Sprint by Jake Knapp
Introduction
The sprint is GV’s unique five-day process for answering crucial questions through prototyping and testing ideas with customers. It’s a “greatest hits” of business strategy, innovation, behavioral science, design, and more—packaged into a step-by-step process that any team can use
The trouble with good ideas
Good ideas are hard to find. And even the best ideas face an uncertain path to real-world success. That’s true whether you’re running a startup, teaching a class, or working inside a large organization
Execution can be difficult. What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? Should you assign one smart person to figure it out or have the whole team brainstorm? And how do you know when you’ve got the right solution? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure? And, once it’s done, will anybody care?
The sprint gives our startups a superpower: They can fast-forward into the future to see their finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitments. When a risky idea succeeds in a sprint, the payoff is fantastic. But it’s the failures that, while painful, provide the greatest return on investment. Identifying critical flaws after just five days of work is the height of efficiency. It’s learning the hard way, without the “hard way
This book is a DIY guide for running your own sprint to answer your pressing business questions. On Monday, you’ll map out the problem and pick an important place to focus. On Tuesday, you’ll sketch competing solutions on paper. On Wednesday, you’ll make difficult decisions and turn your ideas into a testable hypothesis. On Thursday, you’ll hammer out a realistic prototype. And on Friday, you’ll test it with real live humans
Instead of giving high-level advice, we dig into the details. We’ll help you assemble the perfect sprint team from the people with whom you already work. You’ll learn big stuff (like how to get the most out of your team’s diverse opinions and one leader’s vision), medium stuff (like why your team should spend three straight days with your phones and computers off), and nitty-gritty stuff (like why you should eat lunch at 1 p.m.). You won’t finish with a complete, detailed, ready-to-ship product. But you will make rapid progress, and know for sure if you’re headed in the right direction.
You’ll see some methods that look familiar and others that are new. If you’re familiar with lean development or design thinking, you’ll find the sprint is a practical way to apply those philosophies. If your team uses “agile” processes, you’ll find that our definition of “sprint” is different, but complementary. And if you haven’t heard of any of these methods, don’t worry—you’ll be fine. This is a book for experts and beginners alike, for anyone who has a big opportunity, problem, or idea and needs to get started. Every step has been tried, tweaked, tested, and measured over the course of our 100+ sprints and refined with the input we’ve gathered from the growing sprint community. If it doesn’t work, it’s not in the book.
At the end, you’ll find a set of checklists, including a shopping list and day-by-day guides. You don’t have to memorize everything now—the checklists await you once you’re ready to run your own sprint. But before you start that sprint, you’ll need to plan carefully to make it a success. In the next chapters, we’ll show you how to set the stage.
Set the Stage
Before the sprint begins, you’ll need to have the right challenge and the right team. You’ll also need time and space to conduct your sprint. In the next three chapters, we’ll show you how to get ready
1 - Challenge
The bigger the challenge, the better the sprint
If you’re starting a project that will take months or years. A sprint makes an excellent kickoff. But sprints aren’t only for long-term projects. Here are three challenging situations where sprints can help:
When we talk to startups about sprints, we encourage them to go after their most important problem. Running a sprint requires a lot of energy and focus. Don’t go for the small win, or the nice-to-have project, because people won’t bring their best efforts. They probably won’t even clear their schedules in the first place.
So how big is too big? Sure, sprints work great for websites and other software challenges. But what about really large, complicated problems?
2 - Team
Get a Decider (or two)
The Decider must be involved in the sprint. If you, dear reader, are the Decider, clear your schedule and get in the room. If you’re not, you must convince the Decider to join.
Rapid Progress. Emphasize the amount of progress you’ll make in your sprint: In just one week, you’ll have a realistic prototype.
It’s an Experiment.?Consider your first sprint an experiment.
Explain the Tradeoffs.?Show the Decider a list of big meetings and work items you and your team will miss during the sprint week.
It’s About Focus.?Be honest about your motivations.
Recruit a team of seven (or fewer)
Choosing whom to include isn’t always easy, so we’ve created a cheat sheet. You don’t have to include each and every role listed here. And for some roles, you might choose two or three. Just remember that a mix is good.
The word “team” is pretty cheap, but in a sprint, a team is really a team. You’ll be working side by side for five days.
Bring the troublemaker
Before every sprint, we ask: Who might cause trouble if he or she isn’t included? We don’t mean people who argue just for the sake of arguing. We mean that smart person who has strong, contrary opinions, and whom you might be slightly uncomfortable with including in your sprint.
Schedule extra experts for Monday
If you have more than seven people you think should participate in your sprint, schedule the extras to come in as “experts” for a short visit on Monday afternoon. During their visit, they can tell the rest of the team what they know and share their opinions. (We’ll tell you all about the Ask the Experts process starting on page 68.) A half an hour should be plenty of time for each expert.
Pick a Facilitator
Brad Pitt’s character in Ocean’s Eleven, Rusty Ryan, is the logistics guy. He keeps the heist running. You need someone to be the Rusty Ryan of your sprint. This person is the Facilitator, and she’s responsible for managing time, conversations, and the overall process.
3 - Time and Space
The typical day in the typical office goes something like this:
This day is long and busy, but it’s not necessarily productive. Every meeting, email, and phone call fragments attention and prevents real work from getting done. Taken together, these interruptions are a wasp’s nest dropped into the picnic of productivity.
That’s one of the best aspects of a sprint: It gives you an excuse to work the way you want to work, with a clear calendar and one important goal to address. There are no context switches between different projects, and no random interruptions. A sprint day looks like this
Block five full days on the calendar
This step is obvious, but important. The sprint team must be in the same room Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday’s test starts a little earlier, at 9 a.m.
The no-device rule
In a sprint, time is precious, and we can’t afford distractions in the room. So we have a simple rule: No laptops, phones, or iPads allowed. No virtual-reality headsets. If you’re reading this book in the future, no holograms. If you’re reading it in the past, no Game Boys.
Whiteboards make you smarter
We’ve found that magic happens when we use big whiteboards to solve problems. As humans, our short-term memory is not all that good, but our spatial memory is awesome. A sprint room, plastered with notes, diagrams, printouts, and more, takes advantage of that spatial memory. The room itself becomes a sort of shared brain for the team. As our friend Tim Brown, CEO of the design firm IDEO, writes in his book Change by Design: “The simultaneous visibility of these project materials helps us identify patterns and encourages creative synthesis to occur much more readily than when these resources are hidden away in file folders, notebooks, or PowerPoint decks.
Get two big whiteboards
Ideally, you should run your sprint in the same room all day, every day. Unfortunately, that’s not always possible. We’re surprised how many tech companies make space for foosball tables, video games, and even music rooms—all fun but seldom used—yet can’t dedicate a room to their most important project. If you have to share your sprint room, try to get rolling whiteboards that you can take with you. Don’t let the team’s “shared brain” be erased overnight
Stock up on the right supplies
Before starting your sprint, you’ll need a bunch of basic office supplies, including sticky notes, markers, pens, Time Timers (see below), and regular old printer paper. You’ll also need healthy snacks to keep up the team’s energy. We’ve got strong opinions about which supplies are best, so we’ve included a shopping list at the end of the book.
FACILITATOR NOTES
The Magic Clock”
Jake likes to introduce the Time Timer with a bit of narrative, because timing people while they talk can be socially awkward. He says something like:
“I’m going to use this timer to keep things moving. When it goes off, it’s a reminder to us to see if we can move on to the next topic. If you’re talking when the timer beeps, just keep talking, and I’ll add a little more time. It’s a guideline, not a fire alarm.”
The first time you set it, people’s eyes may get big, and blood pressure may rise a little. But give it a chance. By the afternoon, they’ll be used to it, and most likely, they’ll want to take it with them after the sprint.
Monday
Monday’s structured discussions create a path for the sprint week. In the morning, you’ll start at the end and agree to a long-term goal. Next, you’ll make a map of the challenge. In the afternoon, you’ll ask the experts at your company to share what they know. Finally, you’ll pick a target: an ambitious but manageable piece of the problem that you can solve in one week.
4 - Start at the End
When a big problem comes along, like the challenge you selected for your sprint, it’s natural to want to solve it right away. The clock is ticking, the team is amped up, and solutions start popping into everyone’s mind. But if you don’t first slow down, share what you know, and prioritize, you could end up wasting time and effort on the wrong part of the problem
Monday begins with an exercise we call Start at the End: a look ahead—to the end of the sprint week and beyond. Like Gene Kranz and his diagram of the return to planet earth, you and your team will lay out the basics: your long-term goal and the difficult questions that must be answered.
Set a long-term goal
To start the conversation, ask your team this question:
Why are we doing this project? Where do we want to be six months, a year, or even five years from now?
Slowing down might be frustrating for a moment, but the satisfaction and confidence of a clear goal will last all week.
Your goal should reflect your team’s principles and aspirations. Don’t worry about overreaching. The sprint process will help you find a good place to start and make real progress toward even the biggest goal. Once you’ve settled on a long-term goal, write it at the top of the whiteboard. It’ll stay there throughout the sprint as a beacon to keep everyone moving in the same direction
Okay, time for an attitude adjustment. While writing your long-term goal, you were optimistic. You imagined a perfect future. Now it’s time to get pessimistic. Imagine you’ve gone forward in time one year, and your project was a disaster. What caused it to fail? How did your goal go wrong?
List sprint questions
You’ll list out your sprint questions on a second whiteboard (if you have one). We have a few prompts for getting teams to think about assumptions and questions:
You might end up with only one or two sprint questions. That’s fine. You might come up with a dozen or more
5 - Map
The map is a big deal throughout the week. At the end of the day on Monday, you’ll use the map to narrow your broad challenge into a specific target for the sprint. Later in the week, the map will provide structure for your solution sketches and prototype. It helps you keep track of how everything fits together, and it eases the burden on each person’s short-term memory
Jake added, Will clinics change their workflow?
With the sprint questions listed, we started on the map. Michael Margolis and Alex Ingram had interviewed staff at cancer clinics, and with help from Amy, they told us how trial enrollment worked
Flatiron Health’s long-term goal and sprint questions
It was an intricate and messy system. But, after an hour of discussion and a lot of revision, we were able to create a simple map:
Flatiron Health’s clinical trial enrollment map.
Flatiron Health had a complicated problem and a straightforward map. Your map should be simple, too. You won’t have to capture every detail and nuance. Instead, you’ll just include the major steps required for customers to move from beginning to completion, in this case from cancer diagnosis to trial enrollment
On the first day of their sprint, Blue Bottle Coffee sorted through information about coffee selection, customer support, café operations, and distribution channels.
Make a map
You’ll draw the first draft of your map on Monday morning, as soon as you’ve written down your long-term goal and sprint questions. Use the same whiteboard you wrote your goal on and dive in. When we’re drawing our maps, we follow these steps (keep in mind, there’s a checklist at the back of the book, so you don’t have to memorize this):
6 - Ask the Experts
Your team knows a lot about your challenge. But that knowledge is distributed. Somebody knows the most about your customers; somebody knows the most about the technology, the marketing, the business, and so on. In the normal course of business, teams don’t get the chance to join forces and use all of that knowledge. In the next set of exercises, you’ll do exactly that.
Most of Monday afternoon is devoted to an exercise we call Ask the Experts: a series of one-at-a-time interviews with people from your sprint team, from around your company, and possibly even an outsider or two with special knowledge. As you go, each member of your team will take notes individually. You’ll be gathering the information you need to choose the target of your sprint, while gathering fuel for the solutions you sketch on Tuesday.
Nobody knows everything
Instead, the information is distributed asymmetrically across the team and across the company. In the sprint, you’ve got to gather it and make sense of it, and asking the experts is the best and fastest way to do that.
Deciding who to talk to is a bit of an art. For your own team, you probably have a hunch about the right people already. We think it’s useful to have at least one expert who can talk about each of these topics:
Strategy.?What will make this project a success?” “What’s our unique advantage or opportunity?” “What’s the biggest risk?
Voice of the Customer.?Who talks to your customers more than anyone else? Who can explain the world from their perspective?
How Things Work.?Who understands the mechanics of your product?
Previous Efforts. Often, someone on the team has already thought about the problem in detail. That person might have an idea about the solution, a failed experiment, or maybe even some work in progress.
Ask the Experts
Allow half an hour for each conversation, although you likely won’t use all of that time. Once the expert is ready, we follow a simple script to keep things moving.
Introduce the sprint.?If the expert isn’t part of the sprint team, tell her what the sprint is about.
Review the whiteboards.?Give the expert a two-minute tour of the long-term goal, sprint questions, and map.
Open the door.?Ask the expert to tell you everything she knows about the challenge at hand.
Ask questions.?The sprint team should act like a bunch of reporters digging for a story. Ask the expert to fill in areas where she has extra expertise
Fix the whiteboards.?Add sprint questions. Change your map. If necessary, update your long-term goal. Your experts are here to tell you what you didn’t know (or forgot) in the morning, so don’t be shy about making revisions
That’s it. Your experts don’t have to prepare a slide deck. If they already have something to show, that’s fine, but off-the-cuff discussion about the map and the customers is often more efficient. This need for improvisation is a little unnerving, but it works. If they’re truly experts, they’ll tell you things you wouldn’t know to ask
Imagine that every person on the team took his or her own notes. That would be nice, but if one person alone had an interesting observation, the rest of the group wouldn’t benefit from it. Each person’s notes would be trapped in his or her notebook.
But we do have a technique that results in organized, prioritized notes from the entire team. And it’s pretty fast.
The method is called?How Might We. It was developed at Procter & Gamble in the 1970s, but we learned about it from the design agency IDEO. It works this way: Each person writes his or her own notes, one at a time, on sticky notes. At the end of the day, you’ll merge the whole group’s notes, organize them, and choose a handful of the most interesting ones. These standout notes will help you make a decision about which part of the map to target, and on Tuesday, they’ll give you ideas for your sketches.
With this technique, you take notes in the form of a question, beginning with the words “How might we?.?.?.??” For example, with Blue Bottle, we could ask, “How might we re-create the café experience?” or “How might we ensure coffee arrives fresh?”
Take How Might We notes
Every person on the team needs his or her own pad of sticky notes (plain yellow, three by five inches) and a thick black dry-erase marker.II Using thick markers on a small surface forces everyone to write succinct, easy-to-read headlines
To take notes, follow these steps:
Each person will end up with a little stack of notes—you’ll organize them later.
Organize How Might We notes
As soon as the expert interviews are finished, everybody should gather his or her How Might We notes and stick them on the wall. Just put them up in any haphazard fashion, like this
Wow, what a mess! Now you’ll organize the notes into groups. Working together, find How Might We questions with similar themes and physically group them together on the wall.
As the organization goes on, it’ll be useful to label the themes. Just write a title on a fresh sticky note and put it above the group. (We usually end up with a “Misc” theme of notes that don’t fit anywhere else. Those misfit notes often end up being some of the best ones.)
Vote on How Might We notes
To prioritize the notes, you’ll use dot voting. It’s one of our favorite shortcuts for skipping lengthy debate. Dot voting works pretty much the way it sounds:
At the end of the voting, you’ll have clusters of dots on a few How Might We notes, and the whole wall will be prioritized
When the voting is over, take the How Might We notes with multiple votes, remove them from the wall, and find a place to stick them on your map. Most notes will probably correspond with a specific step in the story
The prioritization process isn’t perfect: There’s little time for deliberation, and early votes will sometimes bias later votes. But it leads to pretty good decisions, and it happens fast enough to leave time for the most important job of the day: After a look back over your long-term goal, your sprint questions, your map, and the notes you took this afternoon, your team will choose one specific target for the rest of your sprint’s efforts.
7 - Target
Pick a target
The Decider needs to choose one target customer and one target event on the map. Whatever she chooses will become the focus of the rest of the sprint—the sketches, prototype, and test all flow from this decision.
Ask the Decider to make the call
It’s easiest if the Decider just makes the decision without a lot of discussion and process. After all, you’ve been discussing and processing all day. By Monday afternoon, most Deciders will be able to make the decision as easily as Amy did. But sometimes, the Decider wants input before she chooses. If that’s the case, conduct a quick, silent “straw poll” to collect opinions from the team
Straw poll (if the Decider wants help)
Ask everyone on the team to choose the customer and the event each of them believes are most important and to write down those choices on a piece of paper. Once everyone has privately made a selection, register the votes on the map with a whiteboard marker
Once you’ve selected a target, take a look back at your sprint questions. You usually can’t answer all those questions in one sprint, but one or more should line up with the target
By Monday afternoon, you’ve identified a long-term goal and the questions to answer along the way. You’ve made a map and circled the target for your sprint. Everyone on the team will have the same information, and everyone will understand the week’s objective. Next, on Tuesday, it’ll be time to come up with solutions
FACILITATOR NOTES
Ask for permission
You may feel nervous about managing the group. That’s natural. Even the most experienced Facilitators get nervous. And since structured meetings are uncommon in most companies, your team may not be used to the idea. What should you do to start things off right?
A helpful tactic (learned from our friend Charles Warren, a former Googler) is to ask the group for permission up front
ABC: Always be capturing
We don’t want to freak you out, but if you’re playing the role of Facilitator, Monday is your busiest day. In addition to leading the group through all of the activities, you’re responsible for something simple but important: recording key ideas on the whiteboard. Or as entrepreneur Josh Porter likes to say: “Always be capturing.
Ask obvious questions
The Facilitator needs to say “Why?” a lot and ask questions to which everybody already knows the answer. Covering the obvious ensures there’s no misinterpretation, and it often draws out important details that not everyone knows about.
Take care of the humans
Decide and move on
Throughout the sprint week, there are many large and small decisions. For the biggest decisions, we’ve given you a script (like Monday’s target, or the narrowing of sketches you’ll find on Wednesday). But you’ll have to handle some smaller decisions on your own.
Tuesday
On Monday, you and your team defined the challenge and chose a target. On Tuesday, you’ll come up with solutions. The day starts with inspiration: a review of existing ideas to remix and improve. Then, in the afternoon, each person will sketch, following a four-step process that emphasizes critical thinking over artistry. Later in the week, the best of these sketches will form the plan for your prototype and test. We hope you had a good night’s sleep and a balanced breakfast, because Tuesday is an important day.
8 - Remix and Improve
Like Savioke, you and your team should look far afield and close to home in your search for existing solutions. If you do, you’re sure to uncover surprising and useful ideas.
Lightning Demos
Lightning Demos are pretty informal. Here’s how they work:
These notes are just to jog your memory later in the day, so they don’t have to be fancy or detailed. We usually end up with a whiteboard full of ideas, such as this one from Flatiron’s sprint:
When you combine the ideas you just captured with Monday’s map, your sprint questions, and your How Might We notes, you’ve got a wealth of raw material. In the afternoon, you’ll turn that raw material into solutions. But before you do, you need to form a quick strategy. Should your team split up to tackle different parts of the problem, or should you all focus on the same spot?
Divide or swarm
Should you divide the problem? Take a good look at your map and have a quick team discussion. If you’ve picked a super-focused target, it might be fine to skip assignments and have the whole team swarm the same part of your problem. If there are several key pieces to cover, you should divide up.
If you do decide to divide up, the easiest approach is to ask each person to write down the part he or she is most interested in. Then go around the room and mark each person’s name next to the piece of the map that person wants to tackle in the sketches. If you end up with too many people on one spot and not enough on another, ask for volunteers to switch.
Once each person knows his or her assignment, it’s time to get yourself some lunch. You’ll need energy for the afternoon, because after all of your preparation, you’re finally going to get a chance to sketch some solutions.
Wait a minute. Did somebody say “sketch”?
9 - Sketch
On Tuesday afternoon, it’s time to come up with solutions. But there will be no brainstorming; no shouting over one another; no deferring judgment so wacky ideas can flourish. Instead, you’ll work individually, take your time, and sketch.
Even though we’re total tech nerds, we’re believers in the importance of starting on paper. It’s a great equalizer. Everyone can write words, draw boxes, and express his or her ideas with the same clarity. If you can’t draw (or rather, if you think you can’t draw), don’t freak out. Plenty of people worry about putting pen to paper, but anybody—absolutely anybody—can sketch a great solution.
To show you what we’re talking about, let’s take a look at one of the sketches that came out of Blue Bottle Coffee’s sprint—a solution called “The Mind Reader.” Each sticky note represents one page on Blue Bottle’s website
See, Tuesday afternoon is about sketching, but more importantly, it’s about solutions. When your team evaluates these sketches on Wednesday to decide which are best, and when you test your prototype on Friday, it will be the quality of the solutions that matters, not the artistry of the drawings from which they came
The power of sketching
On Tuesday, we’re not asking you to sketch because we think it’s fun. We’re asking you to sketch because we’re convinced it’s the fastest and easiest way to transform abstract ideas into concrete solutions. Once your ideas become concrete, they can be critically and fairly evaluated by the rest of the team—without any sales pitch. And, perhaps most important of all, sketching allows every person to develop those concrete ideas while working alone
Work alone together
We know that individuals working alone generate better solutions than groups brainstorming out loud.I Working alone offers time to do research, find inspiration, and think about the problem. And the pressure of responsibility that comes with working alone often spurs us to our best work.
In our sprints, we work alone, but we follow specific steps to help everyone focus and make progress. When each person sketches alone, he or she will have time for deep thought. When the whole team works in parallel, they’ll generate competing ideas, without the groupthink of a group brainstorm. You might call this method “work alone together.
The sketches you create on Tuesday will become the fuel for the rest of the sprint
As you can see, these sketches are detailed, but they’re not works of art. Each sketch consists of words, boxes, and the occasional stick figure, drawn on normal printer paper and normal sticky notes with a normal pen. Simple, right?”
The four-step sketch
The four-step sketch contains each of these important elements. You’ll start with twenty minutes to “boot up” by taking notes on the goals, opportunities, and inspiration you’ve collected around the room. Then you’ll have another twenty minutes to write down rough ideas. Next, it’s time to limber up and explore alternative ideas with a rapid sketching exercise called Crazy 8s. And finally, you’ll take thirty minutes or more to draw your solution sketch—a single well-formed concept with all the details worked out.
Notes
This first step is super-easy. You and your team will walk around the room, look at the whiteboards, and take notes. These notes are a “greatest hits” from the past twenty-four hours of the sprint. They’re a way to refresh your memory before you commit to a solution
First, copy down the long-term goal. Next, look at the map, the How Might We questions, and the notes from your Lightning Demos. Write down anything that looks useful. Don’t worry about coming up with any new ideas, and don’t worry about being neat. These notes are for your eyes only.
Ideas
Now that everyone has a pile of notes, it’s time to switch into idea mode. In this step, each person will jot down rough ideas, filling a sheet of paper with doodles, sample headlines, diagrams, stick figures doing stuff—anything that gives form to his or her thoughts
Take twenty minutes for idea generation. When you’re finished, spend an extra three minutes to review and circle your favorite ideas. In the next step, you’ll refine those promising elements.
Crazy 8s
Crazy 8s is a fast-paced exercise. Each person takes his or her strongest ideas and rapidly sketches eight variations in eight minutes. Crazy 8s forces you to push past your first reasonable solutions and make them better, or at least consider alternatives.
And before you get the wrong idea, the “crazy” in Crazy 8s refers to the pace, not the nature of the ideas
“We want you to focus on good ideas—the ones you believe will work and help you hit your goals—and use Crazy 8s to tweak and expand on those good ideas”
Crazy 8s is also a great writing exercise. If your idea contains words or marketing headlines or any other bits of text, you can use Crazy 8s to improve your phrasing. As you’ll see in the next step, writing is often the most important component of the solution sketch.
Sometimes Crazy 8s leads to a revelation. You might come away with several new ways of looking at your ideas
Solution sketch
Remember how we kept saying, “Don’t worry, nobody’s going to look at this”? That time is over. The solution sketch is each person’s best idea, put down on paper in detail. Each one is an opinionated hypothesis for how to solve the challenge at hand. These sketches will be looked at—and judged!—by the rest of the team. They need to be detailed, thought-out, and easy to understand.
Each sketch will be a three-panel storyboard drawn on sticky notes, showing what your customers see as they interact with your product or service. We like this storyboard format because products and services are more like movies than snapshots
We usually use the three-panel format, but there are exceptions. Sometimes, a sprint will be focused on a single part of the customer experience
With either format, there are a few important rules to keep in mind
A solution sketch from the Blue Bottle Coffee sprint. To understand how this idea works, read the notes from top to bottom—as you would a comic book: In the top frame, the customer reads a how-to guide for brewing coffee. In the second frame, she clicks on a link to recommended coffee beans. In the third frame, she finds details about the beans.”
Each person is responsible for creating one solution sketch. If a few folks get inspired and want to sketch more than one, that’s okay, but don’t overdo it
FACILITATOR NOTES
Find Customers for Friday
On Monday or Tuesday, we start the process of finding customers for Friday’s test. That means one person needs to do some extra work outside of the sprint. It takes all week—but only an hour or two a day—to screen, select, and recruit the best matches. Ideally, someone besides the Facilitator should take responsibility for recruiting, since the Facilitator will be busy enough as it is
Wednesday
By Wednesday morning, you and your team will have a stack of solutions. That’s great, but it’s also a problem. You can’t prototype and test them all—you need one solid plan. In the morning, you’ll critique each solution, and decide which ones have the best chance of achieving your long-term goal. Then, in the afternoon, you’ll take the winning scenes from your sketches and weave them into a storyboard: a step-by-step plan for your prototype.
10 - Decide
You know those meetings. The ones that go on and on, wandering off on tangents, burning up time and energy. The ones that end in a decision nobody’s happy about—or worse, end without any decision at all
Your goal for Wednesday morning is to decide which solutions to prototype. Our motto for these decisions is “unnatural but efficient.” Instead of meandering, your team’s conversations will follow a script
Instead, we used the sprint process to reshape that open-ended discussion into efficient critique and decision-making. By the end of the morning, we knew which ideas we wanted to test.
The sticky decision
We’ve spent years optimizing our sprint decisions to be as efficient as possible. We ended up with a five-step process—and coincidentally, every step involves something sticky:
Art museum
The first step is simple. When you arrive on Wednesday morning, nobody has seen the solution sketches yet. We want everybody to take a good long look at each one, so we stole an idea from the Louvre Museum in Paris: hang them on the wall.
Heat map
Naturally, every person should have a fair opportunity to present his or her solution and explain the rationale behind it. Well?.?.?. that may be natural, but you’re not going to do it.
Explaining ideas has all kinds of downsides. If someone makes a compelling case for his or her idea or is a bit more charismatic, your opinion will be skewed. If you associate the idea with its creator (“Jamie always has great ideas”), your opinion will be skewed. Even just by knowing what the idea is about, your opinion will be skewed
The heat map exercise ensures you make the most of your first, uninformed look at the sketches. So before the team begins looking, hand everyone a bunch of small dot stickers (twenty to thirty dots each). Then each person follows these steps:
There are no limits or rules for these dots. If people want to put dots on their own sketch, they should. If people run out of dots, give them more
Speed critique
In the speed critique, you and your team will discuss each solution sketch and make note of standout ideas. The conversation will follow a structure—and a time limit. The first time you do it, it might feel uncomfortable and rushed, and it might be hard to keep track of all the steps
Here’s how the speed critique works:
That’s right—the proud inventor of the solution in the spotlight doesn’t get to speak up until the end of the critique.
Straw poll
These votes aren’t binding. Instead, think of the straw poll as a way to give your Decider some advice. It’s a straightforward exercise:
Make honest decisions
Sometimes when people work together in groups, they start to worry about consensus and try to make decisions that everybody will approve—mostly out of good nature and a desire for group cohesion, and perhaps in part because democracy feels good. Well, democracy is a fine system for governing nations, but it has no place in your sprint
Supervote
The supervote is the ultimate decision. Each Decider will get three special votes (with the Decider’s initials on them!), and whatever they vote for is what your team will prototype and test.
Deciders can choose ideas that were popular in the straw poll. Or they can choose to ignore the straw poll. They can spread out their votes, or put them all in one place. Basically, the Deciders can do whatever the heck they want
11 - Rumble
Rumble or all-in-one
If you have more than one winning solution, involve the whole team in a short discussion about whether to do a Rumble or combine the winners into a single prototype. Typically, this decision about format is easy. If it’s not, you can always ask the Decider to make the call.
Now, if you decide to do a Rumble, you’ll have one more small problem. If you show your customers two prototypes of the same product, you risk sounding like an optometrist: “Which version do you prefer? A, or B? A? Or B?”
Luckily, the resolution to this murky situation is easy, and even fun: You get to create some fake brands. Once your prototypes have their own distinct names and look, customers will be able to tell them apart
Note-and-Vote
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12 - Storyboard
By Wednesday afternoon, you’ll be able to feel Friday’s test with customers looming ahead. Because of the short timeline, it’s tempting to jump into prototyping as soon as you’ve selected your winning ideas. But if you start prototyping without a plan, you’ll get bogged down by small, unanswered questions. Pieces won’t fit together, and your prototype could fall apart
On Wednesday afternoon, you’ll answer those small questions and make a plan. Specifically, you’ll take the winning sketches and string them together into a storyboard. This will be similar to the three-panel storyboards you sketched on Tuesday, but it will be longer: about ten to fifteen panels, all tightly connected into one cohesive story
This kind of long-form storyboarding is a common practice in movie production. Pixar, the film studio behind movies like Toy Story and The Incredibles, spends months getting their storyboards right before committing to animation. For Pixar, the up-front effort makes sense: It’s much easier to change storyboards than to re-render animation or re-record voice tracks with super-famous actors
First of all, somebody needs to be the storyboard “artist.” We put the word “artist” in quotes because the job doesn’t require artistic talent. In this case, the “artist” is just someone willing to write on the whiteboard a lot. (It might be another good time to give the Facilitator a break
Draw a grid
First, you need a big grid with around fifteen frames. Draw a bunch of boxes on an empty whiteboard, each about the size of two sheets of paper. If you have a hard time drawing long straight lines (and who doesn’t), use masking tape instead of a marker
You’ll start drawing your storyboard in the top left box of the grid. This frame will be the first moment that customers experience on Friday. So?.?.?. what should it be? What’s the best opening scene for your prototype?
If you get it right, the opening scene will boost the quality of your test. The right context can help customers forget they’re trying a prototype and react to your product in a natural way—just as if they had come across it on their own. If you’re prototyping an app, start in the App Store. If you’re prototyping a new cereal box, start on a grocery shelf. And if you’re prototyping business communication software?
Choose an opening scene
How do customers find out your company exists? Where are they and what are they doing just before they use your product? Our favorite opening scenes are simple:
Fill out the storyboard
Once you’ve selected an opening scene, the storyboard “artist” should draw it in the first frame. From there, you’ll build out your story, one frame at a time, just like a comic book. As you go, you’ll discuss each step as a team
Making your storyboard will likely take up the entire afternoon. To make sure you finish by 5 p.m., follow these guidelines:
Work with what you have.?Resist inventing new ideas and just work with the good ideas you already came up with.
Don’t write together.?Your storyboard should include rough headlines and important phrases, but don’t try to perfect your writing as a group
Include just enough detail.?Put enough detail in your storyboard so that nobody has to ask questions like “What happens next?” or “What goes here?” when they are prototyping on Thursday
The Decider decides.?Storyboarding is difficult because you already spent a lot of your limited decision-making energy in the morning. To make it easier, continue to rely on the Decider
When in doubt, take risks.?Sometimes you can’t fit everything in. Remember that the sprint is great for testing risky solutions that might have a huge payoff. So you’ll have to reverse the way you would normally prioritize
Keep the story fifteen minutes or less.?Make sure the whole prototype can be tested in about fifteen minutes. That might seem short, especially since your customer interviews will be sixty minutes long. But you’ll have to allow time for your customers to think aloud and answer your questions—not to mention starting up the interview at the beginning and winding it down at the end.
FACILITATOR NOTES
Don’t Drain the Battery
Decisions take willpower, and you only have so much to spend each day. You can think of willpower like a battery that starts the morning charged but loses a sip with every decision (a phenomenon called “decision fatigue”). As Facilitator, you’ve got to make sure that charge lasts till 5 p.m.
Thursday
On Wednesday, you and your team created a storyboard. On Thursday, you’ll adopt a “fake it” philosophy to turn that storyboard into a realistic prototype. In the next chapters, we’ll explain the mindset, strategy, and tools that make it possible to build that prototype in just seven hours.
13 - Fake It
Thursday is about illusion. You’ve got an idea for a great solution. Instead of taking weeks, months, or, heck, even years building that solution, you’re going to fake it. In one day, you’ll make a prototype that appears real, just like that Old West fa?ade. And on Friday, your customers—like a movie audience—will forget their surroundings and just react.
Fa?ades are easier to build than you might think. Let’s say you’re working on a project that will take a hundred days. And let’s say that 90 percent real is real enough to test. Simple math says it’ll take ninety days to get to that 90 percent real level, so you should be ready to test in about three months. But we’ve found that if you only build a fa?ade, you can get to 90 percent on day one.
But perhaps the biggest problem is that the longer you spend working on something—whether it’s a prototype or a real product—the more attached you’ll become, and the less likely you’ll be to take negative test results to heart. After one day, you’re receptive to feedback. After three months, you’re committed.
The prototype mindset
Building a fa?ade may be uncomfortable for you and your team. To prototype your solution, you’ll need a temporary change of philosophy: from perfect to just enough, from long-term quality to temporary simulation. We call this philosophy the “prototype mindset,” and it’s made up of four simple principles
How real is real enough? When you test your prototype on Friday, you’ll want your customers to react naturally and honestly. Show them something flimsy—a “paper prototype” made up of drawings, or a simplified wireframe of your design—and the illusion will break.
Once the illusion is broken, customers switch into feedback mode. They’ll try to be helpful and think up suggestions. In Friday’s test, customer reactions are solid gold, but their feedback is worth pennies on the dollar
Goldilocks quality
This distinction between feedback and reaction is crucial. You want to create a prototype that evokes honest reactions from your customers. You want it to be as real as possible, while sticking to your one-day timeline
14 -Prototype
Thursday is a bit different from other parts of the sprint. Every prototype is different, so there’s no exact step-by-step process we can share. But after making hundreds of our own prototypes, we’ve come up with four exercises that always set us on the right path:
Pick the right tools
If you’re not sure how to build your prototype, start here”
Building a prototype in one day sounds daunting, but when you put together a diverse sprint team you’ll have all the right expertise in the room
Divide and conquer
The Facilitator should help the sprint team divvy up these jobs:
Friday
Sprints begin with a big challenge, an excellent team—and not much else. By Friday of your sprint week, you’ve created promising solutions, chosen the best, and built a realistic prototype. That alone would make for an impressively productive week. But Friday, you’ll take it one step further as you interview customers and learn by watching them react to your prototype. This test makes the entire sprint worthwhile: At the end of the day, you’ll know how far you have to go, and you’ll know just what to do next.
15 - Small Data
Here’s how Friday works: One person from your team acts as Interviewer. He’ll interview five of your target customers, one at a time. He’ll let each of them try to complete a task with the prototype and ask a few questions to understand what they’re thinking as they interact with it. Meanwhile, in another room, the rest of the team will watch a video stream of the interview and make note of the customers’ reactions.
These interviews are an emotional roller coaster. When customers get confused by your prototype, you’ll be frustrated. If they don’t care about your new ideas, you’ll be disappointed. But when they complete a difficult task, understand something you’ve been trying to explain for months, or if they pick your solution over the competition—you will be elated. After five interviews, the patterns will be easy to spot.
Five is the magic number
How many interviews does it take to spot the most important patterns?
So Nielsen analyzed eighty-three of his own product studies.II He plotted how many problems were discovered after ten interviews, twenty interviews, and so on. The results were both consistent and surprising: 85 percent of the problems were observed after just five people.
The number five also happens to be very convenient. You can fit five one-hour interviews into a single day, with time for a short break between each one and a team debrief at the end:
9:00 a.m. Interview #1
10:00 Break
10:30 Interview #2
11:30 Early lunch
12:30 p.m. Interview #3
1:30 Break
2:00 Interview #4
3:00 Break
3:30 Interview #5
4:30 Debrief
This condensed schedule allows the whole team to watch the interviews together, and analyze them firsthand. This means no waiting for results, and no second-guessing the interpretation
These interviews are easy to do. They don’t require special expertise or equipment. You won’t need a behavioral psychologist or a laser eye-tracker—just a friendly demeanor, a sense of curiosity, and a willingness to have your assumptions proven wrong. In the next chapter, we’ll show you how to do it.
16 - Interview
Michael Margolis is an excellent conversationalist. He smiles easily and asks lots of questions, brimming with a natural curiosity about what it’s like to live where you live, work where you work, and do whatever it is that you do. It’s only afterward that you realize you were talking the whole time and learned little about him
No matter what kind of customer he’s talking to, or what kind of prototype he’s testing, Michael uses the same basic structure: the Five-Act Interview
The Five-Act Interview
This structured conversation helps the customer get comfortable, establishes some background, and ensures that the entire prototype is reviewed. Here’s how it goes
Friday’s action takes place in two rooms. In the sprint room, the team watches the interviews over live video. (Nothing sneaky here. You’ll get the customer’s permission to record and play the video.) The interview itself takes place in another, smaller room—which we cleverly call the “interview room.
There’s no special tech setup required. We use a regular laptop with a webcam and simple video meeting software to share the video and audio
Michael Margolis conducting an interview. He sits beside the customer, but gives her plenty of space. A webcam streams video of the customer’s reaction to the sprint room
Act 1: Friendly welcome
People need to feel comfortable to be open, honest, and critical. So the first job of the Interviewer is to welcome the customer and put her at ease
Act 2: Context questions
After the introduction, you’ll be eager to bring out the prototype. Not so fast. Instead, start slow by asking some questions about the customer’s life, interests, and activities. These questions help build rapport, but they also give you context for understanding and interpreting your customer’s reactions and responses
“What kind of work do you do?”
“For how long have you been doing that?”
“What do you do when you’re not working?”
“What do you do to take care of yourself? To stay in shape? To stay active?”
“Have you used any apps or websites or other things to help with fitness? Which ones?”
“What did you want them to do for you? What do you like or dislike about them? Did you pay for them? Why? Why not?”
Act 3: Introduce the prototype(s)
Now you’re ready to get the customer started on the prototype. Michael begins by saying:
“Would you be willing to look at some prototypes?”
By asking for permission, he reinforces the status relationship: The customer is doing him a favor, not the other way around, and it is the prototype that will be tested, not the customer. It’s also important to say:
“Some things may not work quite right yet—if you run into something that’s not working, I’ll let you know.”
Remind the customer that you’re testing the prototype—not her:
“There are no right or wrong answers. Since I didn’t design this, you won’t hurt my feelings or flatter me. In fact, frank, candid feedback is the most helpful”
The Interviewer should also remind the customer to think aloud:
“As we go, please think aloud. Tell me what you’re trying to do and how you think you can do it. If you get confused or don’t understand something, please tell me. If you see things you like, tell me that, too”
Act 4: Tasks and nudges
In the real world, your product will stand alone—people will find it, evaluate it, and use it without you there to guide them. Asking target customers to do realistic tasks during an interview is the best way to simulate that real-world experience
test:
Let’s say you came across FitStar in the App Store. How would you decide if you wanted to try it?
“What is this? What is it for?”
“What do you think of that?”
“What do you expect that will do?”
“So, what goes through your mind as you look at this?”
“What are you looking for?”
“What would you do next? Why?”
Act 5: Quick debrief
To wrap up the interview, ask a few debrief questions. You’ll see and hear a lot during each interview, and it can be tough to pick out the most important reactions successes, and failures. When you ask debrief questions, your customers can help you sift through everything you heard.
“How does this product compare to what you do now?”
“What did you like about this product? What did you dislike?”
“How would you describe this product to a friend?”
“If you had three magic wishes to improve this product, what would they be?”
If you’re testing two or more prototypes in your interviews, review each one (to refresh the customer’s memory) and ask these questions:
“How would you compare those different products? What are the pros and cons?”
“Which parts of each would you combine to create a new, better version?”
“Which one worked better for you? Why?”
INTERVIEWER TIPS
Be a good host.?For just a moment, imagine you are the target customer who comes in for an interview
Ask open-ended questions?To understand what the customer thinks, you have to be careful not to ask leading questions
Ask broken questions?The idea behind a broken question is to start asking a question—but let your speech trail off before you say anything that could bias or influence the answer.
Curiosity mindset.?Our final bit of advice on how to be a great Interviewer is not a technique, but a state of mind. On Thursday, the team has to be in a prototype mindset. On Friday, the team, and especially the Interviewer, should work hard at adopting a curiosity mindset
17 - Learn
Watch together, learn together”
And at the end of the day, your team can make an informed decision about what to do next—the results of the interviews (and the sprint) are still clear in everyone’s short-term memory.
This wonderful teamwork doesn’t happen by itself, but with a few simple steps, you can create it every time. Here’s what to do:
Take interview notes as a group
Before the first interview begins, draw a grid on a large whiteboard in the sprint room. Create five columns—one for each customer you’ll be interviewing—and a few rows—one for each prototype, or section of the prototype, or sprint question you’re trying to answer.
Distribute sticky notes and whiteboard markers to everyone in the room
During the interviews, the room should be quiet. The interview itself is a time for careful listening and detailed note-taking, not boisterous reactions or problem solving on the spot.
Turning a whiteboard full of sticky notes into a list of patterns and next steps may sound like alchemy, but when everyone has watched the interviews together, it’s straightforward.
Look for patterns
Ask the entire team to gather near the whiteboard. Everyone should stand close enough to read the sticky notes. Take about five minutes to silently review the notes; give each person a notepad and pen to write down patterns he or she sees
Back to the future
On Monday, you came up with a list of sprint questions. These are the unknowns that stand between your team and your long-term goal. Now that you’ve run your test and identified patterns in the results, it’s time to look back at those sprint questions. These questions will help you decide which patterns are most important, and also point you toward next steps
A winner every time
Maybe the best part about a sprint is that you can’t lose. If you test your prototype with customers, you’ll win the best prize of all—the chance to learn, in just five days, whether you’re on the right track with your ideas
Made for people
When you get into a regular rhythm of listening to customers, it can remind you why you’re working so hard in the first place. Every interview draws you and your team closer to the people you’re trying to help with your product or service.
If you continue running sprints, and if you’re true to your vision, the day will come when you’ll close that gap. You’ll be watching some Friday’s test, and you’ll see people understand your idea, believe it will improve their lives, and ask the Interviewer how to buy it.
Liftoff
It’s become clear that sprints are versatile, and that when teams follow the process, it’s transformative. We hope you’ve got the itch to go run your own first sprint—at work, in a volunteer organization, at school, or even to try a change in your personal life.
You can run a sprint anytime you’re not sure what to do, or struggling to get started, or dealing with a high-stakes decision. The best sprints are used to solve important problems, so we encourage you to pick a big fight.
Throughout the book, you learned a handful of unconventional ideas about how to work faster and smarter:
Instead of jumping right into solutions, take your time to map out the problem and agree on an initial target. Start slow so you can go fast.
Note: Schedules are Approximate
MONDAY
Note: Schedules are approximate. Don’t worry if you run behind. Remember to take breaks every sixty to ninety minutes (or around 11:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. each day).
10 a.m.
10:15-ish
11:30-ish
1 p.m.
2 p.m.
4-ish
4:30-ish
Key Ideas
Facilitator Tips
TUESDAY
10 a.m.
12:30-ish
1 p.m.
2 p.m.
The Four-Step Sketch. Briefly explain the four steps. Everyone sketches. When you’re done, place the sketches in a pile and save them for tomorrow. (p. 109)
Key Ideas
Recruit Customers for Friday’s Test
WEDNESDAY
10 a.m.
11:30-ish
1 p.m.
2 p.m.
Facilitator Tip
THURSDAY
10 a.m.
1 p.m.
2 p.m.
3-ish
Throughout the Day
Key Ideas
FRIDAY
Makeshift Research Lab
Key Ideas
Five-Act Interview
Interviewer Tips
Observing Interviews
Before the First Interview
During Each Interview
After Each Interview
At the End of the Day