Practical method to explore new streams with your product or service, will be to use either design thinking or design sprint.
Actually, a lot of people are getting confused between those. And you can't blame them. There are few similarities.
If you need to draw the border line between and in sake of simplification: you can think of Design Sprint as a sharp/focused way to execute under the Design Thinking mindset.
While running Design Thinking sessions, I got some time the feeling of "OK, we got that... let's move on..." and I think it really depends what is the "question" you are bringing to the table.
The first stage of crystallizing the business objective/research question is the tricky part and you should consider doing it beforehand and then decide on the methodology to choose.
(more info about Design Thinking can be found on this site).
Don't get me wrong, I like both of those methodologies, and it really depends what you are trying to achieve.
From a practical point of view (and this is what this blog is about :) ), you might consider to prefer Design Sprint, as it is more focused on the finishing with a "productype" :).
The benefits from both are tremendous, and are very important in few aspects:
Getting out good ideas
Formulate the ideas into tangible deliverable
Team building - whether it is your squad, your product team, your cross-functional team,...
Innovation culture
And finally - getting things done - doing a shortcut to endless iterations between R&D/Marketing/Product/...
On a nutshell, the Design Sprint is constructed from 5 steps:
Day 1: Define & map the problem and end with focus area
Day 2: Sketch ideas that match the focus area, use all the creativity you can bring
Day 3: Hard choices, pick and choose the preferred one (can collect things you liked from few) and end with storyboard
Day 4: Prototype time - time to craft it to something tangible
Day 5: Real life testing with your REAL (selected) target audience
That's the by-the-book steps.
On last Annual Product Management conference that I've been, ProductX, one of the speakers, Or Mendels, from UI company, presented a twist that I liked to this method - actually it is a squeeze (so you can consume less bandwidth from the team) and a use of day 5 for "buy-in" process.
It's kind of squeezing day2+3 into day2, protoyping with UI/UX experts on day 3, test on day 4 and then after running "day 5" (you can choose not do it straight away) as a buy-in with executives and presenting the outcomes, test results and get decisions on directions, in order to get things done faster.
I think it is good twist and can be considered if you feel that you challenge is well framed and you sense the workshop pulse if extra time is needed or not.
Either way - use those methodologies, it will boost your service/product!
Dror
