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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.
They can fast-forward into the future to see their finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitments.
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.
The bigger the challenge, the better the sprint If you’re starting a project that will take months or years – like Blue Bottle and their new online store – a sprint makes an excellent kickoff.
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.
Get that surface right, and you can work backward to figure out the underlying systems or technology.
Focusing on the surface allows you to move fast and answer big questions before you commit to execution, which is why any challenge, no matter how large, can benefit from a sprint.
These Deciders generally understand the problem in depth, and they often have strong opinions and criteria to help find the right solution.
Get a Decider (or two) The Decider must be involved in the sprint. If you, dear reader, are the Decider, clear your schedule and get in the room. If you’re not, you must convince the Decider to join. You might feel nervous; after all, it’s a big time commitment for a new process. If your Decider is reluctant, try one or more of these arguments:
It’s an Experiment Consider your first sprint an experiment. When it’s over, the Decider can help evaluate how effective it was. We’ve found that many people who are hesitant to change the way they work are open to a onetime experiment.
Tell the Decider that instead of doing an okay job on everything, you’ll do an excellent job on one thing.
We’ve found the ideal size for a sprint to be seven people or fewer. With eight people, or nine, or more, the sprint moves more slowly, and you’ll have to work harder to keep everyone focused and productive.
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.
Decider Who makes decisions for your team? Perhaps it’s the CEO, or maybe it’s just the “CEO” of this particular project. If she can’t join for the whole time, make sure she makes a couple of appearances and delegates a Decider (or two) who can be in the room at all times. Examples: CEO, founder, product manager, head of design Finance expert Who can explain where the money comes from (and where it goes)? Examples: CEO, CFO, business development manager Marketing expert Who crafts your company’s messages? Examples: CMO, marketer, PR, community manager Customer expert Who regularly talks to
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Troublemakers see problems differently from everyone else. Their crazy idea about solving the problem might just be right. And even if it’s wrong, the presence of a dissenting view will push
everyone else to do better work.
Brad Pitt’s character in Ocean’s Eleven, Rusty Ryan, is the logistics guy. He keeps the heist running. You need someone to be the Rusty Ryan of your sprint. This person is the Facilitator, and she’s responsible for managing time, conversations, and the overall process.
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. Exactly what they’ll say and do is impossible to predict. But with the right team in place, unexpected solutions will appear.
No doubt about it: Fragmentation hurts productivity. Of course, nobody wants to work this way. We all want to get important work done.
By starting at 10 a.m., we give everyone time to check email and feel caught up before the day begins.
Five days provide enough urgency to sharpen focus and cut out useless debate, but enough breathing room to build and test a prototype without working to exhaustion. And because most companies use a five-day workweek, it’s feasible to slot a five-day sprint into existing schedules.
Inside the sprint room, everybody will be 100 percent focused on the sprint’s challenge. The entire team must shut their laptops and put away their phones.
As humans, our short-term memory is not all that good, but our spatial memory is awesome. A sprint room, plastered with notes, diagrams, printouts, and more, takes advantage of that spatial memory. The room itself becomes a sort of shared brain for the team.
It’s kind of like you’re a kid again, building a fort out of chairs and blankets. Tape stuff to walls, move around furniture – do what you have to do to create a good workspace.
Instead, NASA got organized and sorted their priorities before they started on solutions. That’s smart.
you’ll devote the entire first day of your sprint to planning.
Start at the End: a look ahead – to the end of the sprint week and beyond. Like Gene Kranz and his diagram of the return to planet earth, you and your team will lay out the basics: your long-term goal and the difficult questions that must be answered.
If you could jump ahead to the end of your sprint, what question...
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If you went six months or a year further into the future, what would have improved about your busines...
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Set a long-term goal To start the conversation, ask your team this question: “Why are we doing this project? Where do we want to be six months, a year, or even five years from now?”
Slowing down might be frustrating for a moment, but the satisfaction and confidence of a clear goal will last all week.
Your goal should reflect your team’s principles and aspirations. Don’t worry about overreaching.
Once you’ve settled on a long-term goal, write it at the top of the whiteboard. It’ll stay there throughout the sprint as a beacon to keep everyone moving in the same direction.
Imagine you’ve gone forward in time one year, and your project was a disaster. What caused it to fail? How did your goal go wrong?
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.
The map you’ll create on Monday isn’t so different: a simple diagram representing lots of complexity. Instead of elves and wizards moving through Middle Earth, your map will show customers moving through your service or product.
Your map should be simple, too. You won’t have to capture every detail and nuance. Instead, you’ll just include the major steps required for customers to move from beginning to completion, in this case from cancer diagnosis to trial enrollment.
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.
Somebody knows the most about your customers; somebody knows the most about the technology, the marketing, the business, and so on.
When we first started running sprints, we thought we could learn everything just by talking to the people in charge: usually the CEOs and managers. It makes sense. The Deciders should know the most about the project, right? Well, as it turns out, they don’t know everything – even when they think they do.
Nobody knows everything, not even the CEO. Instead, the information is distributed asymmetrically across the team and across the company.
We think it’s useful to have at least one expert who can talk about each of these topics:
Strategy Start by talking to the Decider. If the Decider is not going to be in the sprint the whole time, be sure she joins you on Monday afternoon.
“What will make this project ...
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Voice of the Customer Who talks to your customers more than anyone else?
How Things Work Who understands the mechanics of your product?
Think about bringing in the money expert, the tech/logistics expert, and the marketing expert as well. We frequently talk with two, three, or four “how things work” experts to help us understand how everything fits together.
Many sprint teams get great results by fleshing out an unfinished idea or fixing a failed one.
By asking people for their input early in the process, you help them feel invested in the outcome.
