# Design Sprint: Day 1, an AI-facilitated workshop for choosing a direction

Design Sprint: Day 1 is a focused 68-minute workshop for 2 to 8 people. It helps a product, design or cross-functional team turn a broad challenge into a shared problem statement, useful opportunity questions, several solution ideas and one selected direction.

Clarvelo runs the process so everyone, including the person who organised the sprint, can think, sketch and vote. Guests join with a link, and each activity begins with the output of the one before it.

[Start a free Design Sprint: Day 1](https://clarvelo.com/auth/register?user_return_to=%2Fapp%2Fworkshops%2Fdesign-sprint-day-1).

## When to use Design Sprint: Day 1

Use this workshop when a team has a meaningful product or service challenge but is not yet ready to choose a feature or write a delivery plan. It is useful at the beginning of discovery, before a prototype, or when several plausible directions are competing for attention.

The format works best when participants bring relevant context and have permission to explore. It is not a substitute for user research, and it should not be used to manufacture agreement around a decision that has already been made.

- Define who has the problem and why it matters now.
- Reframe problems as opportunity questions.
- Generate several ideas before evaluating them.
- Vote privately against a clear criterion.

## The 68-minute format

### Problem Statement: 25 minutes

The team defines who experiences the problem, why it matters and what evidence or constraint makes it worth solving. Clarvelo helps turn a broad challenge into a specific frame that can guide the rest of the session.

### How Might We: 25 minutes

Participants rewrite the important pains and opportunities as questions that invite several possible answers. The strongest questions are broad enough to create options and specific enough to direct useful thought.

### Crazy Eights: 8 minutes

Each person rapidly sketches eight possible responses to the selected opportunity. The timebox encourages range and prevents the first reasonable idea from quietly becoming the only idea.

### Blind Vote: 10 minutes

The team privately chooses the ideas that best address the problem and opportunity questions. Votes appear together, reducing the effect of hierarchy, confidence and speaking order.

## Your AI facilitator

Clarvelo introduces each activity, protects the timebox, carries context between steps and makes the decision state explicit. The team gets active process facilitation without hiring a consultant for every routine discovery session.

The person who would normally prepare the board, explain the exercises, watch the clock and run the vote gets to participate instead. Your team still owns the challenge, ideas and decision. Clarvelo runs the workshop mechanics.

## Start with a challenge and leave with a direction

Bring the people who understand the problem, share one link, and let Clarvelo guide the team from a broad challenge to a selected direction.

[Start a free Design Sprint: Day 1](https://clarvelo.com/auth/register?user_return_to=%2Fapp%2Fworkshops%2Fdesign-sprint-day-1).

For preparation advice, facilitation prompts and ways to avoid common sprint mistakes, read [How to run a day one Design Sprint workshop](https://clarvelo.com/blog/how-to-run-a-day-one-design-sprint-workshop.md).

[Explore Clarvelo](https://clarvelo.com/index.md), an AI workshop facilitator for collaborative teams.