quickly.

✅ Take your notes (20min)

Gather some sheets of paper and a pen. Revisit the crucial “How Might We” questions, the customer journey map, and the lightning demos. Jot down all of your thoughts and ideas regarding the solution you’re developing. Keep writing, even if you feel like you’re duplicating your thoughts. These notes are for your personal reference, and you don’t have to share them with anyone.

✅ Write down your ideas (20min)

Let’s get creative. Instead of writing, try sketching interesting ideas or solutions. Don’t worry about making them perfect, just let your creativity flow. Remember, these sketches are for your reference only and won’t be seen by anyone else, so it’s okay if they’re not polished or aesthetically pleasing.

✅ Sketch your crazy 8 (8min)

This may be challenging, but it’s also fun! Follow these steps:

• Take a sheet of paper and fold it into four sections.
• Unfold the paper to create a grid with eight boxes.
• Using a timer, quickly sketch eight different ideas in eight minutes, one idea per box.
• Feel free to experiment with different variations of similar ideas.
• These sketches are for your personal use only, so keep them private and don’t show them to anyone.

✅ Draw your solution sketches (40min)

Now it is time to pick your solution(s) and elaborate on it. Take some new sheets of paper and draw a visual explanation of your solution(s). Each sheet of paper, letter size (A4), will represent one potential solution to the sprint challenge. This exercise will be shared with others, so it is important that your ideas are clearly and effectively communicated. Keep in mind that you won’t be able to explain your concept in person, so it should be self-explanatory and easy to understand.

✅ Submit the sketches

Those who have completed their solution sketch should take a photo of it and send it to the facilitator’s email address. The facilitator will then collect all of the solution sketches and display them in the designated exhibition area for all to see.

The solution sketches which the team created should now be put up and presented by the facilitator in the solution gallery.

The solution gallery allows all the team members, stakeholders and users to see all the solutions and have a clear understanding of the different ideas that the team has generated.

The team is now invited to review the solutions and provide feedback. This feedback can then be used to make decisions about which solutions to move forward with and which to discard. The solutions gallery can also be used later as a resource for the team to come back and refer to in the future, during the implementation and testing stages.

We will start with a silent exposition in which everyone views and evaluates the other’s sketches individually and later vote for the best solutions. After that, the solutions will be discussed in the group and the team member can speed critique the solutions. Finally, the best solution(s) will be selected through a final voting. So go ahead and follow the steps.

✅ Walk through the exposition and vote (30min)

Once the facilitator has put up all solution sketches in the gallery, the participants take about 30 min to go around the gallery individually and look at each sketch in detail. After they finish the first round, the participants take a second round, but this time create a “heatmap” by sticking green dots to the elements of each solution they like most. 1 dot for solutions they like, 2 dots for solutions they like a lot, 3 dots for the solutions they like best. There is no limit to the number of dots every participant can use.

✅ Give your speed critique (60min)

Now every participant has 5 min to explain his solution in his words to the rest of the group, the others can comment and ask questions and critique each solution.

✅ Make your final voting (30min)

Now we move to the final voting. Every participant has 2 votes for the solution or elements of it he/she likes best. However, the decider has supervotes, (as many as he likes) whatever he/she decides will be prototyped.

With this, you should have a rather detailed picture of which solutions or elements you want to move forward with and be ready to create your storyboard.

In the last step of the day, we will be creating your storyboard. The storyboard is a visual representation of a user’s experience with a product or service, used to illustrate the flow of steps and interactions that a user goes through. 

It helps to capture and organize the team’s ideas, and to help them think through the user experience in a visual and holistic way. It also helps to identify problems and opportunities, and to generate further ideas. It allows the team to align and move forward with a shared understanding of the user’s experience and to take key decisions.

A storyboard typically consists of a sequence of illustrations or images, accompanied by captions or notes that describe the user’s actions, thoughts, and emotions at each stage of the experience. The illustrations can be simple hand-drawn sketches or digital images, whatever helps to provide a clear visual representation of the user’s journey. Finally, the storyboard serves as a blueprint for the prototype. 

✅ Draw the storyboard (60)

Work in the group using the grid on the whiteboard to describe each step the user will go through. Start with the opening scene, where will the user discover the product, what happens at each touchpoint. Use pictures, worlds, scribble and go into detail.