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

by Jake Knapp

So how big is too big? Sure, sprints work great for websites and other software challenges. But what about really large, complicated problems?

“I’ll be honest,” Jake said. “An industrial pump sounds too complicated to prototype and test in a week.”

Jake was wrong. The industrial pump wasn’t too complicated for a sprint. The team of engineers accepted the five-day constraint and used their domain expertise to think creatively. They sliced the challenge into important questions, and shortcuts started to appear.

The lesson? No problem is too large for a sprint.

First, the sprint forces your team to focus on the most pressing questions. Second, the sprint allows you to learn from just...

Solve the surface first The surface is important. It’s where your product or service meets customers.

Get that surface right, and you can work backward to figure out the underlying systems or technology.

Focusing on the surface allows you to move fast and answer big questions before you commit to execution, which is why any challenge, no matter how large, can benefit from a sprint.

2 Team

A sprint resembles that perfectly orchestrated heist. You and your team put your talents, time, and energy to their best use, taking on an overwhelming challenge and using your wits (and a little trickery) to overcome every obstacle that crosses your path.

To build the perfect sprint team, first you’re going to need a Danny Ocean: someone with authority to make decisions.

The Decider must be involved in the sprint. If you, dear reader, are the Decider, clear your schedule and get in the room.

If your Decider is reluctant, try one or more of these arguments:

Rapid Progress Emphasize the amount of progress you’ll make in your sprint:

It’s About Focus Be honest about

In many of our sprints with startups, the CEO appoints one or two people from the sprint team to act as Deciders when she’s not there.

We’ve found the ideal size for a sprint to be seven people or fewer.

Sprints are most successful with a mix of people: the core people who work on execution along with a few extra experts with specialized knowledge.

Finance expert Who can explain where the money comes from

Marketing expert Who crafts your company’s messages?

Customer expert Who regularly talks to your customers one-on-one?

Tech/logistics expert Who best understands what your company can build and deliver?

Design expert Who designs the products your company makes?

The word “team” is pretty cheap, but in a sprint, a team is really a team.

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.

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.

managing time, conversations, and the overall process.

summarizing discussions and telling people it’s time to stop talking and move on. It’s an important job. And since you’re the one reading th...

The Facilitator needs to remain unbiased about decisions, so it’s not a good idea to combine the Decider and ...

Sprints are the same way. Each expert in the room will provide a key contribution—whether it’s background information, a fresh idea, or even a shrewd observation of your customers.

3 Time and Space

The typical day in the typical office goes something like this:

Meetings, distraction

Every meeting, email, and phone call fragments attention and prevents real work from getting done.

There are stacks of studies about the cost of interruption.

No doubt about it: Fragmentation hurts productivity. Of course, nobody wants to work this way. We all want to get important work done.

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.

You’ll start at 10 a.m. and end at 5 p.m., with an hour-long lunch in between. That’s right: There are only six working hours in the typical sprint day. Longer hours don’t equal better results.

Sprints require high energy and focus, but the team won’t be able to give that effort if they’re stressed out or fatigued.

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.

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. Inside the sprint room, everybody will be 100 percent focused on the sprint’s challenge. The entire team must shut their laptops and put away their phones.

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.

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.

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.”

The Time Timer itself is an object of simple beauty. True to Jan’s original design, it has a red disk that moves as time elapses. It makes the abstract passage of time vivid and concrete.

We use Time Timers in our sprints to mark small chunks of time, anywhere from three minutes to one hour.

These tiny deadlines give everyone an added sense of focus and urgency.

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.