More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jake Knapp
Started reading
January 29, 2019
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.
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.
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.
presentation software to make a series of slides that looked like three real websites. With a little ingenuity, and without any computer programming at all, we stitched those screens into a prototype that our test customers could use.
Jake doesn’t know anything about industrial assembly lines, but out of curiosity, he joined a meeting with the engineering team. “I’ll be honest,” Jake said. “An industrial pump sounds too complicated to prototype and test in a week.” But the team wouldn’t give up so easily. If limited to just five days, they could prototype a brochure for the pump’s new features and try it in sales visits. That kind of test could answer questions about marketability.
The Facilitator needs to remain unbiased about decisions, so it’s not a good idea to combine the Decider and Facilitator roles in one person. It often works well to bring in an outsider who doesn’t normally work with your team to be the Facilitator, but it’s not a requirement.
Your team will take a short morning break (around 11:30 a.m.), an hour-long lunch (around 1 p.m.), and a short afternoon break (around 3:30 p.m.). These breaks are a sort of “pressure-release valve,” allowing people to rest their brains and catch up on work happening outside the sprint.
The Magic Clock
We use Time Timers in our sprints to mark small chunks of time, anywhere from three minutes to one hour.
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.
Monday begins with an exercise we call Start at the End:
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?”
An important part of this exercise is rephrasing assumptions and obstacles into questions. Blue Bottle Coffee assumed they could find a way to convey their expertise through their website, but before the sprint, they weren’t sure how. It’s not difficult to find an assumption such as Blue Bottle’s and turn it into a question:
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):
Unfortunately, we don’t know how to do any actual magic. 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
...more
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)
Your final task on Monday is to choose a target for your sprint. Who is the most important customer, and what’s the critical moment of that customer’s experience?
The Decider needs to choose one target customer and one target event on the map.
ABC: Always be capturing
Eat light and often Provide good, nutritious snacks in the morning and throughout the day. And be careful of eating a heavy lunch. No burritos, pizza, foot-long subs, or all-you-can-eat buffets. We learned the hard way (Indian food burritos, with tortillas made of naan) how these lunch foods can kill a group’s momentum in the afternoon.
Recruit customers with Craigslist
The secret is to post a generic ad that will attract a broad audience, then link to a screener survey to narrow down to your target customers.
100 customer research interviews on August 2 (San Francisco) I’m scheduling 60-minute research interviews in San Francisco on Thursday, August 2. Selected participants who complete the interviews will receive $100 Amazon gift cards. Please complete this short questionnaire. Click here.
Next, write questions for every one of your criteria. It’s important to write questions that don’t reveal the “right” answers—some people will try to game the survey just so they can get the gift card. For example, rather than asking people whether they go to restaurants, ask: “In a typical week, how many times do you eat out?” Instead of asking if applicants read food blogs, try something like this: “Do you regularly read blogs or magazines dedicated to any of the following topics? • Sports • Food • News • Coffee • Cocktails • Parenting • Gardening • Cars
We always use Google Forms—
Your goal for Wednesday morning is to decide which solutions to prototype. Our motto for these decisions is “unnatural but efficient.”
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?”I 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.
If you’re prototyping a new cereal box, start on a grocery shelf. And if you’re prototyping business communication software?
The trick is to take one or two steps upstream from the beginning of the actual solution you want to test.
It’s almost always a good idea to present your solution alongside the competition. As a matter of fact, you can ask customers to test out your competitors’ products on Friday right alongside your own prototype.
Remember that most ideas sound better in the abstract, so they may not be that good.
We know it sounds crazy, but we’re 90 percent sure you should use Keynote to make your prototype. How can we suggest that when we don’t even know what you’re prototyping? Good question. Of course we can’t be completely sure—but in our 100+
(And yes, if you’re on Windows, PowerPoint also makes a fine prototyping tool. It’s not quite as nice as Keynote, but a quick web search will yield a number of template libraries you can use to make realistic prototypes in PowerPoint.)
Pick the right tools
If it’s on a screen (website, app, software, etc.)—use Keynote, PowerPoint, or a website-building tool like Squarespace.
Finally, there’s the Interviewer, who will use the finished prototype to conduct Friday’s customer interviews. On Thursday, he should write an interview script. (We’ll go into detail about the structure of this script in Chapter 16 on page 201.) It’s best if the Interviewer doesn’t work on the prototype. This way, he won’t be emotionally invested in Friday’s test, and won’t betray any hurt feelings or glee to the customer.
Let’s say your storyboard calls for a customer to see an ad, visit your website, and download your app.
You know the rest of the story. Today, there are hundreds of millions of Harry Potter books in print worldwide. How did publishers get it so wrong? Eight experts in children’s publishing turned Harry Potter down—and the ninth, Newton, only printed five hundred copies. But Alice, an eight-year-old, knew right away that it was “so much better than anything else.”
Five is the magic number
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:
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: 1. A friendly welcome to start the interview 2. A series of general, open-ended context questions about the customer 3. Introduction to the prototype(s) 4. Detailed tasks to get the customer reacting to the prototype 5. A quick debrief to capture the customer’s overarching thoughts and impressions
“Keep A-Knockin’ ” by Little Richard.)
“Would you be willing to look at some prototypes?”
“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.”
