How to improve a mature product with a Design Sprint
How do you confidently improve and refine a mature product while mitigating risks and maintaining user trust? A Design Sprint may be just what you need. The approach has been popularized and well adapted in the startup world, but it’s not just for startups. Design Sprints can provide significant value throughout the lifecycle of a product. In fact, some of my most frequent clients are large organizations and the teams responsible for mature products in need of attention.
Let’s talk about why and how to run a Design Sprint for your mature product, with some tangible evaluation criteria to help you determine if a Sprint is right for your team.
The Design Sprint: A Powerful Tool for Evolving Mature Products
Mature products face some unique pressures, from maintaining user loyalty and relevance, to staying competitive and adaptable over time. That’s why a Design Sprint is the perfect playground to improve a mature product—it allows teams to break free from entrenched assumptions, test bold ideas, and evolve the product’s value.
Here’s why the Design Sprint formula works so well for teams managing mature products, in particular:
1. FOCUS: Rather than trying to get things done in starts and stops, a Design Sprint harnesses the team’s attention and asks them to set aside their daily distractions to tackle a specific problem. This alone is an affront to the way work is typically done and can help teams get further faster (much more so than they would without dedicated, uninterrupted time together). I’ve heard teams say, “wow, we wouldn’t have made this much progress in a month or more” after a week-long Design Sprint.
2. ALIGNMENT: When a team has been managing a product for a long time, there are a lot of assumptions made about what the goals are, who the customer is, and what needs to be done. Over time, people’s opinions and perspectives may shift or drift from what was originally a shared intent (if there ever was one). During a Design Sprint, the team orients themselves to the customer they aim to impact, their journey, and the most important problems to solve. They also bring to light areas of ambiguity or misunderstanding. This realignment exercise ensures that everyone is on the same page around priorities, up to date on current user needs, and set up for success.
3. PROTOTYPING: Prototyping is another big benefit for a team working on a product that’s been around the block. It allows them to collaborate in real time to improve the experience. Often, team members have their own ideas about how things should change but don’t get an opportunity to bring them to light. They may lack the confidence or bandwidth to get their point of view across. A Design Sprint allows everyone to contribute their ideas so that they can be evaluated based on their merit vs the presentation skills of the person contributing.
How to Use the Design Sprint Formula to Innovate a Mature Product
After years leading Design Sprints, I’m still amazed by their ability to transform the way teams collaborate. Even the most unproductive group—swayed by internal friction and power dynamics—can design a better way forward.
While a lot goes into running a Design Sprint, I've broken down some of the key aspects that help unlock the power of this method. This will give you better insight into what it takes to run a Sprint (and determine if it’s something you want to bite off, or outsource).
Define the Challenge
Even mature products have pain points and opportunities for improvement. Is adoption plateauing? Are users struggling with specific features? Are competitors outpacing you in certain areas? It’s essential that you pinpoint the right challenge in order to solve the right problem.
It might sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how often teams jump straight to solutions without fully understanding the problem. I recently helped a financial services company evolve a mature digital product with a confusing customer experience. Rather than assuming a new feature would solve the problem, we started from ground zero. The team realized that their internal org structure and inability to collaborate effectively was the culprit behind the poor and disjointed user experience. This gave us a really clear starting point for the work and helped us get real about what success meant for the sprint.
Leverage Existing Insights
Mature products often have a wealth of data. Use the information at your fingertips to inform decisions, analyze the user journey, identify friction points, and beyond.
And don’t forget that people are your best source of information. In the case of my financial services client, I recommended we curate a cross-functional team representative of different areas of the business. Each team member had a unique perspective to offer based on their focus. Together, they were able to think about the customer experience holistically and design a better way to support users from every angle.
Prototype + Test Strategically
Since your core product is stable, sprints can be a safe space to experiment with transformative ideas that may feel too risky otherwise. As you build your prototype, your team can test and learn in real time to ensure the design lands with stakeholders, as well as aligns with the technical and business constraints of the product.
This is why creating space for a full, 5-day sprint is so necessary. In my work with the financial services client, we used day five to get feedback from people who were representative of their target customers. It helped the team understand if the new design offered value and would result in the outcomes that were important to the business (e.g., sign ups).
Testing also gave the team actionable feedback for improving the prototype. In turn, we were able to create a plan of action that outlined next steps, roles, and responsibilities. This is super important because it ensures that your team will keep the momentum going and bring the changes to light beyond the sprint. It also shows internal stakeholders that you’ve done your homework, which helps with buy-in.
Where to Start: Evaluation Criteria
Innovation is really about people, and mature products are managed by people first and foremost. In order to refine a product, you need your people to be productive, collaborative, and aligned. But does it ever seem like your team spins out on an issue for months at a time? Do they have a lot of meetings, but not a lot of results? Are they disengaged when they gather?
I see these issues a lot within larger organizations, typically because:
The product team is made up of individuals with fractional focus
Even when the product has the full-time attention from a small group of people, there are stakeholders surrounding the team that need to be managed and brought along to support change (and this isn’t happening)
Teams aren’t fully autonomous or able to make unilateral decisions on their own, so the process of getting things done is much slower than it would be otherwise.
When these conditions are true, it takes a long time to execute and people get tired, lose focus, and are inefficient in their work. And that makes it really hard to innovate and evolve any product, mature or not.
If your team meets any of the criteria above, I’d argue that a Design Sprint is one of the most powerful ways you can overcome the obstacles and quickly move forward.
That said, it can be a lot to bite off, especially if you’re busy managing the rest of your responsibilities, or are too close to the problem. In truth, the secret sauce of a Design Sprint lies in the facilitator's ability to diffuse friction, neutralize politics, and allow the best ideas to emerge (rather than simply the loudest voices).
If you want help with that, let’s talk. Check out this resource to learn more about my people-first approach to leading Design Sprints, or send me a note here.
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