Sprint-based design work solves one problem well: it creates urgency. Two weeks, a defined output, a review at the end. The pressure is real, and pressure produces decisions. But sprints also create a specific kind of dysfunction in design-heavy work: the team is always executing, and the space for thinking about whether they are executing the right things collapses.
At France VAE, the platform for prior learning recognition operated by beta.gouv.fr, I was embedded as the product designer on a cross-functional team. The work was complex: a national platform serving 100,000+ candidates, with a parallel system of field actors (the AAPs) whose needs were often different from the candidates' and sometimes in tension with them. The team was not short of ideas. It was short of direction. Each sprint produced output, but the cumulative shape of the product was getting harder to read.
