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By Wednesday afternoon, you can start getting in touch with people and scheduling your interviews for Friday.
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. Even though this recruiting happens behind the scenes, it’s as important as the team activities. For a sample screening survey and other online resources, take a look at thesprintbook.com.
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. Then, in the afternoon, you’ll take the winning scenes from your sketches and weave them into a storyboard: a step-by-step plan for your prototype.
10 Decide
You might recognize this kind of back-and-forth. Someone comes up with a solution, the group critiques it, someone tries to explain the details, and then someone else has a new idea:
When we jump from option to option, it’s difficult to hold important details in our heads. On the other hand, when we debate one idea for too long, we get worn out—like a judge at a baking contest who fills up on apple pie before tasting anything else.
Normally, if we want the benefit of everyone’s perspective, we’re forced to endure these slogs. But not in a sprint. 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.
Your goal for Wednesday morning is to decide which solutions to prototype. Our motto for these decisions is “unnatural but efficient.” Instead of meandering, your team’s conversations will follow a script. This structure is socially awkward, but logical—if you feel like Spock from Star Trek, you’re doing it right. It’s all designed to get the most out of the team’s expertise, accommodate for our human strengths and shortcomings, and make it as easy as possible to come to a great decision.
Technology companies went bonkers for Slack. A year after launch, more than 500,000 people on more than 60,000 teams used Slack every single day. For workplace software, this kind of growth was unheard of. When Slack announced they were the fastest growing business app of all time, the press agreed.
To keep expanding, Slack needed to get better at explaining their product to all kinds of businesses. It was a tricky problem. On the surface, Slack was simple: a messaging app for the workplace. But under the surface, the story was more complicated.
Slack had become so popular because it changed the way teams functioned. Teams started by using the service to send instant messages to one another, and then often abandoned email in favor of it. But Slack wasn’t just for one-to-one messages. When a team used Slack, all of its employees were in a chat room, so they could communicate as a group. Soon, Slack replaced check-in meetings and phone calls. Teams used it to manage projects and stay up to speed on what the whole company was doing. They connected other software and services to Slack, so that everything was in one place. Slack became the
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In the Slack sprint, there were about a dozen different solutions for explaining the product to new customers. Each person believed his or her own idea could work. And each person could have spent an hour explaining why. But if we had spent an hour discussing each idea, the whole day could have gone by without any clear conclusion.
We ended up with a five-step process—and coincidentally, every step involves something sticky: 1. Art museum: Put the solution sketches on the wall with masking tape. 2. Heat map: Look at all the solutions in silence, and use dot stickers to mark interesting parts. 3. Speed critique: Quickly discuss the highlights of each solution, and use sticky notes to capture big ideas. 4. Straw poll: Each person chooses one solution, and votes for it with a dot sticker. 5. Supervote: The Decider makes the final decision, with—you guessed it—more stickers.
1. Art museum The first step is simple. When you arrive on Wednesday morning, nobody has seen the solution sketches yet. We want everybody to take a good long look at each one, so we stole an idea from the Louvre Museum in Paris: hang them on the wall.
Specifically, use masking tape to stick the sketches on a wall. Space them out in one long row, just like the paintings in a museum. This spacing allows the team to spread out and take their time examining each sketch without crowding. It’s also a good idea to place the sketches in roughly chronological order, following the storyboard.
2. Heat map Naturally, every person should have a fair opportunity to present his or her solution and explain the rationale behind it. Well . . . that may be natural, but you’re not going to do it. Explaining ideas has all kinds of downsides. If someone makes a compelling case for his or her idea or is a bit more charismatic, your opinion will be skewed. If you associate the idea with its creator (“Jamie always has great ideas”), your opinion will be skewed. Even just by knowing what the idea is about, your opinion will be skewed.
