Lesson series

Design Sprints

Learn tips and tricks for facilitating a Design Sprint (whether it's your first or 101st) and for incorporating these techniques into normal meetings.
What you are going to learn

Design Sprints

The Design Sprint is a method for answering big questions quickly.

The Design Sprint is a staple structure in the world of facilitation for solving big challenges. It’s a five-day process, initially developed at Google Ventures, used for validating ideas and tackling a business problem. The powerful process guides teams through a design-based thinking process to uncover insights, prototype an idea, and test it with users. Design Sprints can help to align a team around a shared vision, answer critical business questions, or discover the essence of a creative challenge or problem.

In this course, we'll lead you through all five stages of the Design Sprint process, teaching how the various steps fit together and why and how they work. You’ll learn tips and tricks for facilitating a Design Sprint (whether it's your first or 101st) and for incorporating these techniques into normal meetings.
Throughout this course you will:

  • Identify crucial business and product questions to answer in your sprint.
  • Map out a challenge and choose the most important place to start.
  • Sketch a solution with confidence, even if you're not a designer or artist.
  • Build the confidence to lead a team through the Design Sprint process.

Course contents

Who Should Attend?

Startup Founders

who want to learn the power of the Design Sprint

Executives

who want to level up their facilitation skills

Leaders 

who want to build products based on customer insights

What People are Saying

"There are many choices for workshops, but in my mind there are very few who get it right. Douglas Ferguson and Voltage Control get it. If you are looking to learn a topic for the first time or level up your own skills or that of your team, then the virtual workshops offered by Voltage Control are a great option. Thanks to the workshops, we are now confidently moving beyond design thinking and regularly pushing prototypes into production."
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Robert T.

VP & SENIOR CORPORATE COUNSEL AT LIBERTY MUTUAL

"Anyone that can construct a sequence of conversations to lead others is a metaskill. Anyone who participates in meetings or owns an agenda would benefit from this. It is a whirlwind, but you are among others who are in charge of making an impact. This is a practical, hands-on deep dive for managers, entrepreneurs, and leaders who can change their culture by leading meetings like a pro."
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Mark T.

HEAD OF SERVICES AT MURAL

About Douglas
Douglas Ferguson is an entrepreneur and human-centered technologist with over 20 years of experience. He is the founder and president of Voltage Control, an Austin-based facilitation agency that specializes in helping teams work better together through participatory decision making and design inspired facilitation techniques. He has helped transform teams from U.S. SOCOM, the Air Force, Adobe, Dropbox, Fidelity, Vrbo, Liberty Mutual, Humana, and SAIC.

Douglas is a thought leader and master facilitator of Design Sprints, Innovation Acceleration, Team Alignment, Meeting Systems, Culture Transitions, and Change Transformations. He is also the author of three books: Beyond the Prototype, How to Remix Anything (co-authored), and Start Within (co-authored).
Motivated by a mission to rid the world of horrible meetings and offer meaningful meetings in their place, Voltage Control is calling upon fellow facilitators to transform meeting and innovation culture. From free weekly community meetups to Control the Room–the annual facilitator summit, Voltage Control is building a community of facilitators to change the world.
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