Back in 2016, a project landed on our team that we weren’t quite expecting. It was the second last week of November, and we were being asked to concept, ideate and design a new brand, from the ground up, and present it within 3 weeks ahead of the Christmas holiday break.

We can all debate how much time is really needed to pull something like this off, and the various ways of going about it until the cows come home. (Will definitely be another post on this topic!) But we undertook the project and quickly realized we’d need to strategize how to move it forward as quick as we could.

I quickly established that some of the normal processes and methods were not going to work for what we needed here.  We had to scrutinize our normal process and find the fastest and sure-fire way to be able to deliver our pitch on time.

Step 1 was to identify the key designers on the team, that had both some availability in their schedule, along with the skill set to help conceptualize and ideate this new mark.

With the selected designers at the ready, I Immediately decided that creating a daily ritual and cadence for our connections would likely be the best way to drive progress forward on a daily basis - so we set the time towards the end of each day.  Some prefer the morning, but our team got into a groove of sharing progress at 4pm daily.  By changing the time to afternoon would allow them the day to explore and work,  and offer that guidance for anyone who was going to stick around and work a bit after 5 - , or early in the morning.

Many functions of Agile frameworks would likely suggest the daily scrum early in the morning - but for us, it just didn’t work.  Creatives need their morning (we aren’t all early birds)

At the start of our explorations, things were really wide open. We started just doing research in our target demographic for the brand we were designing.  Mood boards of ads they would likely see, brands they had affinity to, anything related to them we could inspire ourselves from.

From there, we kept our first week of exploration wide open - just doing sketches and ideas for us to see where this mark could go, without any judgement or plan.   At the daily scrum, everyone would bring and quickly present what they’d found or sketched since the meeting the prior day.  Everyone got to comment on everyone’s finds and see what worked well or if there were any triggers/flags on a specific path that would impact it’s path further.

As we started the design phase the same theory would apply - we narrowed down some specific marks in sketches we liked, and each designer was assigned some that they’d either sketched or had ideas for, and started refining them.   

It was in this process that I learned that you really need to be able to know when to get specific in your feedback, vs keeping things high level.   When you’re racing against a clock,  sometimes it’s more helpful to be more specific about what you’d like to see changed, along with the rational, vs leaving things too open ended.   When you have lots of time, leaving things open ended for multiple rounds can be fruitful, but after 2 days of wondering where we’d get, we couldn’t afford another few days of exploration so specific feedback came into place.

The other element that really helped our daily scrums, was being able to identify specific and clear outcomes of what an ideal state 24 hours from here would be.   So for example, at the end of each scrum, we would review with each designer what would be ideal for them to share at the next meeting. For example. (Make the tweaks we spoke about on Concept 1,  change the colours on Concept 2,  and for both concepts, let’s add in the business card design ideas, and an out of home poster for each).   This way you could pre plan more deliverables you would need for your pitch and to have them all in time.     

When we started the project, not all of our dates and meetings were set in stone yet - after all, we’d just been given the project - so how can. You make dates and deliverables clear, when you don’t know when you will present?   Well, for this I don’t have a perfect answer - but I will share this - the minute you know of dates getting confirmed,  share them with your team.   It’s important for the team to know what we’re driving to as a team and goal.   If you only inform them of what they need for tomorrow,  without knowing the full picture, they could assume that after tomorrow the exploration is complete.   The idea here was to share here’s what would be good to see by The next daily scrum,  and our overall presentation is 1 week away.

At the end of this project, we had one of the most well structured brand presentations we’d ever come up with as a team, and started our process of growing the design disciple in our organization.   We use this scrum model for all of our big projects now, from brand design to our larger campaigns,  we mimic this format.   And in today’s world of Digital meetings,  this format still works - It’s a daily Teams Call, and people upload pictures of their sketches or ideas,  our copy writer adds a word document with her thoughts on tone and language, and we connect on a daily basis in this format and it’s worked so far! 

The next time you have a project that would benefit from a scrum, try this method out and let me know on twitter if it was successful or what you changed to make it your own process!