Study smarter with Fiveable
Get study guides, practice questions, and cheatsheets for all your subjects. Join 500,000+ students with a 96% pass rate.
Design sprints represent one of the most powerful frameworks in modern product development, and understanding their structure is essential for any advanced design strategy work. You're being tested on more than just knowing the six phases in order—examiners want to see that you understand why each phase exists, how they build on each other, and when to apply specific techniques within each stage. The sprint methodology embodies core principles you'll encounter throughout this course: divergent vs. convergent thinking, rapid iteration, user-centered validation, and cross-functional collaboration.
Don't just memorize "Understand, Define, Sketch, Decide, Prototype, Validate" as a sequence. Know what cognitive mode each phase demands, which stakeholders lead at each stage, and how skipping or rushing any phase undermines the entire sprint. When you encounter scenario-based questions, you'll need to diagnose which phase a team is in—or should be in—based on their activities and outputs.
The first two phases focus on problem framing—ensuring your team solves the right problem before generating solutions. These phases are inherently divergent, pulling in information from multiple sources before converging on a focused direction.
Compare: Understand vs. Define—both are research-oriented, but Understand is expansive (gathering inputs) while Define is reductive (filtering to focus). If an FRQ asks about problem framing, distinguish between data collection and data synthesis.
These phases shift the team into creative mode, first diverging to explore possibilities, then converging to select the strongest direction. The transition from Sketch to Decide represents one of the most critical handoffs in the sprint.
Compare: Sketch vs. Decide—Sketch rewards quantity and wild ideas; Decide rewards critical evaluation and feasibility analysis. Teams that struggle often blur these phases, critiquing ideas too early or generating new concepts too late.
The final phases shift from abstract concepts to tangible artifacts. Fidelity management becomes critical—prototypes must be real enough to test but cheap enough to discard.
Compare: Prototype vs. Validate—Prototype is about making with speed; Validate is about learning with rigor. A common failure mode is building prototypes too polished to abandon or running validation sessions too informal to yield actionable insights.
| Concept | Best Examples |
|---|---|
| Divergent thinking | Understand (research gathering), Sketch (idea generation) |
| Convergent thinking | Define (problem focusing), Decide (concept selection) |
| User research methods | Understand (interviews, observation), Validate (usability testing) |
| Decision frameworks | Decide (dot voting, impact-effort matrix, decider vote) |
| Rapid iteration | Prototype (low-fidelity builds), Sketch (Crazy 8s) |
| Cross-functional collaboration | All phases, but especially Understand (lightning talks) and Prototype (divide and conquer) |
| Fidelity management | Prototype (Goldilocks quality), Sketch (rough concepts acceptable) |
Which two phases both involve user engagement, and how does the purpose of that engagement differ between them?
A team is simultaneously generating new ideas and critiquing existing ones. Which phase boundary are they violating, and why does this cause problems?
Compare and contrast the outputs of the Define phase versus the Decide phase—both produce focused direction, but at different levels of abstraction.
If a prototype receives negative user feedback during Validate, which earlier phase should the team revisit, and what factors determine how far back they should go?
An FRQ describes a team that skipped directly from Understand to Prototype. Identify two specific risks this creates and explain which missing phases would have mitigated them.