Giving design a sprint without making up the ROI

Choosing what fits in a sprint makes limited capacity tangible.

A tightly packed arrangement of graphite slabs and brushed aluminium surrounds a deliberately empty rectangular recess with a lime floor. This reserved space represents one sprint per quarter chosen by design, not a quantitative capacity diagram.

At T-Bank, we had an agreement with the business that design could plan one sprint per quarter without having to attach a business-value estimate to every item first.

There are product problems a design team can see before it has a credible revenue calculation for fixing them. I don’t see much value in making people invent a number just to get that work considered.

A sprint is a lot of time, but there’s always more you want to fix. Now you’re the one deciding what matters most, what to simplify or postpone, and where to find extra capacity to finish the work.

That agreement helps design understand the business better. You’re managing a limited resource yourself and taking responsibility for how you spend it.