What the five-day design sprint is
When people say "design sprint", they usually mean a method Jake Knapp developed while at Google and refined at Google Ventures, now called GV. It is described in the 2016 book Sprint, written by Knapp with John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz. It is a five-day workshop that aims to answer a big question quickly, before you spend months building.
The week runs roughly like this:
- Monday: map. The team agrees on the long-term goal, maps the problem, and picks one target to focus on.
- Tuesday: sketch. Everyone sketches solutions on their own.
- Wednesday: decide. The group reviews the sketches and picks what to test. One person, the Decider, has the final say.
- Thursday: prototype. The team builds a realistic prototype, fast. It only needs to look real enough to test.
- Friday: test. Five users try the prototype while the team watches and takes notes.
The result is a tested idea and a set of learnings. You find out, in one week, whether people understand and want the thing. It is a good method, and it has helped many teams avoid building the wrong thing.
We are not connected to Google or GV. We know the method well, and we want to be fair to it.
What an MVP design sprint is
Our MVP design sprint is a four-week design project. It takes you from goals to a dev-ready design. We do the design work with you. We discover what the first version must do, map the user flows, design 15 to 25 core screens, build a clickable prototype and start a design system. Then we hand it over to your developers in a form they can use.
The aim is different. The five-day sprint is built to test a risky idea. The MVP sprint is built to produce a design that can be built. It assumes you have already decided to make the product, and want to get to a good first version.
Who is in the room
The five-day sprint needs a team in the same workshop for most of the week. The book suggests a small group, usually about five to seven people, with a mix of roles: someone who decides, someone who knows the customer, someone who knows the technology, a facilitator. It takes real time from senior people on your side, all week.
In our sprint, your time is lighter. Your team joins a discovery session at the start, reviews flows and screens as they appear, and joins a walkthrough at the end. In between, we work, and you watch a weekly Loom update. You need one decision-maker who can answer quickly, but you do not need to clear a week of everyone's diary.
This difference matters for small startups. A founder who is also the head of sales and product may not be able to give five full days.
What you walk away with
| Five-day design sprint | MVP design sprint | |
|---|---|---|
| Main output | A tested prototype and what you learned from five users | A dev-ready design for the first version |
| Prototype | Fast and rough, built to test an idea | Clickable, built from the real screens |
| Screens | Only what the test needs | 15 to 25 core screens |
| Design system | Not part of the method | A starter: colors, type, key components |
| User testing | Built in, on Friday | Not part of the sprint |
| Handoff to developers | Not the goal | Yes, in Figma, with a walkthrough call |
The five-day sprint gives you evidence. The MVP sprint gives you something to build. Neither replaces the other.
Cost and time
The five-day sprint is short, but it is intense. The cost is mostly the time of the people in the room, plus a facilitator if you hire one. We have not listed prices here, because they vary a lot by who runs it.
Our MVP design sprint takes four weeks and starts at $5,900. The final price depends on the number of flows and screens, and we agree it before we start. If you began with a UX audit in the last 30 days, the audit fee is credited.
The shorter format wins on speed to an answer. Ours wins on distance to a finished design. They are priced and timed for different jobs, so comparing price alone is misleading.
Which one fits your case
The five-day sprint fits best when:
- You have a big, risky question and no clear answer. "Will people pay for this?" or "Does this concept make sense to users?"
- You have several people who can give a full week.
- You are choosing between very different directions.
- You want evidence for an investor, a board or a skeptical team.
- You have not yet decided what to build.
The MVP design sprint fits best when:
- You have decided what to build, and need to design the first version.
- A developer is waiting, or you are about to hire one.
- Your team cannot spare a full week together.
- You need a real design-system start and a handoff, not only a test.
- You have a rough prototype or old screens and want them turned into a clear product.
Neither is right when: you have a live product with a specific problem, such as sign-ups stalling. A UX audit may be the better first step. And if you have a clear idea and a small budget, a smaller piece of work may do.
Using both
These two work well in order. A team unsure about its concept can run a five-day sprint first, learn what users respond to, and then bring the result into a four-week design project. The test removes the biggest risk, and the project turns the winning idea into a product design.
Even without a formal workshop, you can borrow its best ideas. Define a clear long-term goal. Pick a single target. Test a rough version with five users before you invest. These habits help in any project, and we use some of them in ours.
A fair word on the name
"Sprint" is also an engineering term, meaning a short work cycle. Our MVP design sprint is not a workshop and not a software sprint. It is a fixed-scope design project with a four-week timeline. We use the word because it signals speed and a clear end date, and we try to be clear about what it is.
The details of what we do each week are on our process page, and the service is explained at MVP design agency. If you are not sure which format your question needs, describe it to us and we will say which one we would choose, even if the answer is a workshop.
