What is a Design Sprint Board?
The Design Sprint Board is a focused workspace that guides your team through a structured, high-impact process—from complex challenge to tested solution in just a few days. This framework empowers cross-functional teams to rapidly align, ideate, prototype, and validate new ideas.
When to Choose a Design Sprint Board?
A Design Sprint Board is the right choice when your team needs to:
Tackle a specific challenge or explore a bold idea quickly.
Align stakeholders and build shared understanding fast.
Explore multiple solutions and converge on a clear direction.
Prototype rapidly and test ideas with real users.
De-risk big decisions before committing significant resources.
Whether you’re launching a new feature, rethinking a customer experience, or exploring a product pivot, this board is built for focused innovation with measurable results.
When to Try Another Use Case?
If your team is working on long-term product delivery and iterative improvement, the Agile Board is more appropriate. For ongoing user research and problem discovery, try the Continuous Discovery Board. If you’re collecting ideas across the organization or running open ideation campaigns, explore Idea Challenges instead.
What Does It Mean for the HYPE Board?
Access Controls
To support focused collaboration during sprints, we’ve configured the board with the following access rules:
Only listed users and those with email addresses from approved domains can access the board.
Make sure to list the allowed domains relevant to the board's audience from the board's Access rights section
Authentication is enabled through Office 365, Google, and Viima.
All users must be logged in to contribute—ensuring active, accountable participation throughout the sprint.
Submissions
The board is configured to allow submissions for any user logged in, regardless of their user role. To restrict submissions after day 1, you can change the permissions settings to allow submissions only to admins.
Sharing Options
We’ve enabled email and Viva Engage sharing so that teams can easily distribute updates, invite reviewers, or summarize outcomes at the end of the sprint.
Welcome Message
Clarity on challenges, goals, agenda and key roles is essential in a design sprint and your welcome message will be an invaluable asset for that clarity. We have created a template welcome message (called board instructions) detailing the different stages of the sprint with placeholders for the Sprint Challenge and Goals & Deliverables. You should edit the welcome message to detail your main contact people and team roles, personas and the different stages of the process defined for the sprint.
Statuses & categories
The Design Sprint Board is organized around a classic five-stage sprint framework:
Understand – Lay the foundation by exploring the problem space, mapping user journeys, and defining the sprint goal. This stage is all about shared knowledge and alignment.
Sketch – Individual creativity takes center stage. Generate solution ideas through sketching and ideation. The aim is breadth, not perfection.
Decide – Critique ideas together and select the most promising path forward. Use structured methods like dot voting and storyboarding to align quickly and effectively.
We created 3 evaluation metrics (scale of 1 to 5) to support decision-making at this stage:
Customer Desirability
Technical Feasibility
Business Viability
All three have equal weight in the Viima Score
Idea responsibles and admins can provide evaluations
A text field is also available for feedback on the given evaluations
Prototype – Bring your solution to life—fast. Build just enough to test, focusing on experience over detail. This is about simulating the idea, not perfecting it.
Test – Share your prototype with real users. Gather feedback, observe behaviors, and capture insights that will shape your next steps.
These stages help your team move from complexity to clarity, from idea to evidence—in just a few days.
We recommend you tailor the categories to your teams' needs and the topic relevant to your design sprint. You can find instructions on how to configure categories in this article
Sprint with Focus, Learn with Speed
The Design Sprint Board is your toolkit for structured innovation under pressure. It encourages creativity without chaos, alignment without delay, and learning without risk. Collaborate in real-time, make bold decisions quickly, and stay laser-focused on user needs.
Use it. Trust the process. And make each sprint count.