A Mountain Sprint

This essay was written for the Makers of Sport® newsletter in August 2015. Monday Musings and Weekend Reads were the written editions of the newsletter that accompanied the podcast; the archived email is on Mailchimp. The newsletter's links and announcements are trimmed here.

A Mountain Sprint

So there was no Weekend Reads last week. My bad. Things have been crazy 'round these parts between getting the kids ready for school and a little bit of travel. Anyhow, you're not here for me to dump my time struggles onto. I wanted to shoot off a mid-week email to catch y'all up on a few things.

Some of you that follow me on Twitter know that yesterday I launched Mtn. & Co., the complete rebranding and repositioning of my freelance business. It was a long and rigorous process, but it had me thinking recently about a commonly-used term in the startup world: sprints.

A sprint is when a team of designers and/or developers get together to quickly create a solution to a problem through prototyping. Google Ventures defines it as a five-day process for answering critical business questions though design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers.

Many product design companies use design sprints to test their interfaces and products with users. It gives users insight into what the final product might look like and feel like to use. I think we too can benefit from sprints in the sports industry. Sometimes you just have to get things done.

For example, I designed my first iteration of the Mtn. & Co. website and logo nearly a year ago. It has went through numerous iterations since then but I just let it sit there and kept talking about getting it done. But never actually doing it. Execution is everything, talk is nothing.

In lieu of the last newsletter about productivity, I finally had to take a dose of my own medicine and knock it out. So beginning Thursday night last week, I worked about 60 hours over the weekend to code up and load content into the new site. My most recent iteration of the site was complete in Photoshop (special thanks to many pal and Episode 27 guest, Bethany Heck for the feedback and support. Arguably the best digital designer I know). I just needed to figure out which platform I was going to use digitally (i.e. Drupal or Wordpress) and get on it.

So Thursday night I made my decision to use Wordpress, bought a template as I didn't need to reinvent the wheel on this first iteration, installed the CMS on my cloud server (I use DigitalOcean so it takes some coding in Terminal on the Mac to do some of the server admin) and got going. My goal was to launch Monday (yesterday).

So I had to take some time to prioritize, putting the Makers of Sport newsletter on hold until it got done. I took about a 24 second break to watch Ronda Rousey knockout her opponent Saturday night but other than that, it was sprinting to the finish line to get a product up and launched. Once launched, the beauty of the web is I can iterate in real time and its never done.

We all know the sports industry moves fast. Getting quick concepts out the door and soliciting quick feedback may be a good way to integrate better processes into your workflow at the college, team or organization you work for. Often we refine and refine until we have something we feel is perfect before the client ever sees it, only to make massive amounts of revisions or nix it all together. My advice this week is to check out Google Ventures' design sprint techniques and see if you can integrate it into where you work. Even if you're not working on digital products, quick iterations and soliciting feedback early could be a solid way to free you up and help your co-workers better understand what you do day-to-day. Communicating that may help them have empathy in the future when they drop something on you due immediately.