How a Product Design Sprint Fast Tracks Testing Your Ideas

Poornima Vijayashanker, founder of Femgineer (left) and Charbel Semaan, Product Designer and Founder of Made in Public (right)

Interview with Charbel Semaan Product Designer and Founder of Made in Public

How many times have you and your team spent countless hours building, bug fixing, 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 it again takes weeks or months to build and tweak 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 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 and .

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 today’s episode!

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• What is a product design sprint
• When does it make sense to a product design sprint
• What do each of the days of a product design sprint look like
• How constraining the time, energy and money you spend on a problem leads to clarity
• How a product design sprint can benefit your overall product development process

Once you’ve watched today’s episode, 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.

Listen to the episode on iTunes!

You can listen to this episode of Build on iTunes.

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Check out these additional resources on product design:

• Differentiating With Product Design
• Product Debt: What Is Product Debt And Why You Need To Prioritize It
• Product Redesign: What To Do Before You Redesign Your Product
• The Art vs Science of User Experience Design

Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.