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

by Jake Knapp

Dot voting works pretty much the way it sounds: 1. Give two large dot stickers to each person. 2. Give four large dot stickers to the Decider because her opinion counts a little more. 3. Ask everyone to review the goal and sprint questions. 4. Ask everyone to vote in silence for the most useful How Might We questions. 5. It’s okay to vote for your own note, or to vote twice for the same note.

We prefer whiteboard markers over Sharpies for three reasons: (1) They’re more versatile. (2) They don’t smell as much. (3) If you hand Jake a Sharpie, he’ll accidentally use it on the whiteboard, guaranteed.

7 Target

You’ll begin Tuesday morning by searching for existing ideas you can use in the afternoon to inform your solution. It’s like playing with Lego bricks: first gather useful components, then convert them into something original and new. Our method for collecting and synthesizing these existing ideas is an exercise we call Lightning Demos. Your team will take turns giving three-minute tours of their favorite solutions: from other products, from different domains, and from within your own company. This exercise is about finding raw materials, not about copying your competitors. We’ve found limited benefit in looking at products from the same industry. Time and time again, the ideas that spark the best solutions come from similar problems in different environments.

Blue Bottle wanted to help customers find coffee they’d love. But coffee beans all look alike, so photos wouldn’t be helpful. To find useful solutions, the team did Lightning Demos of websites selling everything from clothes to wine, looking for ways to describe sensory details such as flavor, aroma, and texture.

Sometimes, the best way to broaden your search is to look inside your own organization. Great solutions often come along at the wrong time, and the sprint can be a perfect opportunity to rejuvenate them. Also look for ideas that are in progress but unfinished—and even old ideas that have been abandoned. In Savioke’s sprint, an unfinished design for the robot’s eyes became the heart of the Relay’s personality.

Lightning Demos are pretty informal. Here’s how they work:

Make a list Ask everyone on your team to come up with a list of products or services to review for inspiring solutions. (Coming up with these lists on the spot is easier than it sounds—but if you like, you can assign it as homework on Monday night.) Remind people to think outside of your industry or field, and to consider inspiration from within the company. In Flatiron’s sprint, the team looked at products in the medical field, such as websites for clinical trials and software that analyzed DNA. But they also looked at similar problems in different fields. They looked at tools for filtering email, task apps that sorted to-dos, management software that sorted projects and deadlines, and even the way airlines let passengers configure flight notifications. Finally, they looked at experimental projects that their own engineers had built, but not quite finished.

After a few minutes of thinking, everyone should narrow down to his or her top one or two products. Write the collected list on the whiteboard. It’s time to begin the demos.

Give three-minute demos One at a time, the person who suggested each product gives a tour—showing the whole team what’s so cool about it. It’s a good idea to keep a timer going: Each tour should be around three minutes long. (In case you’re wondering, yes, you can use laptops, phones, and other devices for these tours. We like to connect them to a big screen so everyone can easily see.)

Capture big ideas as you go Your three-minute Lightning Demos will go by quickly, and you don’t want to rely on short-term memory to keep track of all the good ideas. Remember the “Always be capturing” mantra and take notes on the whiteboard as you go. Start by asking the person who’s giving the tour, “What’s the big idea here that might be useful?” Then make a quick drawing of that inspiring component, write a simple headline above it, and note the source underneath.

Flatiron found plenty of interesting elements, but in the end they discarded most of them. If you record on the whiteboard as you go, you don’t have to decide which ideas should be discarded and which are worth remixing and improving. You can figure that out later, when you sketch—a much more efficient use of your energy. For now, don’t make decisions and don’t debate. Just capture anything that might be useful.

By the end of your Lightning Demos, you should have a whiteboard full of ten to twenty ideas. That’s enough to make sure you’ve captured each person’s best inspiration—but it’s a small enough set that you won’t be overwhelmed when you start to sketch.

When you combine the ideas you just captured with Monday’s map, your sprint questions, and your How Might We notes, you’ve got a wealth of raw material. In the afternoon, you’ll turn that raw material into solutions. But before you do, you need to form a quick strategy. Should your team split up to tackle different parts of the problem, or should you all focus on the same spot?

Blue Bottle Coffee had one specific target for their sprint: helping customers choose beans. But there were several smaller pieces of the website that were involved: the home page, the list of coffees, and the shopping cart. Without a plan, every person in the sprint might sketch the same part—say, the home page—leaving Blue Bottle without enough ideas for a whole prototype. So they divided up. Each person picked a spot, then the team checked the distribution on the map (page 102).

If you do decide to divide up, the easiest approach is to ask each person to write down the part he or she is most interested in. Then go around the room and mark each person’s name next to the piece of the map that person wants to tackle in the sketches. If you end up with too many people on one spot and not enough on another, ask for volunteers to switch.

Once each person knows his or her assignment, it’s time to get yourself some lunch. You’ll need energy for the afternoon, because after all of your preparation, you’re finally going to get a chance to sketch some solutions.

9 Sketch

On Tuesday afternoon, it’s time to come up with solutions. But there will be no brainstorming; no shouting over one another; no deferring judgment so wacky ideas can flourish. Instead, you’ll work individually, take your time, and sketch.

Even though we’re total tech nerds, we’re believers in the importance of starting on paper. It’s a great equalizer. Everyone can write words, draw boxes, and express his or her ideas with the same clarity. If you can’t draw (or rather, if you think you can’t draw), don’t freak out. Plenty of people worry about putting pen to paper, but anybody—absolutely anybody—can sketch a great solution.

On Friday, when shown to real customers, “The Mind Reader” was remarkably effective. Customers grew confident in the quality of the coffee as they clicked through the website. They found beans they wanted to order. They described the prototype as “way better” than competing retailers and mentioned that “clearly, these people know coffee.” It was the big winner of Friday’s test, and it became the foundation for Blue Bottle’s new website.

On Tuesday, we’re not asking you to sketch because we think it’s fun. We’re asking you to sketch because we’re convinced it’s the fastest and easiest way to transform abstract ideas into concrete solutions. Once your ideas become concrete, they can be critically and fairly evaluated by the rest of the team—without any sales pitch. And, perhaps most important of all, sketching allows every person to develop those concrete ideas while working alone.

We know that individuals working alone generate better solutions than groups brainstorming out loud.I Working alone offers time to do research, find inspiration, and think about the problem. And the pressure of responsibility that comes with working alone often spurs us to our best work.

The individual has to not only solve the problem, but also invent a strategy for solving the problem.

When each person sketches alone, he or she will have time for deep thought. When the whole team works in parallel, they’ll generate competing ideas, without the groupthink of a group brainstorm. You might call this method “work alone together.”

The sketches you create on Tuesday will become the fuel for the rest of the sprint. On Wednesday, you’ll critique everyone’s sketches and pick the best ones. On Thursday, you’ll turn them into a prototype. And on Friday you’ll test the ideas with customers.

The four-step sketch contains each of these important elements. You’ll start with twenty minutes to “boot up” by taking notes on the goals, opportunities, and inspiration you’ve collected around the room. Then you’ll have another twenty minutes to write down rough ideas. Next, it’s time to limber up and explore alternative ideas with a rapid sketching exercise called Crazy 8s. And finally, you’ll take thirty minutes or more to draw your solution sketch—a single well-formed concept with all the details worked out.

1. Notes This first step is super-easy. You and your team will walk around the room, look at the whiteboards, and take notes. These notes are a “greatest hits” from the past twenty-four hours of the sprint. They’re a way to refresh your memory before you commit to a solution.

First, copy down the long-term goal. Next, look at the map, the How Might We questions, and the notes from your Lightning Demos. Write down anything that looks useful.

Give your team twenty minutes to take notes. During this time, feel free to look up reference material on your laptop or phone. Sometimes people want to take a second look at something they saw in the morning’s Lightning Demos or research some specific details from their company’s own product or website. Whatever the purpose, this moment is a rare exception to the no-devices rule. And don’t forget to reexamine old ideas. Remember, they’re often the strongest solutions of all.

At the end of notes time, the team closes their laptops and phones. Take another three minutes to review what you wrote down. Circle the notes that stand out. They’ll help you in the next step.

2. Ideas Now that everyone has a pile of notes, it’s time to switch into idea mode. In this step, each person will jot down rough ideas, filling a sheet of paper with doodles, sample headlines, diagrams, stick figures doing stuff—anything that gives form to his or her thoughts. It doesn’t matter if these ideas are messy or incomplete. Just like the notes, these pages won’t be shared with the whole team. Think of them as a “scratch pad.” And there’s no wrong way to do it. As long as everyone is thinking and writing stuff on paper, you’re on the golden path.

Take twenty minutes for idea generation. When you’re finished, spend an extra three minutes to review and circle your favorite ideas. In the next step, you’ll refine those promising elements.

3. Crazy 8s Crazy 8s is a fast-paced exercise. Each person takes his or her strongest ideas and rapidly sketches eight variations in eight minutes. Crazy 8s forces you to push past your first reasonable solutions and make them better, or at least consider alternatives.

Each person begins Crazy 8s with a single sheet of letter-size paper. Fold the paper in half three times, so you have eight panels. Set a timer to sixty seconds. Hit “start” and begin sketching—you have sixty seconds per section, for a total of eight minutes to create eight miniature sketches. Go fast and be messy:

The exercise works best when you sketch several variations of the same idea. Take a favorite piece from your ideas sheet and ask yourself, “What would be another good way to do this?” Keep going until you can’t think of any more variations, then look back at your ideas sheet, choose a new idea, and start riffing on it instead.

4. Solution sketch

Remember how we kept saying, “Don’t worry, nobody’s going to look at this”? That time is over. The solution sketch is each person’s best idea, put down on paper in detail. Each one is an opinionated hypothesis for how to solve the challenge at hand. These sketches will be looked at—and judged!—by the rest of the team. They need to be detailed, thought-out, and easy to understand.

Each sketch will be a three-panel storyboard drawn on sticky notes, showing what your customers see as they interact with your product or service. We like this storyboard format because products and services are more like movies than snapshots. Customers don’t just appear in one freeze frame and then disappear in the next. Instead, they move thr...

there are a few important rules to keep in mind: 1. Make it self-explanatory

On Wednesday morning, you’ll post your sketch on the wall for everyone to see. It needs to explain itself.

2. Keep it anonymous Don’t put your name on your sketch, and be sure that everyone uses the same paper and the same black pens.

3. Ugly is okay Your sketch does not have to be fancy (boxes, stick figures, and words are fine), but it does have to be detailed, thoughtful, and complete.

4. Words matter We’ve used sprints with startups in all kinds of industries. One surprising constant: the importance of writing. Strong writing is especially necessary for software and marketing, where words often make up most of the screen.

5. Give it a catchy title Since your name won’t be on your sketch, give it a title. Later, these titles will help you keep track of the different solutions as you’re reviewing and choosing.

Each person is responsible for creating one solution sketch. If a few folks get inspired and want to sketch more than one, that’s okay, but don’t overdo it. Each additional sketch means more work reviewing and narrowing down on Wednesday. Not only that, but we’ve noticed that the first batch tend to be the strongest and there are diminishing returns beyond ten to twelve solution sketches. Thirty minutes should be enough time for everyone to finish one sketch.

Once everybody is finished, put the solution sketches in a pile, but resist the urge to look at them. You’ll only see them for the first time once, and you should save those fresh eyes for Wednesday.

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 participants for our tests with Savioke and Blue Bottle Coffee—and dozens of other companies. The secret is to post a generic ad that will attract a broad audience, then link to a screener survey to narrow down to your target 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. Start by writing down characteristics of the customers you want to test with, then translate those characteristics into something you can discover with your survey. Do the same thing for characteristics you want to exclude (for example, people with too much expertise in your industry). 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. We excluded people who didn’t make coffee at home or drank coffee infrequently.

After you’ve turned your criteria into questions, create your survey. 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.