Facilitating a 12-team AI-powered design sprint

At a glance

Problem

Twelve newsrooms needed to develop AI concepts that appealed to “Next Gen” news audiences. I was tasked with taking each team from idea to functional prototype in two days.

Constraints

This scale of sprint isn’t exactly in the playbook, so I’d have to build a new framework for myself. It needed to support teams coming in with different focuses, levels of expertise and research quality.

Solution

I developed a sprint that was somewhere between an interactive lecture and a hackathon. It focused on iterating fast, reducing risk and employing user-centered practices.

Outcome

All twelve teams successfully created and tested concepts with real users, most for the first time. My framework was developed into an open-source resource for other newsrooms to use.

My role

As lead facilitator, I designed the format, recruited testers, and ran the two-day session at the University of Missouri in March 2026. Afterward, I wrote a sprint report outlining the outcome of the sprint, what teams learned and a meta-analysis on the sprint format itself.

I also built out take-home guides on using AI as a co-designer, patterns for prototyping and building and facilitating usability testing. My curriculum and guides were used to develop an open-source resource for other newsrooms called the Next Gen News Sprint Tool Kit. Part of my framework was also used to expand the program to Latin America in AI-Powered Next Gen News Sprint LatAm.

At a glance

My role

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