Releasing their inner Banksy

The Autocase development team have been sequestered in the Toronto conference room all this week. In case anyone is missing an Autocase team loved one they are safe in the Fashion Building at 130 Spadina Ave., Suite 501, Toronto. Apart from occasional sightings from others dropping by to add their expertise, they have been missing for a week.

The team is sustained only by post-it notes, voting sticky dots, markers, product manager enthusiasm, fruit and other healthy snacks. They have been seen (briefly) over the last few days so we know that all still healthy and as far as we know no-one has been voted off the team.

There is a stock of beer as a reward when they emerge late on Friday.

The design sprint fits nicely into our Agile development process. It is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. Working together in a sprint they are trying to shortcut the endless-debate cycle and compress months of time into a single week. Instead of waiting to launch a minimal general version of our buildings product we’ll get clear data

Where are the Cheetos?

from a realistic prototype.

Hi-tech voting machine

On Monday of this week, they mapped out the problem and picked an important place to focus (building design comparisons). On Tuesday, they sketched 5 competing solutions on paper. On Wednesday, they made difficult decisions and turned the ideas into a testable hypothesis. On Thursday, they hammered out a high-fidelity prototype. And on Friday and early next week they will test it with clients and potential client experts.

We look forward to welcoming the engineering department back into the company next week after a well-earned long weekend – Happy 150th Canada/241st U.S.A.

P.S. The design sprint is a Google Ventures process. More detail is here – http://www.gv.com/sprint/