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

by Jake Knapp

There are two ways to find the right customers for your test. If you have fairly easy-to-find customers, you’ll use Craigslist. If you have hard-to...

Recruit customers with Craigslist Most of the time, to recruit people who exactly match our target customer, we use Craigslist. We know it sounds crazy, but it works. It’s how we found perfect particip...

The secret is to post a generic ad that will attract a broad audience, then link to a screener survey to narro...

We offer a small stipend or token of appreciation—usually a $100 gift card—to pique the interest of potential customers.

Write a screener survey The screener survey is a simple questionnaire for interested people to fill out. You’ll need to ask the right questions to find the right people.

Blue Bottle Coffee wanted to interview “coffee-drinking foodies.” To find these customers, we used measurable criteria like: they drink at least one cup of coffee per day, they read food-related blogs and magazines, and they eat at restaurants at least once per week.

Next, write questions for every one of your criteria. It’s important to write questions that don’t reveal the “right” answers

“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—it’s easy to set up, and the responses go right into a Google spreadsheet that you can sort and filter.

Once your screener survey is ready and your ad is live on Craigslist, the responses will start rolling in. Look through the survey results and pick out customers who match your criteria.

But what about existing customers or “hard-to-find” professionals with uncommon jobs? You’ll need a different strategy.

Recruit customers through your network Finding existing customers is generally pretty easy. You probably already have the means to reach them—consider email newsletters, in-store posters, Twitter, Facebook, or even your own website.

Make sure potential interview candidates match your screening criteria. With only five interviews, it’s important to talk to the right people.

The entire sprint depends on getting good data in Friday’s test, so whoever takes charge of recruiting your customers should take the job seriously.

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.

afternoon, you’ll take the winning scenes from your sketches and weave them into a storyboard: a step-by...

10 Decide

Left to our own devices, we humans tend to debate this way:

Someone comes up with a solution, the group critiques it, someone tries to explain the details, and then someone else has a new idea:

These discussions are frustrating, because humans have limited short-term memory and limited energy for decision-making.

We’ve structured Wednesday to do one thing at a time—and do it well. We’ll evaluate solutions all at once, critique all at once, and then make a decision all at once.

This structure is socially awkward, but logical—if you feel like Spock from Star Trek, you’re doing it right.

To show you what Wednesday looks like, we’d like to introduce you to another startup.

their first product was a video game called Glitch.

a messaging system they had originally built for their own use.

So they launched it to the public, and named it Slack. Technology companies went bonkers for Slack.

To keep expanding, Slack needed to get better at explaining their product to all kinds of businesses.

As a reporter for the New York Times—one of the workplaces that had adopted Slack—put it, “I have a feeling of intimacy with coworkers on the other side of the country that is almost fun. That’s a big deal, for a job.”

This sticky stuff isn’t a gimmick. The dot stickers let us form and express our opinions without lengthy debate, and the sticky notes allow us to record big ideas without relying on our short-term memory.

Blue Bottle Coffee faced a similar challenge when they tested different ideas for their online store. They needed fake brand names that sounded like real coffee companies, and they came up with “Linden Alley Coffee,” “Telescope Coffee,” and “Potting Shed Coffee.”

Inventing fake brands is fun, but it’s also a potential time waster. To keep the process short, we use an all-purpose brainstorm substitute that we call Note-and-Vote. Here’s how it works:

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.

you’ll take the winning sketches and string them together into a storyboard.

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, 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.

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’re prototyping an app, start in the App Store. If you’re prototyping a new cereal box, start on a grocery shelf.

The fake news article is a useful opening scene. We used the same method in our sprint with Blue Bottle, when we opened with a (fake) New York Times article about three (fake) up-and-coming coffee companies.

Flatiron’s opening scene was an email inbox—the place research coordinators would receive notifications from the new system.

How do customers find out your company exists? Where are they and what are they doing just before they use your product?

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

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.

You can have buttons that don’t function and menu items that are unavailable. Surprisingly, these “dead ends” are generally easy for customers to ignore in Friday’s test.

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.

Wednesday is one decision after another, and it’s all too easy to drain the battery. By following the Sticky Decision process and steering the team from inventing new ideas, you should be able to make it to 5 p.m. without running out of juice.

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.

If you’ve ever watched an old Western movie, you’re probably familiar with this scene. Good guys in white hats, bad guys in black, plenty of melodrama.

Of course, those Old West scenes were never quite as real as they appeared. Sometimes, the director found an existing location that looked about right: an abandoned ghost town or a picturesque Italian village.