Sprint

by Jake Knapp

The trouble with good ideas Good ideas are hard to find.

Execution can be difficult. What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start?

Instead of waiting to launch a minimal product to understand if an idea is any good, our companies get clear data from a realistic prototype.

Identifying critical flaws after just five days of work is the height of efficiency.

On Monday, you’ll map out the problem and pick an important place to focus. On Tuesday, you’ll sketch competing solutions on paper. On Wednesday, you’ll make difficult decisions and turn your ideas into a testable hypothesis. On Thursday, you’ll hammer out a realistic prototype. And on Friday, you’ll test it with real live humans.

If you’re familiar with lean development or design thinking, you’ll find the sprint is a practical way to apply those philosophies.

that the online store should match the hospitality of the cafés. It felt as if we were onto something.

The bigger the challenge, the better the sprint

A sprint is your chance to check the navigation charts and steer in the right direction before going full steam ahead.

You need good solutions, fast. As the name suggests, a sprint is built for speed.

In these situations, a sprint can be a booster rocket: a fresh approach to problem solving that helps you escape gravity’s clutches.

But what about really large, complicated problems?

No problem is too large for a sprint.

First, the sprint forces your team to focus on the most pressing questions. Second, the sprint allows you to learn from just the surface of a finished product.

When our new ideas fail, it’s usually because we were overconfident about how well customers would understand and how much they would care.

Get that surface right, and you can work backward to figure out the underlying systems or technology.

you will need a leader and a set of diverse skills.

Rapid Progress

It’s an Experiment

Explain the Tradeoffs

It’s About Focus

Once you’ve got a Decider (or two) committed to the sprint, it’s time to assemble your sprint team.

Sprints are most successful with a mix of people: the core people who work on execution along with a few extra experts with specialized knowledge.

Who makes decisions for your team? Perhaps it’s the CEO, or maybe it’s just the “CEO” of this particular project.

The Facilitator needs to remain unbiased about decisions, so it’s not a good idea to combine the Decider and Facilitator roles in one person.

Sprints are the same way. Each expert in the room will provide a key contribution – whether it’s background information, a fresh idea, or even a shrewd observation of your customers.

Every meeting, email, and phone call fragments attention and prevents real work from getting done. Taken together, these interruptions are a wasp’s nest dropped into the picnic of productivity.

And we know that meaningful work, especially the kind of creative effort needed to solve big problems, requires long, uninterrupted blocks of time.

“The simultaneous visibility of these project materials helps us identify patterns and encourages creative synthesis to occur much more readily than when these resources are hidden away in file folders, notebooks, or PowerPoint decks.”

Don’t let the team’s “shared brain” be erased overnight.

Monday’s structured discussions create a path for the sprint week. In the morning, you’ll start at the end and agree to a long-term goal. Next, you’ll make a map of the challenge. In the afternoon, you’ll ask the experts at your company to share what they know. Finally, you’ll pick a target: an ambitious but manageable piece of the problem that you can solve in one week.

Instead, NASA got organized and sorted their priorities before they started on solutions. That’s smart.

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

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

The sprint process will help you find a good place to start and make real progress toward even the biggest goal.

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 assumptions, turn them into questions, and find some answers.

An important part of this exercise is rephrasing assumptions and obstacles into questions.

Each map is customer-centric, with a list of key actors on the left. Each map is a story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. And, no matter the business, each map is simple.

1. List the actors (on the left)

2. Write the ending (on the right)

Words and arrows in between

4. Keep it simple

5. Ask for help

We never get ours right the first time, but you have to start somewhere.

Most of Monday afternoon is devoted to an exercise we call Ask the Experts: a series of one-at-a-time interviews with people from your sprint team, from around your company, and possibly even an outsider or two with special knowledge.

Reading the How Might We list feels a lot better than reading the problem list.

Organize How Might We notes As soon as the expert interviews are finished, everybody should gather his or her How Might We notes and stick them on the wall.

After interviewing the experts and organizing your notes, the most important part of your project should jump right out of your map, almost like a crack in the earth.

By Monday afternoon, they had clarity about the challenge, the opportunity, and the risk. The target was obvious to them, too.

Once you’ve clustered your team’s How Might We notes, the decision about where to focus your sprint will likely be easy.