Martian Design Sprint

Who benefits most from a design sprint?

The design sprint is versatile, and benefits everyone from founders with just a sketch of an idea, early-stage startups needing to launch an MVP quickly, and even growing companies with established market fits.

Idea stage. If you have an idea and are just starting to shape it, we can provide strategic insights. Our product launch team of multidisciplinary experts will help shape the idea and guide you through upcoming technical, UX, and marketing challenges.

Pre-seed. If you’re fundraising, we can create an interactive prototype for demos. Our product designers will assist with shaping the idea, creating the first designs and turning them into an interactive prototype that will reflect the reality of your vision.

Seed. If you’ve raised a seed round, the design sprint can deliver detailed, high-fidelity designs for key user flows, ready for your engineering team to turn into a working product. Right from the start, we focus on top-notch UI and meticulous details, essential for product-led growth startups.

Post-PMF. For companies moving from good to great, the design sprint sets the foundation for a growth-focused framework. Acting as an extended product+growth team, we use a cycle of hypothesis, feature shipment, and data analysis to ensure that developments truly address user needs.

How design sprints work

Most design sprints take two weeks. During a kickoff call, the customer and the Martian team narrow down the scope to determine the set of features or changes that are both most valuable for the business at the current stage and which can be completed in two weeks. Following the MVP mindset, the Martian team guides the customer through this process. Ready, set, go!

The first few days (typically about two) are dedicated to exploration and research. Depending on the specific scope, this may include elements such as user research, competitive product analysis, or creating a mood board. The goal is to define the boundaries of potential solutions. After discussing the results of this exploration , the customer and the designer proceed to implement the ideas they’ve discovered.

For the remainder of the two weeks, the customer and the designer have synchronization calls every two days to ensure work is heading in the right direction. Before the sprint concludes, the Martian designer collaborates with the engineers to ensure that the designs align with any technical constraints, and to facilitate a smooth handoff.

The resulting artifacts usually consist of design screens that comprehensively depict various states of the feature, specifications to aid in handing off the designs to engineers, the essential design system, and a plethora of new ideas that emerged during the process. The primary value in this scenario is that the engineers receive everything they need to begin their work.

Ultimately, the design sprint sets the entire development machine into motion.

Why Evil Martians?

For 17 years, we’ve been launching products for 20—30 startups per year—most of them raise impressive new rounds and expand their businesses. Martian designers are experts in designing user interfaces, data visualization, and user research. Together with Martian Team Leads, our designers ensure efficiency of product decisions, release planning, and timely delivery. We use analytics to measure results, get insights, and form growth hypotheses.

Further, many of our designers have experience launching their own products and founding their own startups in the past. All of this allows our clients to rely on Martian product teams as partners for bringing their ideas to life.

Numerous client projects started with the design sprint: HTTPie, an open source API testing client that secured $6.5M from Blossom Capital and Coatue. Synonym, a biomanufacturing business that raised $6M from Andreessen Horowitz. The “my Loewe” app for Loewe, a nearly 100-year-old German television and entertainment electronics pioneer, which was recipient of an iF DESIGN AWARD—and many others.

Want to start an Evil Martian Design Sprint with our team? Drop us a line, tell us about your mission and the pains that come with it, and we’ll figure out how to help you get results and develop your idea faster.