Project Development Sprints
LISTEN + SET GOALS
Goal of Project Development Sprints – Successful and productive ideation sessions that conclude with consensus around which scientific questions to tackle and how to pursue answers.
Origin of Sprints – Design sprints originated with Jake Knapp at Google Ventures. He developed the sprint process to help Google Ventures and the companies it invests in to prototype and validate projects rapidly and effectively in just one week.
For example, a coffee company wanted to build an online store… a project that could take a long time and many years of refinement. Rather than slog through many meetings and endless discussions of how the online store should function, they decided to run a design sprint. During the sprint, the coffee team worked together to map out the customer experience —from who the customer was to what a positive customer outcome might look like, refining their ideas with help from experts on each step of the customer experience. They then created three rough prototypes of websites and presented them to potential future customers to see how they responded. Based on the testers’ feedback, the team eliminated the design that they had initially been most excited about and moved forward with one of the other designs; they had learned in one short week what would be compelling to customers, without the need for weeks of meetings and months of refinement!
Sprints at VAI – We at Van Andel Institute have adapted this prototyping process to support scientific ideation for the development of grants and collaborative projects. Here’s how it works:
LISTEN + SET GOALS
A diverse team is an asset.
‘How might we…’ questions help us define our biggest challenges, without prescribing solutions.
Hear from the Experts – While you listen to the experts present research related to your project, everyone will take notes using a special format: “how might we…” questions. “How might we…” questions help us define our biggest challenges, without prescribing solutions. These questions grease our mental wheels.
Working “alone together” allows all voices to be heard—not just the loudest or most charismatic.
After compiling and organizing these questions, you will have the opportunity to anonymously vote on the challenges that you think are most important and interesting. Based on the top-voted challenges, everyone will work “alone together” to each draft an inspirational long-term goal for the project. “Alone together” or “silently alongside one another” is a key strength of project development sprints because it allows all voices to be heard—not just the loudest or most charismatic. Once each person’s long-term goal has been shared, the team will vote to choose an inspirational overall goal for the project.
This map provides a high-level overview of the team’s current understanding of the science.
Establish a focus – After listening to the experts, organizing our questions, and choosing a goal, it is important to establish a map of the science. How do all of these parts fit together? By framing the project in terms of actors (e.g., cells, inputs) on the left, “outcomes” (e.g., disease outcomes, cells states) on the right, and “possible mechanisms” that connect the two, this map provides a high-level overview of the team’s current understanding of the project and identifies places where the team wants to expand their understanding.IDEATE + ALIGN
By the end of the exercises, you will have fleshed out a concept that encompasses what you want to investigate and how.
Ideate – Now that we know where we want to go, we have to figure out how to get there. So, after a break and grabbing your favorite snack (we believe happy stomachs create happy minds), we will work through four ideation exercises, taking us from quick rough ideas to more detailed proposals. By the end of the exercises, you will have fleshed out a concept that encompasses what you want to investigate and how. You’ll give it a catchy title, and then you’ll prepare an anonymous 3-slide pitch deck explaining your idea.
Share and Align – After taking time to quietly read and absorb the concepts, each team member will get a chance to vote for the bits of the presented concepts that they like best. When all the voting is complete, each team member gets to point out their favorite concept and explain why they like it. These beloved concepts will be combined to form one “target concept” and will be the foundation for putting pen to paper for a project proposal. And congrats, you are now two thirds of the way done with the sprint!
OUTLINE + EXPAND + REFINE
The last phase of the sprint hones in on a single project arc.
Outline – The last phase of the project development sprint focuses on building a concrete project plan in three steps: outline, expand, and refine. In this phase, each person will use stickies to outline the project from hypothesis to expected outcomes, using the chosen concepts as guides. Here again, the team will vote, narrowing down all the suggestions in order to hone in on a single project arc (which could be a mash-up of several arcs).
Your team will divide up into small groups, each group claiming a piece of the arc to flesh out.
Expand – Lastly, you’ll expand your chosen project arc into a more detailed slide deck that contains all of the details that you will need to move your project or collaboration to the next level. For this step, your team will divide up into small groups, each group claiming a piece of the arc to flesh out. The great thing is, you’ve already done a lot of the work without even knowing it! You can grab figures and chunks of text from your concepts and drop them right into your slide deck.
In addition to improving the project proposal, corporate editing is a great training opportunity.
Refine – Once the whole deck is drafted, you’ll corporately walk through the slides and edit, refining ideas and prose.