Tepia runs product design sprints that take a new app idea from a mapped problem to a clickable prototype tested with five real users in about a week. The sprint feeds straight into Tepia's Discovery phase, producing User Stories, a prioritized feature list and wireframes your team can build from.
A sprint answers the riskiest question about a new app in days, before months of design and engineering go into the wrong thing.
Tepia compresses framing, sketching, deciding, prototyping and testing into one week, with your decision maker in the room.
Read: MVP App Development for Startups
Designers build a realistic Figma prototype of the core flow, close enough to real that participants react as they would to an app.
Read: UX Research and Usability Testing
Tepia recruits five people who match your target users and watches them try the prototype, so decisions rest on behavior.
Read: Rapid Prototyping: a Working App in Weeks
The sprint ends with findings, revised flows and User Stories, so Tepia's Discovery and Design phases start from tested decisions.
Research Tepia keeps in mind when testing new app ideas with a design sprint.
CB Insights found 43 percent of failed startups cited poor product market fit, the risk a design sprint is built to test early.
Pendo's Feature Adoption Report found 80 percent of features in the average software product are rarely or never used.
Nielsen Norman Group research found that testing with five users uncovers about 85 percent of usability problems in a design.
A design sprint is built for one situation: you have an app idea, and something about it is still a guess. Maybe you do not know whether customers will book through an app instead of calling, whether field staff will fill in a form on a phone, or which of three onboarding ideas makes the product click. Tepia uses a sprint to turn that guess into evidence before anyone writes production code.
Good candidates include:
A sprint is the wrong tool when the requirements are already clear and validated, in which case Tepia goes straight to Discovery, or when the main risk is technical, such as whether a sensor can stream data fast enough. That calls for a working proof of concept, which our rapid prototyping team builds instead.
Tepia follows the five day structure popularized by Google Ventures, with a preparation week before it and a short report after:
| Day | What happens | Who takes part | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prep week | Kickoff call, recruiting screener, booking five test participants, gathering existing research | Tepia project manager and your product owner | Confirmed participants and a sprint brief |
| Day 1: Map | Agree the long term goal, list sprint questions, map the user journey, interview your in house experts | Full sprint team with your decision maker | Journey map and the one moment to focus on |
| Day 2: Sketch | Review examples from other products, then each person sketches a detailed solution alone | Full sprint team | Several competing solution sketches |
| Day 3: Decide | Silent review, voting, the decision maker chooses, the team writes a storyboard | Full sprint team, decider has final say | A step by step storyboard of the prototype |
| Day 4: Prototype | Tepia designers build a realistic Figma prototype with real content; the interview script is finalized | Tepia designers, with your team on call | A clickable prototype that runs on a phone |
| Day 5: Test | Five individual interviews while the team watches remotely and notes patterns | A Tepia researcher with each participant; team observing | Findings ranked by how many users hit them |
Within a few days of the test, Tepia delivers a written summary with clips, the revised flow and a recommendation on what to build, change or drop.
The original method was not written specifically for phones, so Tepia adjusts a few things. Participants test the prototype on a real phone, not a laptop screen, because thumb reach, keyboard covering fields and small text change behavior. Where context matters, such as a technician on a job site or a shopper in a store aisle, we run one or two sessions in that setting.
We also put an engineer in the room on days one and three. Ideas that depend on background location, Bluetooth hardware, in app purchase rules or offline sync get flagged early, so the prototype does not promise something the platforms will not allow. Many Tepia sprints run remotely in FigJam during US overlapping hours, and teams that already have solid research can use a shorter four day version that combines sketching and deciding.
From your side, the ideal sprint team is small: the decision maker, someone who talks to customers every week, someone who knows operations or sales, and a technical contact if the app touches existing systems. Tepia supplies the facilitator, product designers, a researcher and the engineer, which keeps the group within the size the method recommends.
A sprint is not a separate engagement bolted onto a build. At Tepia it is the opening of the six phase process, and its outputs carry directly into the phases that follow.
Read about the full Tepia process.
Every sprint ends in one of three places. If the prototype tested well, Tepia moves into a scoped MVP built around the validated flow, often with a shorter Discovery because the hardest questions are answered. If results were mixed, we revise the prototype and run a second round of tests, usually in days rather than another full week. If the idea did not hold up, you have learned that for a week of effort instead of after launch, which is one of the most useful outcomes a sprint can give.
You keep everything: the journey map, sketches, storyboard, Figma prototype, recordings and findings. As a PalPilot analyst put it, “In every stage of our web development project, Tepia was there to nurture and guide our team.” For more on planning the release that follows, see how to plan an MVP, browse our work, or talk to Tepia about a sprint.
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