Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days

by Jake Knapp

1. Art museum: Put the solution sketches on the wall with masking tape. 2. Heat map: Look at all the solutions in silence, and use dot stickers to mark interesting parts. 3. Speed critique: Quickly discuss the highlights of each solution, and use sticky notes to capture big ideas. 4. Straw poll: Each person chooses one solution, and votes for it with a dot sticker. 5. Supervote: The Decider makes the final decision, with—you guessed it—more stickers.

Here’s how the speed critique works: 1. Gather around a solution sketch. 2. Set a timer for three minutes. 3. The Facilitator narrates the sketch. (“Here it looks like a customer is clicking to play a video, and then clicking over to the details page . . .”) 4. The Facilitator calls out standout ideas that have clusters of stickers by them. (“Lots of dots by the animated video . . .”) 5. The team calls out standout ideas that the Facilitator missed. 6. The Scribe writes standout ideas on sticky notes and sticks them above the sketch. Give each idea a simple name, like “Animated Video” or “One-Step Signup.” 7. Review concerns and questions. 8. The creator of the sketch remains silent until the end. (“Creator, reveal your identity and tell us what we missed!”) 9. The creator explains any missed ideas that the team failed to spot, and answers any questions. 10. Move to the next sketch and repeat.

1. Give everyone one vote (represented by a big dot sticker—we like pink). 2. Remind everyone of the long-term goal and sprint questions. 3. Remind everyone to err on the side of risky ideas with big potential. 4. Set a timer for ten minutes. 5. Each person privately writes down his or her choice. It could be a whole sketch, or just one idea in a sketch. 6. When time is up, or when everyone is finished, place the votes on the sketches. 7. Each person briefly explains his or her vote (only spend about one minute per person).

The Decider should listen to these explanations—because all decision-making authority is about to be turned over to her.

All the same, it’s a good idea to remind the Decider of the long-term goal and the sprint questions (which should still be on one of your whiteboards!). Finally, when the Decider has placed her votes, the hardest choice of the week is complete. It’ll look something like this: The sketches with supervotes on them (even just one!) are the winners. You’ll plan your prototype around those ideas and put them to the test on Friday.

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?”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.

Note-and-Vote Throughout the sprint, you’ll have times when you need to gather information or ideas from the group and then make a decision. The Note-and-Vote is a shortcut. It only takes about ten minutes, and it works great for everything from fake brand names to deciding where to get lunch. 1. Give each team member a piece of paper and a pen. 2. Everyone takes three minutes and quietly writes down ideas. 3. Everyone takes two minutes to self-edit his or her list down to the best two or three ideas. 4. Write each person’s top ideas on the whiteboard. In a sprint with seven people, you’ll have roughly fifteen to twenty ideas in all. 5. Everyone takes two minutes and quietly chooses his or her favorite idea from the whiteboard. 6. Going around the room, each person calls out his or her favorite. For each “vote,” draw a dot next to the chosen idea on the whiteboard. 7. The Decider makes the final decision. As always, she can choose to follow the votes or not.

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.

The trick is to take one or two steps upstream from the beginning of the actual solution you want to test. 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: • Web search with your website nestled among the results • Magazine with an advertisement for your service • Store shelf with your product sitting beside its competitors • App Store with your app in it • News article that mentions your service, and possibly some competitors • Facebook or Twitter feed with your product shared among the other posts

Fill out the storyboard Once you’ve selected an opening scene, the storyboard “artist” should draw it in the first frame (the “artist” will be standing at the whiteboard while everyone else gathers around). 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. Whenever possible, use the sticky notes from your winning sketches and stick them onto the whiteboard.

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. Group copywriting is a recipe for bland, meandering junk, not to mention lots of wasted time. Instead, use the writing from your solution sketches, or just leave it until Thursday. 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. But don’t get too specific. You don’t need to perfect every frame or figure out every nuance. It’s okay to say: “Whoever builds this tomorrow can decide that detail.” And then move on. 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. In the Slack sprint, Braden was the “artist” drawing the storyboard, but Merci made the decisions. It was extra work for her, but it kept us fast and opinionated. You won’t be able to fit in every good idea and still have a storyboard that makes sense. And you can’t spend all day arguing about what to include. The Decider can ask for advice or defer to experts for some parts—...

Keep the story fifteen minutes or less. Make sure the whole prototype can be tested in about fifteen minutes.

Once you’ve incorporated all of the winning sketches, the storyboard will be complete. And you’ve finished with the hardest part of the sprint. The decisions are made, the plan for your prototype is ready, and Wednesday is a wrap.

Watch out for discussions that aren’t destined for a quick resolution. When you spot one, push it onto the Decider: “This is a good discussion, but there’s still a lot to cover today. Let’s have the Decider make the call so we can move on.” And: “Let’s just trust the Decider on this one.”

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.

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. As our partner Daniel Burka says, the ideal prototype should be “Goldilocks quality.” If the quality is too low, people won’t believe the prototype is a real product. If the quality is too high, you’ll be working all night and you won’t finish.

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: 1. Pick the right tools 2. Divide and conquer 3. Stitch it together 4. Do a trial run

We like to do our trial run around 3 p.m., so that we still have enough time to fix mistakes and patch any holes we find in the prototype. Have everyone pause work and gather around, and then ask the Stitcher to walk through the entire prototype, narrating as he goes. As you go, you should double-check against the storyboard to make sure everything made it into the prototype. The trial run is also a great time to revisit your sprint questions. It’s one last check to make sure your prototype will help you get answers.

The primary audience for the trial run is the Interviewer, who will be talking with customers on Friday. The Interviewer needs to be familiar with the prototype and the sprint questions so he can get the most out of the interviews. (We’ll explain how to run these interviews in the next chapter.) But the whole team will benefit from watching the trial run. If the Decider isn’t a full-time participant in the sprint, now is another good time for a cameo appearance. The Decider can make sure everything matches what she was expecting.

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.

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

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

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. Give everyone instructions for how to take notes during the interviews: “When you hear or see something interesting, write it down on a sticky note. You can write down quotes, observations, or your interpretation of what happened.” Use a different color marker depending on the note: green for positive, red for negative, black for neutral. If you only have black markers, write a plus or minus in the corner, or leave it blank for neutral. During the interviews, the room should be quiet.

At the end of each interview, collect the notes and stick them to the whiteboard. Put them into the correct row and column, but don’t worry about any other organizing just yet.

Look for patterns that show up with three or more customers. If only two customers reacted in the same way but it was an especially strong reaction, make note of that, too. After five minutes looking for patterns individually, ask the team to share what they found and read the patterns aloud. On another whiteboard, list every pattern and label each one as positive, negative, or neutral. Once the patterns are listed, it’s time to make sense of the results.

At the end of your own sprint, you’ll do the same. Review your long-term goal and sprint questions from Monday. You probably won’t answer every question, but like Slack, you’ll make progress. After looking back, it’s usually easy to figure out the next step. The team can have a short discussion, and then (you guessed it) the Decider decides how to follow up.

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. • Instead of shouting out ideas, work independently to make detailed sketches of possible solutions. Group brainstorming is broken, but there is a better way. • Instead of abstract debate and endless meetings, use voting and a Decider to make crisp decisions that reflect your team’s priorities. It’s the wisdom of the crowd without the groupthink. • Instead of getting all the details right before testing your solution, create a façade. Adopt the “prototype mindset” so you can learn quickly. • And instead of guessing and hoping you’re on the right track—all the while investing piles of money and months of time into your ideas—test your prototype with target customers and get their honest reactions.

SET THE STAGE • Choose a big challenge. Use sprints when the stakes are high, when there’s not enough time, or when you’re just plain stuck. (p. 26) • Get a Decider (or two). Without a Decider, decisions won’t stick. If your Decider can’t join the entire sprint, have her appoint a delegate who can. (p. 31) • Recruit a sprint team. Seven people or fewer. Get diverse skills along with the people who work on the project day-to-day. (p. 34) • Schedule extra experts. Not every expert can be in the sprint all week. For Monday afternoon, schedule fifteen- to twenty-minute interviews with extra experts. Plan for two to three hours total. (p. 36) • Pick a Facilitator. She will manage time, conversations, and the overall sprint process. Look for someone who’s confident leading a meeting and synthesizing discussions on the fly. It might be you! (p. 36) • Block five full days on the calendar. Reserve time with your sprint team from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday. (p. 40) • Book a room with two whiteboards. Reserve a sprint room for the entire week. If it doesn’t have two whiteboards in it already, buy some or improvise. Book a second room for Friday’s interviews. (p. 44) Key Ideas • No distractions. No laptops, phones, or iPads allowed. If you need your device, leave the room or wait for a break. (p. 41) • Timebox. A tight schedule builds confidence in the sprint process. Use a Time Timer to create focus and urgency. (p. 47) • Plan for a late lu...

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. • Write this checklist on a whiteboard. When you’re done, check off this first item. See how easy that was? Keep checking off items throughout the day. • Introductions. If some people don’t know one another, do a round of introductions. Point out the Facilitator and the Decider and describe their roles. • Explain the sprint. Introduce the five-day sprint process (you can use the slide deck on thesprintbook.com). Run through this checklist and briefly describe each activity. 10:15-ish • Set a long-term goal. Get optimistic. Ask: Why are we doing this project? Where do we want to be in six months, a year, or even five years from now? Write the long-term goal on a whiteboard. (p. 55) • List sprint questions. Get pessimistic. Ask: How could we fail? Turn these fears into questions you could answer this week. List them on a whiteboard. (p. 57) 11:30-ish • Make a map. List customers and key players on the left. Draw the ending, with your completed goal, on the right. Finally, make a flowchart in between showing how customers interact with your product. Keep it simple: five to fifteen steps. (p. 65) 1 p.m. • Lunch break. Eat together if you can (it’s fun). Remind your team to choose a light lunch to maintain energy in the afternoon. There are snacks if you get hungry later. 2 p.m. • Ask the Experts. Int...

TUESDAY 10 a.m. • Lightning Demos. Look at great solutions from a range of companies, including yours. Three minutes per demo. Capture good ideas with a quick drawing on the whiteboard. (p. 96) 12:30-ish • Divide or swarm. Decide who will sketch which part of the map. If you’re targeting a big chunk of the map in your sprint, divide it up and assign someone to each section. (p. 102) 1 p.m. • Lunch 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) • 1. Notes. Twenty minutes. Silently walk around the room and gather notes. (p. 110) • 2. Ideas. Twenty minutes. Privately jot down some rough ideas. Circle the most promising ones. (p. 111) • 3. Crazy 8s. Eight minutes. Fold a sheet of paper to create eight frames. Sketch a variation of one of your best ideas in each frame. Spend one minute per sketch. (p. 111) • 4. Solution sketch. Thirty to ninety minutes. Create a three-panel storyboard by sketching in three sticky notes on a sheet of paper. Make it self-explanatory. Keep it anonymous. Ugly is okay. Words matter. Give it a catchy title. (p. 114) Key Ideas • Remix and improve. Every great invention is built on existing ideas. (p. 96) • Anyone can sketch. Most solution sketches are just rectangles and words. (p. 104) • Concrete beats abstract. Use sketches to turn abstract ideas into concrete solutions that can be assessed by others. (p. 106) • Work alone together. G...

WEDNESDAY 10 a.m. • Sticky decision. Follow these five steps to choose the strongest solutions: • Art museum. Tape the solution sketches to the wall in one long row. (p. 132) • Heat map. Have each person review the sketches silently and put one to three small dot stickers beside every part he or she likes. (p. 132) • Speed critique. Three minutes per sketch. As a group, discuss the highlights of each solution. Capture standout ideas and important objections. At the end, ask the sketcher if the group missed anything. (p. 135) • Straw poll. Each person silently chooses a favorite idea. All at once, each person places one large dot sticker to register his or her (nonbinding) vote. (p. 138) • Supervote. Give the Decider three large dot stickers and write her initials on the sticker. Explain that you’ll prototype and test the solutions the Decider chooses. (p. 140) 11:30-ish • Divide winners from “maybe-laters.” Move the sketches with supervotes together. (p. 141) • Rumble or all-in-one. Decide if the winners can fit into one prototype, or if conflicting ideas require two or three competing prototypes in a Rumble. (p. 145) • Fake brand names. If you’re doing a Rumble, use a Note-and-Vote to choose fake brand names. (p. 145) • Note-and-Vote. Use this technique whenever you need to quickly gather ideas from the group and narrow down to a decision. Ask people to write ideas individually, then list them on a whiteboard, vote, and let the Decider pick the winner. (p. 146) 1 p.m. • L...

THURSDAY 10 a.m. • Pick the right tools. Don’t use your everyday tools. They’re optimized for quality. Instead, use tools that are rough, fast, and flexible. (p. 186) • Divide and conquer. Assign roles: Maker, Stitcher, Writer, Asset Collector, and Interviewer. You can also break the storyboard into smaller scenes and assign each to different team members. (p. 187) • Prototype! 1 p.m. • Lunch 2 p.m. • Prototype! • Stitch it together. With the work split into parts, it’s easy to lose track of the whole. The Stitcher checks for quality and ensures all the pieces make sense together. (p. 189) 3-ish • Do a trial run. Run through your prototype. Look for mistakes. Make sure the Interviewer and the Decider see it. (p. 189) • Finish up the prototype. Throughout the Day • Write interview script. The Interviewer prepares for Friday’s test by writing a script. (p. 188) • Remind customers to show up for Friday’s test. Email is good, phone call is better. • Buy gift cards for customers. We usually use $100 gift cards. Key Ideas • Prototype mindset. You can prototype anything. Prototypes are disposable. Build just enough to learn, but not more. The prototype must appear real. (p. 168) • Goldilocks quality. Create a prototype with just enough quality to evoke honest reactions from customers. (p. 170

FRIDAY Makeshift Research Lab • Two rooms. In the sprint room, the sprint team will watch a video feed of the interviews. You’ll need a second, smaller room for the actual interviews. Make sure the interview room is clean and comfortable for your guests. (p. 202) • Set up hardware. Position a webcam so you can see customers’ reactions. If your customer will be using a smartphone, iPad, or other hardware device, set up a document camera and microphone. • Set up video stream. Use any video-conferencing software to stream video to the sprint room. Make sure the sound quality is good. Make sure the video and audio are one-way only. Key Ideas • Five is the magic number. After five customer interviews, big patterns will emerge. Do all five interviews in one day. (p. 197) • Watch together, learn together. Don’t disband the sprint team. Watching together is more efficient, and you’ll draw better conclusions. (p. 218) • A winner every time. Your prototype might be an efficient failure or a flawed success. In every case, you’ll learn what you need for the next step. (p. 223) Five-Act Interview • Friendly welcome. Welcome the customer and put him or her at ease. Explain that you’re looking for candid feedback. (p. 204) • Context questions. Start with easy small talk, then transition to questions about the topic you’re trying to learn about. (p. 205) • Introduce the prototype. Remind the customer that some things might not work, and that you’re not testing him or her. Ask the customer...

Q: How about a four-day sprint? A: Maybe. If the team has experience running five-day sprints, you may be able to compress Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday’s activities into just two days. However, you should not compress prototyping and testing—allow one full day for each.

Q: Should we ever interview customers before a sprint? A: Yes! We know how difficult it is to make time for customer interviews before a sprint. We usually can’t do it. But if you can, this kind of “pre-research” provides a big head start. It’s especially helpful when you’re starting from scratch and don’t already know a lot about your customers or how they use your product.