Just launched: A Global directory for Design Sprint firms.
Written by @Giorgos Vareloglou
When we did our first Sprint back in 2017, we had no idea what a Design Sprint is. Out of necessity, we needed to come up with an idea and a wide communication plan, build a prototype of the end result, validate it with end-users, and present the day after to our “client”, who happened to be a political party (you heard right). All the above in 48hrs.
While the project was a complete failure, we knew that there was something in that way of working, which was inspired by the way ad agencies work during the pitch process. So when we launched REBORRN a few months later, we used this way of working as our flagship problem-solving approach. We called it the 58 session, but we still didn’t know that this was a version of a Design Sprint.
It was several months later that we stumbled upon this amazing book called The Sprint, published a year earlier from our first Sprint when we connected the dots and a whole new world was wide open in front of us. We started looking for others that are doing Design Sprints, training institutions, case studies and more. On one hand, we figured out that Design Sprints were booming as an approach to test ideas, on the other hand looking at the total addressable market it is still in its infancy both as a community, but also in terms of adoption by Startups and Corporates.
I liked the way Jonathan Courtney put it in one of his videos. To prove his point that Design Sprints are still in their infancy he turned to Google Trends comparing sprints with terms like Agile & innovation.
Today, remote (or physical less frequently) Design Sprints account for a big part of our business and we always try to get better by looking at what others are doing being part of the wider community. As part of this journey, we have an ongoing process of mapping the Global market, and up to this date we haven’t found a place that works as a directory of firms/consultants that are into Design Sprints, so we decided to start one of our own.
This is how the 👉 Designsprintsdirectory.com was born. 🚀 It is a first attempt to map the global market of Design Sprint facilitators, listing the first 99 companies that are actively into Design Sprints, hoping that the rest of the community will be helping us grow this directory larger.
Some first insights we got:
Most of these firms are really small. The median is 13 employees. Even thought leaders like the Design Sprint Academy or AJ&Smart are no more than a handful of people. That on one hand means that this line of business is really hard to scale, on the other hand, it has an extremely low barrier to entry.
There is a notable concentration of companies in Europe (UK, DE) and the United States (CA, MA), and almost nothing in APAC, at least according to our research efforts so far. Combining this with the rise of remote collaboration, we see this as an opportunity.
That’s all for now, if you own, work for or with a Design Sprint firm that is not part of this directory, please go ahead and submit the company’s detailed to enlist it.
