The Design Gym Sprints

The CUSTOMER INSIGHTS SPRINT

Better understand the needs of your top customers

Who It’s For

The Customer Insights Sprint is great for leadership, product, innovation/strategy, and customer experience teams who need to:

  • Conduct research with your top customers/users
  • Understand the underlying needs, motivations, beliefs, and behaviors that inform how they interact with your business and brand
  • Better prioritize your projects and investments to align with the needs of your customers
  • De-risk big strategy or investment decisions before making them
  • Model to your team what customer centricity looks like in action

Note: This Sprint is equally effective for better understanding the needs of external stakeholders (i.e. customers, consumers, partners) or internal stakeholders (i.e. employees, leaders, board members, interns, etc.)

How It Works

Weeks 1-2: On-boarding, Data Immersion, and Research Planning

Our teams become one team with an immersion into goals, desired outcomes, and business results. We co-create a Strategy Brief that will guide the project.

  • Immersion into existing documentation (asynchronous)
  • 1x 90m Visioning Session with the team leader (virtual)
  • 1x 3-hour Kickoff + Problem Framing Workshop (in person/virtual)
  • 1x 3-hour Research Mapping + Hypotheses Creation workshop (in person/virtual)
  • Qualitative research recruiting and logistics planning
  • Desk research
Weeks 3-6: Field Research

Getting into the (virtual) field with your most important stakeholders – your customers. We’ll combine virtual interviews, in-person shadows, and data immersion to fully understand the behaviors, beliefs, and needs of your users.

  • Depending on the challenge, we will recommend one of the following:
    • 24x 1-hour virtual interviews across 3x different target B2C segments
    • 8x 3-hour virtual design thinking workshops with top B2B customers
    • 4x 6-hour in-person design thinking workshops with top B2B customers
  • 3x in-person shadows in a high-priority market
  • Survey execution and synthesis for a broader volume of target customers
  • Desk research to incorporate broader market trends and quantitative studies
Weeks 7-9: Insights and Analytics Synthesis

We will lead a rigorous synthesis of the research done to distill a behavioral analysis and prioritize the needs that emerged.

  • Heads down time to synthesize the research and distill insights
  • Visualization of key data and trends
  • 1x 3-hour insights presentation to gather input and brainstorm implications
Week 10: Insights Activation

We will facilitate an ‘open invite’ event for the broader organization to join an interactive readout of the research outcomes and participate in a facilitated exercise to map out implications for their own teams and projects.

  • Development of final deliverables
  • 1x 90m Insights Summit share out and implications workshop (virtual, open invite for as many people as are interested in joining)
  • 1x 60m team retrospective to debrief the process and collaboration (virtual)
  • Optional: 1x 90m workshop to co-create a narrative to cascade through the team (virtual)

Sprint Deliverables

  • Strategy Brief
  • Research Plan
  • Empathy Interview Videos
  • Insights + Opportunities Presentation including User Personas, Journey Maps, or Jobs to Be Done frameworks

The Details

  • Time Starting at 10 weeks
  • Participants A hand selected team of 6-12 cross-functional people
  • Instructors Expert facilitation and coaching from 3 TDG strategists
  • Location Virtual or in person, wherever you are

The Business Case

  • Outcomes Accelerate quality outcomes
  • Engagement Increase employee engagement
  • Time & Money Spend less money and time
  • Customer Get closer to your customer
Interested? Let's connect.

EXAMPLES OF PAST CUSTOMER INSIGHTS SPRINTS

Fortune 100 Tech Company

Led design thinking sessions with the organization’s top 30 B2B customers to understand needs and create executive level validation for a major product roadmap investment. Created high value customer touchpoint for 100+ customer leaders.

Sponsor: Lead Product Manager

National Financial Services Company

Conducted deep research across a complex ecosystem of consumers and channel partners to inform a full E2E digital product redesign and roadmap.

Sponsor: Chief Product Officer

Fortune 100 Tech Company

Conducted deep organizational listening across 3 teams to understand success imperatives and tensions following a substantial re-org. Opportunity spaces emerged as new ways of working, team rituals, and leadership practices.

Sponsor: Business Unit Leader

Learn More

If you’re interested in bringing a TDG Sprint to your organization, or customizing a sprint to fit your needs, drop us a note below!

    About TDG Sprints

    TDG Sprints are strategy and innovation projects designed to help leaders move quickly, creatively, and collaboratively in environments that are volatile, lean, and fast moving (kind of like right now).

    What types of activities can you expect?

    • Core Team working sessions
    • Full Team facilitated workshops
    • Customer listening and feedback sessions
    • TDG synthesis, strategy, and design time

    What does a Sprint Team look like?

    • Our side: 3x strategists + 1 partner
    • Your side: 3-6 people on the core team + additional stakeholders at key moments

    My team is busy – what’s the time commitment?

    They can be fully embedded with our team or hands off – we know calendars are tight, we so we’ll mold to what is feasible.

    Our priorities are already set. How do these fit in?

    Sprints are designed to accelerate the highest priority initiatives you’re on the hook to deliver. We will work with you in advance to make sure they’re scoped against the right strategic priorities so it doesn’t feel like a ‘side of desk’ project.

    Check out the other TDG Sprint Offerings.

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