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

by Jake Knapp

It makes no difference to the audience. For the few minutes we see the town, we get lost in the story. It all appears real. Whether it’s a façade or a ghost town, the illusion works.

Thursday is about illusion. You’ve got an idea for a great solution. Instead of taking weeks, months, or, heck, even years building that solution, you’re going to fake it. In one day, you’ll make a prototype that appears real, just like that Old West façade.

Façades are easier to build than you might think.

But perhaps the biggest problem is that the longer you spend working on something—whether it’s a prototype or a real product—the more attached you’ll become, and the less likely you’ll be to take negative test results to heart.

At the beginning, you’re in the sweet spot of all these charts (which, to be fair, we made up). You’re not attached to your ideas yet, so if they don’t test well, you’ll be flexible enough to fix or cut them. You’re in the perfect position to take advantage of that fast curve to 90 percent real, if you limit yourselves to building a façade. No plumbing, no wiring, no structural engineering. Just a façade.

Building a façade may be uncomfortable for you and your team. To prototype your solution, you’ll need a temporary change of philosophy: from perfect to just enough, from long-term quality to temporary simulation

1. You Can Prototype Anything

This statement might sound corny, but here it is. You have to believe. If you go into Thursday with optimism and a conviction that there is some way to prototype and test your product, you will find a way.

2. Prototypes Are Disposable Don’t prototype anything you aren’t willing to throw away. Remember: This solution might not work.

You’ll have diminishing returns on that extra work, and all the while, you’ll be falling deeper in love

3. Build Just Enough to Learn, but Not More The prototype is meant to answer questions, so keep it focused.

4. The Prototype Must Appear Real To get trustworthy results in your test on Friday, you can’t ask your customers to use their imaginations.

Once the illusion is broken, customers switch into feedback mode. They’ll try to be helpful and think up suggestions. In Friday’s test, customer reactions are solid gold, but their feedback is worth pennies on the dollar.

Goldilocks quality This distinction between feedback and reaction is crucial. You want to create a prototype that evokes honest reactions from your customers.

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.

We just needed something that looked like a real app. We remembered that you can run Keynote (Apple’s presentation software, like PowerPoint) on an iPad. A slideshow running full-screen would look just like an app. It could even play videos.

To complete the illusion, we added screenshots from the iPad App Store to the beginning of the slideshow.

By the end of the day, it looked just like real software—even though there was no software at all. FitStar’s prototype was just like one of those Old West façades: The illusion only worked for a few minutes, from a certain angle.

But that was enough to answer Mike and Dave’s big question for the sprint: Can we better explain our app to new customers? After Thursday, FitStar was ready for their test.

For FitStar, success in the market depended on quality. But in their sprint, success depended only on being real enough to answer their key questions. They got the information they needed to identify the right solutions—and shut down the wrong ones—with a prototype that only took seven hours to build.

When a team has an extraordinary prototyping challenge, they often have the extraordinary skills and tools to make it happen.

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

There’s a good chance that your team’s regular tools are not the right tools for prototyping.

The trouble with your team’s regular tools is that they’re too perfect—and too slow.

You don’t need to worry about supply chains, brand guidelines, or sales training. You don’t need to make every pixel perfect.

The good news is that we were in this same situation not long ago. As designers of software such as apps and websites, we were comfortable with tools like Photoshop and programming languages like HTML and JavaScript. And then we discovered Keynote.

It has easy-to-use layout tools, so you can quickly make things look pretty nice. It’s organized around “slides,” which are...

paste in photos and other images; then add clickable hotspots, animation, a...

We know it sounds crazy, but we’re 90 percent sure you should use Keynote ...

(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.)

For physical products, Keynote will be less useful. You may need to use 3D printing or make modifications to your existing product. But then again, many hardware devices have a software interface.

One of our favorite shortcuts is the Brochure Façade: Instead of prototyping the device, prototype the website, video, brochure, or slide deck that will be used to sell the device.

After all, many purchase decisions are made (or at least heavily informed) online or in a sales call.

This marketing material will give you a great start on understanding how customers will react to the promise of your product—which features are importa...

If it’s on a screen (website, app, software, etc.)—use Keynote, PowerPoint, or a website-building tool like Squarespace.

If it’s on paper (report, brochure, flyer, etc.)—use Keynote, PowerPoint, or word processing software like Microsoft Word.

If it’s a service (customer support, client service, medical care, etc.)—write a script and use...

If it’s a physical space (store, office lobby, etc.)—modify...

If it’s an object (physical product, machinery, etc.)—modify an existing object, 3D print a prototype, or prototype the marketing using Keynote or PowerPo...

Divide and conquer The Facilitator should help the sprint team divvy up these jobs: • Makers (2 or more) • Stitcher (1) • Writer (1) • Asset Collector (1 or more) • Interviewer (1)

Makers create the individual components (screens, pages, pieces, and so on) of your prototype.

The Stitcher is responsible for collecting components from the Makers and combining them in a seamless fashion.

And earlier in this chapter we told you that your prototype must appear real. It’s impossible to make a realistic prototype with unrealistic text.

dedicated Writer becomes extra important if you work in a scientific, technical, or other specialized industry.

Your prototype will likely include photos, icons, or sample content that you don’t need to make from scratch.

Your Asset Collectors will scour the web, image libraries, your own products, and any other conceivable place to find these elements.

Finally, there’s the Interviewer, who will use the finished prototype to conduct Friday’s customer interviews.