Fresh Ideas

Maximize your chances of making something people actually want This is Chapter 1 from “Design Sprint: A Practical Guidebook for Building Great Digital Products,” by Richard Banfield, C Todd Lombardo, and Trace Wax. Design Sprint was just recently named one of the 100 Best Product Design Books…

Design Sprints were once thought to be the exclusive province of startups and small organizations, but that is simply not the case. To the contrary, we are seeing massive organizations, public enterprises and government agencies rack up successes using this time-boxed method to…

A Design Sprint is a focused problem-solving framework for product teams to get answers quickly and effectively. It has become the go-to for timeboxed innovation sessions with an emphasis on collaborative ideation, solution sketching, prototype building, and user testing. The exercises embedded…

We say it in our workshops, we have a dedicated slide in our pitch deck, and we tell everyone who will listen: The biggest takeaway from a Design Sprint is (in)validation of your riskiest assumptions. Often at the end of a Design…

  We’ve written a lot about Design Sprints here at Fresh Tilled Soil. I’ve personally run well over one-hundred of them and taught thousands of students over the years. One aspect that’s critical to working through a Design Sprint is the mindset…

Dear [product/service/process], We have to talk… It’s not you, it’s me… Yes, this is a “Dear John” letter. But it’s not just any Dear John letter. A Dear John letter, also known as a breakup letter, is a great exercise to identify…