The Remote Design Sprint Cheat Sheet

33 tricks for facilitation and teamwork over video

10 min readJun 29, 2020

Hey there! This post is a cheat sheet version of The Remote Design Sprint Guide which I created with John Zeratsky, Jackie Colburn, and the input, advice, and smart ideas of over one hundred Design Sprint experts from around the world (see below).

This cheat sheet is pretty good, but the Guide is better and much more detailed—it’s just really long, so I thought it would be handy to have a quick reference thing to go with it. This is that thing.

Wait, what’s a Design Sprint?

The Design Sprint is a process for small teams starting big projects. Following a step-by-step checklist, the team develops competing solutions, chooses the best, then builds and tests a prototype, all in just five days.

Oh, but hey! Quick note. If you didn’t already know what a Design Sprint is, this post isn’t gonna teach you enough to run one. May I suggest this book?

Okay, so you’re back and you’ve read the entire book, or you’re just skimming and didn’t even read this sentence because it doesn’t have a number by it. Either way let’s go…

Here are the tricks:

1. Yes, remote Design Sprints work!

I know, this isn’t exactly a “trick” but I think it’s important that you know people have done remote Design Sprints literally thousands of times with great outcomes. If this is your first time and you experience one or more moments of terror, remember tip #1. This is TOTALLY gonna work. 💪

2. Don’t reinvent the process, just tweak it

More good news: You don’t have to reinvent the Design Sprint in order to do it over video conferencing. You can even use the checklist from the book! You just need extra preparation and a bunch of tiny adjustments.

Let’s talk about those adjustments. First, you need some software.