Introducing sprint playbooks to stimulate experimentation and design at ING Labs
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In Short
ING Labs is where a mix of internal and external startup teams work on preparing the bank for the future. Labs is a place where business units can experiment and create new propositions, outside of the operational environment. Three types of teams are hosted in ING Labs: teams coming from ING’s global innovation contest (Innovation Bootcamp), projects that originate from existing business units, and external startups.
During my time at ING Labs I’ve had the opportunity to support teams and introduce them to a wide range of innovation methodologies and tools through workshops.
For the Labs’ leads I worked on the adaptation of Google’s Design Sprint, and created an “experimentation” version of this sprint.
Responsibilities
Working closely with the Lab’s leads and the internal startup teams, my main responsibilities were to compose and design sprint playbooks, facilitate teams during these sprints and to work together with teams to conduct experiments. Experiments commonly included some form of user research, online testing or digital prototyping.
Teams
ING Labs hosted a mix of internal innovation teams and external startups. To stimulate cross-pollination between these two, regular demo sessions, problem fix workshops and networking events took place. Teams work according to ING’s innovation methodology PACE, a mix of Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile.
Methods and tools
Within ING Labs a wide range of methodologies and tools are being used. Working with multiple teams, I spent significant time providing support and giving workshops on the following topics:
- Lean Startup
- Design Thinking
- Growth Hacking
- Design Sprints
- Lean Experimentation
- Prototyping
Creating Sprint Playbooks
The goal of creating a Sprint Playbook was to let teams run a sprint on their own, while simultaneously providing a catalog of tools for tackling specific challenges.
Composing
Desk research provided a large amount of potential elements. Using the Design Sprint as foundation, a version was composed to fit into three days.
Testing
The majority of Sprint finetuning was done by testing (part of) it with one of the teams. Several iterations were made to improve the Sprints’ composition and duration.
Refining
After several iterations, the Sprint programme was digitalised and an easy to use interactive .pdf was made for the teams.
