A Crashcourse on Interactive Project Management with Sprint

This four-week project showed me the ropes of interactive project management with the Design Sprint

Project Overview

The Design Sprint, a project management strategy pioneered by Jake Knapp, is perhaps one of the most ambitious and well-known project management tools among designers and product developers. The five-day process is designed to get teams out of their usual routines, repetitive meetings, and stagnant production timelines, helping them accomplish a new goal in just one work week.

The Sprint is ambitious, but it was made more ambitious by the remote nature of the Emerging Media Master’s program for which I completed this project during my Summer 2025 Project Management and Innovation course. To accomplish this, the Sprint was stretched over four weeks, allowing myself and my team of eight other students to re-create much of the collaborative, in-person work through live chat, collaborative docs, and plenty of Zoom calls.

Our task: use the Sprint framework to identify a media or web-related issue, then ideate, prototype, and test a solution. It was time to Sprint.

The Problem

Monday of a traditional Sprint, or week one for us, was all about ideation. Using the Sprint’s “long-term goals” strategy, we had a structured brainstorming session followed by a vote. The brainstorming session produced a wide range of potential issues, from “improve or redesign the Craigslist website,” to “improve student success within the university’s online resources.”

In the end one idea won out: “Build a dashboard with a few templates to help municipalities structure better/more functional websites.” Inspired by web builders like Shopify which offer specific services to specific kinds of websites, we aimed to solve the problem of confusing, outdated, and poorly designed municipal websites with a tool specifically for those clients. We wanted to create a tool that would help government employees create sites with better UX/UI design and easier to manage content and workflows, and that inspire community engagement and trust. Blox was born.

We brainstormed ideas using the sticky note tool on Figjam. These two ideas received the most votes from the group, but ultimately we went with the idea which inspired our tool Blox.

Our Solution

The rest of the “Monday” and “Tuesday” tasks—including conducting interviews with industry experts to gain a greater perspective on the field, making lists of “how might we” questions to guide our plan, and sketching various versions of the tool—helped us focus our vision and remain on track toward accomplishing the goals we set at the beginning of the Sprint.

On “Wednesday” we voted on our favorite sketch and used that to create a robust storyboard mapping the way a potential user would navigate our tool. In our storyboard a newly hired social media manager with very little web develpment experience is tasked with updating her town’s website. After becoming frustrated with the current site manager’s outdated and clunky format, she begins using our tool on assisted mode. She is guided through the site builder and is given support and recommendations where needed, allowing her to update the site much more easily.

The above solution sketch, called “Building Blocks,” received the most votes from our team. The sketch outlines three development modes, independent, balanced, and assisted, which we used to shape our final prototype.

On “Thursday” it was time to prototype the tool and bring it to life. Our goal was to create a prototype that functioned as closely to the live tool as possible. After all, we would have to user test this thing on “Friday,” and the prototype needed to be convincing enough for usvto gather useful information.

We used Figma to create a prototype which users could navigate on “assisted mode,” just as our newly hired social media manager had done in our storyboard. Throughout the prototyping process, my primary role was creating the visual assets for our new brand, which I dubbed Blox. I created a color palette, a suite of fonts, a tagline, three logos, and buttons. By building a comprehensive styleguide prior to the rest of the prototype design, it helped our team create a cohesive and professional-looking product.

During this process I also came up with the name Blox, which played on our “Building Blocks” sketch idea and related to our target audience of municipalities by bringing to mind the “city block.” The logo, incorporating three blocks stacked on top of one another, continued along this train of thought.

In early versions of the logo design process I experimented with incorporating multiple blocks and positioning them in different configurations.

Our completed prototype guided users through a website build from start to finish using “assisted” mode. The process included a questionnaire which resulted in suggested modules based on the user’s needs and goals, a choice of four preset web templates specifically designed for municipalities, an opportunity to add additional or custom modules, and a branding suite which allows users to apply assets like custom logos, fonts, and colors.

In the prototype the user was also able to test the Blox drag-and-drop page builder tool, which allows users to easily organize their modules on different pages within their site. At the end, the user was able to “publish” their newly built site, customized with their brand assets. Explore the full prototype in the video below.

[embed]

The Results

The final section of the Sprint, “Friday,” consisted of user testing. We conducted four user tests, collecting notes and observations throughout, and asking questions about the users’ experiences and overall impressions of the tool at the end. While this final stage in the Sprint resulted in plenty of useful feedback were we to bring Blox to life in the real world—such as offering a wider range of templates and incorporating additional accessibility features—my key takeaways from this project were more about the how than the what.

This experience learning the mechanics of the Design Sprint, gave me valuable new insight on working with a team, and collaborating on projects in structured ways. While I had done plenty of group projects and work with professional teams prior to this experience, this was the first time working with a specific project management structure. This experience taught me tons of useful skills and tricks for working with teams in the real world, and I will definitely be applying these lessons as I take on my capstone project with a group for four peers over the next two semesters.