Design Thinking & Ideation Facilitation

Whether it’s a 30-minute ideation session or a 3-day design sprint, I adore helping teams understand problems and develop meaningful solutions together.

Since my early days as a consultant to now as an in-house staff designer, I’m continually finding opportunities to democratize the creative process with design thinking exercises. Recently, I upped my product development skillset by becoming a certified LUMA Institute facilitator and crafting and leading a 1-day facilitation training for my cross-functional coworkers.

I’m also a passionate advocate for design sprints if the size of the project calls for it. When planned by a skilled facilitator like myself, design sprints can be an excellent way for a team to quickly improve a product, create a shared vision, or validate a new concept. It’s a framework I have come to enthusiastically promote as a way to take a project from confusion to clarity in just a few days. (Even with just a few hours, we can get pretty far!) My favorite part is that the entire team to be productive contributors to the design process. I’ve used design workshops and sprints to help multiple teams build concepts and consensus without resorting to the dreaded design-by-committee or groupthink focus groups.

I follow Google’s 6-phase framework, which I helped to outline in The Design Sprint Kit, with some of my own improvements. My process differs from Google Venture’s process in that I believe, with adequate preparation, it’s not necessary to ask a full team to dedicate five whole days to a sprint. I’ve seen many successful sprints take only 2-3 days.

I like to thoroughly plan and customize my workshops and sprints based on the team and the problem to be solved. As you can see from the rest of my work, I like to get my hands into the design as well. So as a sprint progresses into Day 2 or 3, I will often split my role between facilitator and designer. 

If your team is interested in my facilitation help or guidance in planning a sprint, please be in touch.

Leading the icebreaker at the 2018 Sprint Conference