# The Official 5-Day Design Sprint Run your own sprint with this interactive guide to product and marketing validation. The Design Sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. You take a small team, clear the schedule for a week, and rapidly progress from problem to tested solution using a proven step-by-step checklist. Working together in a sprint, you can shortcut the endless-debate cycle and compress months of time into a single week. Instead of launching a minimal product to understand if an idea is any good, you’ll get clear data from a realistic prototype. We think the Design Sprint gives you a superpower: You can fast-forward into the future and see how customers react before you invest all the time and expense of creating your new product, service, marketing campaign, or whatever! But the Design Sprint is not just about efficiency. It's also an excellent way to stop the old defaults of office work and replace them with a smarter, more respectful, and more effective way of solving problems that brings out the best contributions of everyone on the team. Originally created by [Jake Knapp](https://jakeknapp.com/) at Google, the Design Sprint was developed and refined by our team at GV. We’ve used sprints to help hundreds of startups solve problems and test new ideas. Today, we use Design Sprints to help startups find and expand product-market fit at our VC firm and work with a global network of Sprint Pros who run Design Sprints with all kinds of organizations. You can use this interactive doc as a guide and toolkit while running your sprint. ## The Right Time to Run a Sprint The Design Sprint works best when the stakes are high and the road is long. Small opportunities and quick fixes don't require new ways of working. But when you're faced with a big opportunity or problem, and the solution will take weeks or months to execute, that's the right time to run a sprint. We've used sprints to help teams working on: - New products - New features - Customer onboarding - Customer acquisition - Marketing campaigns - Possible pivots - Expansion into new markets ## Run a Design Sprint in This Doc If you want to run a Design Sprint with your team, this doc can help — it's a step-by-step interactive guide that enables you to learn the process and do the work in one place. ## The Design Sprint, Day by Day On Monday, you make a map of the problem. On Tuesday, you sketch solutions. On Wednesday, you decide which sketches are strongest. On Thursday, you build a realistic prototype. And on Friday, you test that prototype with five target customers. ### Set the stage Before the sprint begins, you've got to do some prep work. You need to have a big important challenge—something that's worth five days of focused work. You need to recruit a team with diverse skills and determine the right room and materials. ### Monday: Map Monday is a series of structured conversations to build a foundation for the sprint week. You’ll define key questions and a long-term goal, create a simple map of your product or service, gather insights from experts on your team, and select a target representing the greatest risk or opportunity. ### Tuesday: Sketch Tuesday is focused on solving the problem through individual sketches, optimizing for deep thinking and critical analysis over group brainstorming. ### Wednesday: Decide On Wednesday, your team will evaluate sketches and decide which to prototype using the "Sticky Decision" method to identify the best solutions, culminating in a storyboard for your prototype. ### Thursday: Prototype On Thursday, you'll build a realistic prototype based on your storyboard to simulate a finished product for customer testing. ### Friday: Test It's time to put that prototype to the test with five customers in individual interviews to receive data on your prototype's effectiveness.