Sprints are a combination of business strategy, innovation, behavior science, design thinking, lean and agile methodology, packaged into a process​​ that any team can use to solve any challenge. It's a tool that gives companies tangible results, and helps them to use time and resources efficiently.

Sprints can be used for strategy and vision exploration for products, services, brand development, or market and technology exploration. They are a great tool to use to align Multi-disciplinary teams and creating a clear vision for teams to work towards. Sprints are a catalyst to validating ideas and business models before investing time/money into a project. When you are looking to create customer-first experiences and solve business innovation challenges, a sprint workshop is the right investment for you.

A sprint can be run at any time, but when you have a business challenge that is time bound, you have a forcing function that can drive results. Good examples of this would be naming your company, designing a logo, re-branding, hiring an agency, or writing a brand manifesto. We can help your team turn the abstract idea of 'your brand' into something concrete and tangible.

Yes you can use a design sprint for complex enterprise products! A sprint helps you identify the most important part of a complex project and helps you target one piece to validate. Scoping this one moment allows you to build on a validated piece of the puzzle instead of feeling like the team has to figure it all out at once. The sprint sets the keystone for your team to then continue to build on, knowing they are moving in the right direction.

Yes, you can use a sprint for a marketing campaign! Marketing is crucial to getting your brand, product, or service right. Questions to ‘what are the key features?’, ‘Do our customers care?’ ‘How will we be discovered?’ can be answered in a sprint. By testing campaigns against each other, you can try different messaging, explore alternate ways of explaining your product or service to quickly learn how to sell, explain, and enable discovery of your product.

When it comes to a design sprint, the answer is no, but if you have research—we’ll use it! Many times innovative products come from the insights of the team paired with your research. But, quite often it is the insight that comes from an expert in your company that sparks a success story. In a sprint, we can take an idea for a brand, service, or product and find the bridge to connect to the customer.

You need two to six participants to have a successful sprint. For a Brand Sprint, we need to include people (executives, decision makers, stakeholders) with authority and ownership of your company’s identity. Usually this includes a founder or CEO, or CMO. For an Innovation Sprint, Product Sprint, or Opportunity Sprint, the group must consist of a decision maker with the authority and ownership over a team, product, or service, but the remaining team members can be a diverse group of individuals throughout the organization.

With an individual founder, it is better to work 1-on-1 with Emerson Blue in an immersive process that will enable you to create a vision for your brand, product or service to move forward with clarity and direction.

When you have brand clarity, the abstract idea of your brand becomes concrete. Your company and team is provided a common language to describe what your company is about, allowing all other decisions around “what’s on brand” to become easy. When you’re faced with a big decision about naming, identity, marketing, or even company policy, you can use your brand guidelines to lead the decision making process. If you work with outside vendors or agencies, you can start your relationship with them by walking through your new brand guide. Having clarity on your brand is also a crucial component to help new employees understand what your company is about, and can remind the founding team what you stand for. Your brand defines what you build, the way you build it, who you build it for, and how you and your team do your work.