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

by Jake Knapp

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.

Starting at the end is like being handed the keys to a time machine. If you could jump ahead to the end of your sprint, what questions would be answered? If you went six months or a year further into the future, what would have improved about your business as a result of this project?

“Why are we doing this project? Where do we want to be six months, a year, or even five years from now?”

Savioke wanted to focus on customers, and use the same goal as the hotels: better guest experience.

Your goal should reflect your team’s principles and aspirations.

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.

What caused it to fail? How did your goal go wrong?

Lurking beneath every goal are dangerous assumptions. The longer those assumptions remain unexamined, the greater the risk. In your sprint, you have a golden opportunity to ferret out assumptio...

You’ll list out your sprint questions on a second whiteboard

What questions do we want to answer in this sprint?

To meet our long-term goal, what has to be true? • Imagine we travel into the future and our project failed. What might have caused that?

An important part of this exercise is rephrasing assumptions and obst...

(unless they’re Jeopardy! contestants). But turning these potential problems into questions makes them easier to track—and easier to answer with sketches, prototypes, and tests.

shift from uncertainty (which is uncomfortable) to curiosity

By starting at the end with these questions, you’ll face your fears. Big questions and unknowns can be discomforting, but you’ll feel relieved to see them all listed in one place. You’ll know where you’re headed and what you’re up against.

Exactly

5 Map

The map you’ll create on Monday

your map will show customers moving through your service or product. Not quite as thrilling, but every bit as useful.

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.

1. List the actors (on the left) The “actors” are all the important characters in your story.

2. Write the ending (on the right) It’s usually a lot easier to figure out the end than the middle of the story.

3. Words and arrows in between

4. Keep it simple Your map should have from five to around fifteen steps.

5. Ask for help As you draw, you should keep asking the team, “Does this map look right?”

6 Ask the Experts

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.

Start by talking to the Decider. If the Decider is not going to be in the sprint the whole time, be sure she joins you on Monday afternoon.

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?

Think about bringing in the money expert, the tech/logistics expert, and the marketing expert as well.

Previous Efforts Often, someone on the team has already thought about the problem in detail.

Talking to these experts reminds the team of things they knew but may have forgotten. It always yields a few surprising insights.

Ask the Experts Allow half an hour for each conversation,

1. Introduce the sprint

2. Review the whiteboards Give the expert a two-minute tour of the long-term goal, sprint questions, and map.

3. Open the door Ask the expert to tell you everything she knows about the challenge at hand.

4. Ask questions The sprint team should act like a bunch of reporters digging for a story. Ask the expert to fill in ar...

5. Fix the whiteboards Add sprint questions. Change your map. If necessary, update your long-term goal.

The method is called How Might We.

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.

When we tried it, we came to appreciate how the open-ended, optimistic phrasing forced us to look for opportunities and challenges, rather than getting bogged down by problems or, almost worse, jumping to solutions too soon.

Reading the How Might We list feels a lot better than reading the problem list. It was exciting when the interviews ended and we saw each other’s notes on the wall.

Each How Might We note captured a problem and converted it into an opportunity.

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

Everyone had a chance to share an opinion about what we should focus on. Bobby Green, the VP of clinical strategy, thought it would be best to build a tool for doctors. The engineers wanted to focus on research coordinators. Both had excellent arguments.