Calling Freelancers/Solopreneurs running Design Sprints

May 13 (edited) in Career & Getting Clients 💰

Hi there!

I am on my journey to become a full time freelance facilitator and I decided to participate in the Design Sprint Masterclass to improve my toolkit. Until now my experience running Design Sprints has been in a company, where I always had other people in my team for support and to do various tasks. Also, in the Masterclass AJ&Smart talks a lot about the sprint from a company point of view, again with a lot of people and resources involved.

This is why I would like to get some experience from other facilitators doing design sprints solo as freelancers, and what are your tips and challenges. If you have some input regarding the following (but not exclusively), I would be very grateful:

How do you deal with the preparation be it live or remotely, do you have any support, do you do everything alone, do you involve the client? For example for all the onboarding meetings, prep meetings, meeting organisation, prepping the room, snacks and drinks etc.
How do you deal with facilitating alone? In my experience it is hard to be attentive to every aspect of such a complex workshop, especially in some more demanding exercises. Do you enlist a co-facilitator from the client, do you have someone that can jump in when you need? Other ideas or tips?
How do you deal with all the work behind user recruiting and organising the user tests? Do you delegate to the client? Do you onboard someone to do it for you or do you handle everything at the same time?
Prototyping: Again, how do you juggle the work involved in this phase? Do you offer building the prototype yourself or do you give this to-do to the clients design team? And what if the client does not have a design team or resources to create the prototype themselves?
Finally, what are your deliverables at the end of the sprint and the timings between the end of the sprint and getting your results to the client?

Hopefully this is not too much, looking forward to reading your experiences!

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