Steve Fisher

The founder of the Republic of Quality reflects on design sprints, diversity, and why too many tools are killing our focus.

- Oliver Lindberg

2016 was the year of the design sprint,a five-day process for solving, proto-typing and testing design problems, first brought to prominence by Google Ventures.Sprint, the book by GV’s Jake Knapp,became a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, and teams all over the world started adopting the framework to improve their products and ultimately their businesses. Steve Fisher, the founder of Canadian UX, content strategy and web technology consultancy the Republic of Quality, however, noticed one thing was missing from the sprints he saw: content.

“The GV guys have been writing about design sprints for four or five years, and we’ve been running our own sprints for about as long, ” he explains. “There are big benefits. A sprint allows you to leap ahead and see what’s possible without having to spend too much effort and time. But we found people weren’t really talking about content design and how that would help the product.”

QUICK PITCH 

Initially, the clients that Fisher pitched the sprint process to were sceptical. It seemed expensive. You needed to allocate four to six people and up to a whole week for it to be successful. However, they soon saw the advantages – especially in content and design, which are at the core of the Republic of Quality ethos. “Every single time those companies would see a huge saving and gains by the end of the project, because we had done sprints, ” Fisher enthuses. “Once that word gets out, it’s pretty compelling.”