Design Sprints - the Google Way
How Google Runs Design Sprints—and What Enterprises Can Learn from It
When you think of design sprints, you probably think of startups moving fast, iterating on big ideas, and validating concepts without wasting time or resources.
But what happens when the organization is no longer small and nimble—when it’s operating at Google-scale?
We asked ourselves the same question. And to find out, we spoke with Felix Wang, UX designer and facilitator at Google’s Design Sprint Master Academy. His role on the Design Relations team puts him at the center of how Google runs, evolves, and teaches design sprints internally.
The Sprint Origins
The sprint method was born at Google Ventures, designed to help startups test risky ideas quickly—without betting the whole roadmap.
A design sprint is a structured framework that allows teams to address critical business questions through a rapid cycle of designing, prototyping, and testing ideas with users.
This methodology is rooted in the principle of conserving resources, avoiding the pitfalls of extensive resource allocation before validating ideas.
At Google, the design sprint process encompasses six distinct phases – Understand, Define, Sketch, Decide, Prototype, and Validate – each carefully orchestrated to ensure efficient and effective problem-solving.
How Google Customizes Design Sprints by Team
Google’s adaptation of the design sprint is not a one-size-fits-all model; it's tailored to meet the nuanced needs of various teams and projects.
- Google X: Google X focuses on ambitious and futuristic moonshot ideas. With small, nimble teams and a bottom-up culture, they have the flexibility to quickly organize groups around specific projects and then move on to the next mission.
- Google Ventures (GV): GV operates more like an agency where founders bring their early-stage ideas to be tested. A culture of relying on a single decider or decider role helps guide the sprint process within Google Ventures.
- Ads & Commerce: This team deals with established, complex, and data-driven products, carrying a high risk of mistakes. Their design sprint process heavily emphasizes experimentation and incorporates the engineering perspective.
- Corp Eng: The Corp Eng team focuses on developing internally facing software projects. With limited UX resources and an engineering-centric culture, they prioritize co-creation models and leverage easy access to users within the Google ecosystem. Given the large team size and multiple stakeholders, their sprints tend to be larger in scale.
Across all these contexts, one principle holds: design sprints are not plug-and-play. They must be adapted.
And this is where most enterprises get it wrong.
Design Sprints, the Google Way
The Google way of conducting design sprints begins with a comprehensive Sprint Brief, detailing the challenge, goals, user types, platform considerations, and timelines.
The team structure is equally important, ideally comprising cross-functional members to bring diverse perspectives to the table.
The six phases of the Google design sprint are methodically executed, each contributing to a holistic understanding of the problem, ideation, decision-making, prototyping, and user validation. Moreover, extensive planning and follow-up actions are integral parts of the process, ensuring the sprint's success and impact.
- Understand: In this phase, the team unpacks the problem and creates a shared knowledge base. Techniques like "How Might We" (HMW) exercises, user interviews, lightning talks, and experience mapping are used to gain a comprehensive understanding of the problem space.
- Define: The team aligns on principles and scopes out the ideal user journey. Activities such as user journey mapping, defining design principles, establishing success metrics, and using tools like value proposition and business model canvases help shape a clear understanding of the product's purpose and objectives.
- Sketch: This phase focuses on generating a broad range of ideas within a time-boxed format. Techniques like Crazy-8 sketching, comparable problem analysis, and solution sketching are employed to rapidly generate a variety of ideas.
- Decide: In this phase, the team votes and decides on the ideas to pursue further. Methods like dot voting and decision matrices assist in selecting the most promising concepts that align with the sprint goals.
- Prototype: The team creates a tangible representation of the chosen ideas. Depending on the project type, physical products can be prototyped using materials like cardboard or clay, while software-driven products may involve clickable mockups or interactive prototypes. The goal is to create something real enough to gather user feedback.
- Validate: The final phase involves putting the prototype in front of users to validate and gather their feedback. This feedback helps generate insights and learning that inform the team's decision on whether to proceed with the current path or iterate and refine it.
Learn more about how Google runs Design Sprints from our webinar featuring Felix Wang, Design Relations at Google
Looking ahead, Google's vision for design sprints is dynamic and collaborative.
Felix’s team is developing new sprint models to cater to varying project needs, from visioning to branding.
They are also focused on enhancing facilitation skills and sharing their methodology through resources like the designsprintkit.withgoogle.com.
So, what can enterprise teams learn from this?
First, that Google isn’t Google Ventures. They’re a massive, multi-layered organization. Scaling design sprints across such a complex environment means facing the same challenges that any large organization does—fragmented teams, limited UX resources, competing priorities, and the pressure to deliver measurable results.
And yet, they didn’t abandon the sprint model. They adapted it.
That’s the key takeaway. Sprints only work at scale when you make them fit the organization, not the other way around.
At Design Sprint Academy, we took that insight to heart. We’ve spent the past 8 years working exclusively with large companies—helping them make the design sprint practical, repeatable, and impactful inside complex environments.
The result is what we call the Enterprise Design Sprint 3.0—a flexible, evidence-based version of the sprint that starts with Problem Framing to align stakeholders and define the right challenge, then moves into a high-impact, time-boxed sprint to solve it.
Like Google, we believe that the sprint isn’t one-size-fits-all. But with the right preparation, facilitation, and structure, it can be one of the most effective tools for driving innovation and decision-making—at scale.
👉 Read: Our Perspective on Enterprise Design Sprints
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