Product Innovation Sprint

Discover a potential new growth engine and create measurable outcomes to reduce innovation risk and uncertainty within 4 weeks

Fastest path to market evidence

The Product Innovation Sprint is the fastest path from an early stage product idea to evidence that it will work in the market. 80% of product ideas are not adding value and create are a huge waste when scaling development. The way forward is to ideate, design and test many ideas before investing and scaling up development.

The Product Innovation Sprint is a method to discover and design bold new value propositions and get tangible results and evidence that the idea will work in the market. In a 4 week Sprint teams de-risk ideas in a systematic way to tell winning ideas from losers within a product innovation portfolio.

It is a repeatable innovation process to navigate from strategic design to tangible outcomes to enable evidence based decision making. Unlike Scrum or the GV Design Sprint the Product Innovation Sprint combines customer discovery with strategic design, and rapid prototyping with systematic, lightweight testing.

When do I need a Product Innovation Sprint?

The Product Innovation Sprint is about finding evidence for a product idea before scaling development. The Product Innovation Sprint fits for you if you have an idea, a new market opportunity or new technology for an existing market to explore. 

Here are some typical starting points from where we helped clients move forward:

  • Address a new market opportunity or customer need to expand your existing business model

  • Tell the potential winners from the losers of early ideas in your portfolio

  • Start a new venture and find problem/solution fit in a market

  • Find a new value proposition for a newly acquired technology 

When scoping the Product Innovation Sprint with you we will find out together if you need the full Sprint, or a GV Design Sprint or complete Innovation Sprint based on the Strategyzer Method. 

Tangible outcomes of a Product Innovation Sprint

The outcomes of a single Product Innovation Sprint is a validated product idea, a repeatable innovation process to iterate product ideas fast, an upskilled team and strategic stakeholder alignment. During Product Innovation Sprints teams consistently create strategically well designed, tested value propositions so that leadership can decide where to invest based on market evidence. Teams are empowered to apply the tools within the mindset required for entrepreneurship and innovation. 

Teams learn 

  • how to shape and refine a growth idea with design thinking, systematically and rigorously test ideas in the field

  • how to select and apply sequences of tests based on a set of 50 lean experiments, identify the most critical assumptions, gather evidence and insights

  • how to define actionable product metrics for early stage ideas 

and leaders will learn 

  • how to empower autonomous product teams

  • how to measure progress of product innovation projects

  • how to use evidence to make investment decisions in their innovation portfolio.

How we do it

The Product Innovation Sprint can be done by a single team or scaled up for many teams to manage a product innovation portfolio. It Sprint starts with a team lift-off workshop and tools training. Then teams will work in short iterations from a day to a week long. With a coach they will apply the tools to decide and re-align rapidly on next steps: shelve, pivot or persevere. At the end they will present evidence-backed data and measurable progress of innovation projects to leadership and stakeholders.

Schedule

4 weeks, 3 workshops, 20 hours Product Coaching

Week 1: Vision, Customer Discovery

2 day workshop, 3x 30 min. coaching hours, ad-hoc coaching 

  • 2 days: Vision Alignment, Challenge Framing, Team Lift-Off and Tools Onboarding 

  • 2 ½ days Customer Discovery, Leadership Check-in

Week 2: Value Proposition

1 day workshop, 4x 30 min. coaching hours, ad-hoc coaching

  • 1 day Mapping Opportunities, Value Proposition Design, Metrics, Define

  • 3 ½ days Test-Learn-Design-Iterate, Leadership Check-in

Week 3: Test-Learn-Design-Iterate

5x 30 min. coaching hours, ad-hoc coaching

  • 4 ½ days Test-Learn-Design-Iterate, Leadership Check-in

Week 4: Test-Learn-Design-Iterate, Review

½ day workshop, ½ day working session, 3x 30 min. coaching hours, ad-hoc coaching  

  • 3 days Test-Learn-Design-Iterate 

  • ½ day Wrap-Up and Pitch Training

  • ½ day Stakeholder Review and Decision Making 

The team

The team should be small (2-4 People), cross-functional and bring sufficient domain knowledge of the innovation field and passion for the topic. We encourage self-assignment to join the Product Innovation Sprint when possible.

Most important for leadership: the team members need the time and have access to potential new customers. And the team needs to be empowered and operate in a space with high psychological safety to enable fast decision making and good collaboration.

For prototyping some technical/UX skills are good to have else #nocode development and Lean UX support can be provided additionally to Product Coaching.

Our way of working

When working with organisations who are leading in digital and agile product development we are constantly deepening our knowledge in designing agile product organisations that grow organically and adapt to fit needs. In the process of using our toolbox in coaching corporate startups and accelerators from global companies we’ve identified a set of core principles and success factors that guide us as we help innovation teams:

Organize in small, 100% dedicated, cross-functional teams using lightweight agile roles. Have a dedicated sponsor who leads in an agile way, creates high level of psychological safety and gives forthright, non-violent feedback. Nurture a culture of high autonomy, shared purpose, mastery and trust,. Establish a customer-centric flow, value create over react. Have a strong shared vision combined with rapid empirical design/test cycle for fast learning. Utilize a lightweight, emergent, adaptive agile process owned by the people who do the work, in a continuous improvement cycle, with emphasis on: focus, speed, action, visualization, time-boxing and experimenting. Be mindful of setting up a physical and digital workspace that adapts for creative work.

Inspired customers

  • “With the Product Innovation Sprint we were able to strategize, create and test a valuable user-oriented product prototype in just a few weeks what usually would have taken us various months. Our #PoDojo coaches guided our team brilliantly through this process with lots of empathy and experience.”

    Tobias Merktle | Project Manager Digital Innovation | BWF Group

  • “The methodology and the tools the #PoDojo used brought everyone up to speed very quickly. It was interesting to see how fast you can develop your skills if you use the right structure and tools. Such a great experience that helped me and the team to develop great skills for a successful future.”

    Ellie Amirnasr | CEO at qlair

  • “We have hired the #PoDojo to introduce us to Lean Startup and Design Thinking for Business Model and Value Proposition Design. The action-oriented teaching style and deep knowledge of how to apply the tools helped us a lot so that the new thinking is now well accepted by our innovation coaches helping teams.”

    Bastian Gerhard | Head of Innovation and Enablement at Zalando SE

  • “Our Lean Product Innovation Workshop with Stefan was a great experience and although we are already pros with respect to Design Thinking and Lean Startup each of us expanded their know-how and got introduced to new tools.”

    Carolin (Torner) Kroeger | Digital Business & Innovation Consultant and Co-Founder at beingfemale.de

  • “#PoDojo guided my team from STREAMETRIC and me in finding the actual problems of our customers. Our workshops helped the team to be more confident in testing and learning from failures, making it possible to build prototypes faster and increase their insights.”

    Alexander Ubl | Co-Founder STREAMETRIC

  • “The PoDojo team was top of my mind during our search for a coach to up-skill up our Product & Design teams. Stefan supported us with regular catch-up's and guided us in ideation, interviewing, design sprints and conceptualisation. Thank you”

    Tanya Höpker | Head of Product Management at FinLink

  • “Great workshop, very action orientated and really valuable experience for our Startup.”

    Vincent Houdebine | CEO at Tiresio

  • “Suprising experience on converting my idea into reality. Helping a research guy to learn to think in business model. Guide you towards the right direction.”

    Shushu Ding | BASF

  • “The guys make a great job bringing the practical component to the lean startup theory! Thank you!”

    Philipp Katz | Co Funder LineUpr

3 Minutes Interview after Lifting-Off the Product Innovation Sprint with Henning Lueke, Startup Founder of Atameo at Axel Springer Plug&Play