Sprint

by Jake Knapp

1. Introduce the sprint If the expert isn’t part of the sprint team, tell her what the sprint is about. 2. Review the whiteboards Give the expert a two-minute tour of the long-term goal, sprint questions, and map. 3. Open the door Ask the expert to tell you everything she knows about the challenge at hand. 4. Ask questions The sprint team should act like a bunch of reporters digging for a story. Ask the expert to fill in areas where she has extra expertise. Ask her to retell you what she thinks you already know. And most important, ask the expert to tell you where you’ve got it wrong. Can she find anything on your map that’s incomplete? Would she add any sprint questions to your list? What opportunities does she see? Useful phrases are “Why?” and “Tell me more about that.” 5. Fix the whiteboards Add sprint questions. Change your map. If necessary, update your long-term goal. Your experts are here to tell you what you didn’t know (or forgot) in the morning, so don’t be shy about making revisions.

A recap: First, Jake, as the sprint’s Facilitator, began the interview by asking Bobby about the map on the whiteboard. That gave us all context for how the new information would fit with what we’d already discussed.

Amy’s phrase “Remind us . . .” is useful, because most interviews include content the team has heard before, at some point or another. That’s okay. Covering it again refreshes everyone’s memory and reveals new details.

To prioritize the notes, you’ll use dot voting. It’s one of our favorite shortcuts for skipping lengthy debate. 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. At the end of the voting, you’ll have clusters of dots on a few How Might We notes, and the whole wall will be prioritized.

Ask the Decider to make the call It’s easiest if the Decider just makes the decision without a lot of discussion and process. After all, you’ve been discussing and processing all day.

2. ABC: Always be capturing We don’t want to freak you out, but if you’re playing the role of Facilitator, Monday is your busiest day. In addition to leading the group through all of the activities, you’re responsible for something simple but important: recording key ideas on the whiteboard. Or as entrepreneur Josh Porter likes to say: “Always be capturing.”

As you go, ask the team, “Does this look right?” or “How should I capture that?” And when the conversation starts to stall out, you can nudge it to conclusion by saying, “Is there a good way we can capture this thinking and move on?”

Remember, the whiteboard is the shared brain of the team. Keep it organized and you’ll help everyone be smarter, remember more, and make better decisions, faster.

3. Ask obvious questions The Facilitator needs to say “Why?” a lot and ask questions to which everybody already knows the answer. Covering the obvious ensures there’s no misinterpretation, and it often dra...

Slow decisions sap energy and threaten the timeline of the sprint. Don’t let the group dissolve into unproductive debates that aren’t moving you toward a decision.

When a decision is slow or not obvious, it’s your job as Facilitator to call on the Decider. She should make the decision so the team can keep moving.

On Monday, you and your team defined the challenge and chose a target.

On Tuesday, you’ll come up with solutions. The day starts with inspiration: a review of existing ideas to remix and improve. Then, in the afternoon, each person will sketch, following a four-step process that emphasizes critical thinking over artistry.

We want to create something completely new. But amazing ideas don’t happen like that. The lesson of Melitta Bentz is that great innovation is built on existing ideas, repurposed with vision.

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.

“Always be capturing” mantra and take notes on the whiteboard as you go.

“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.

Like the ideas on Flatiron’s list, most won’t turn into anything, but one or two may inspire a great solution. If you look hard enough, you can usually find your blotting paper.

If you’ve picked a super-focused target, it might be fine to skip assignments and have the whole team swarm the same part of your problem. If there are several key pieces to cover, you should divide up.

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.

Even though we’re total tech nerds, we’re believers in the importance of starting on paper. It’s a great equalizer.

Okay, come back to reality. That was an imaginary scenario, but it’s the sort of thing that happens when people make decisions about abstract ideas. Because abstract ideas lack concrete detail, it’s easy for them to be undervalued

Once your ideas become concrete, they can be critically and fairly evaluated by the rest of the team – without any sales pitch.

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.

Allen writes, is not to think about the task as one monolithic effort (like “Pay taxes”), but instead to find the first small action needed to make progress (like “Collect tax paperwork”) and go from there.

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.

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.

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

These notes are for your eyes only.

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.

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.”

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.

the “crazy” in Crazy 8s refers to the pace, not the nature of the ideas.

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: As with the notes and ideas, Crazy 8s will not be shared with the team.

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.

Customers don’t just appear in one freeze frame and then disappear in the next. Instead, they move through your solution like actors in a scene. Your solution has to move right along with them.

On Wednesday, when you evaluate everyone’s sketch, this anonymity will make it much easier to critique and choose the best ideas.

But choosing the right words is critical in every medium. So pay extra close attention to the writing in your sketch. Don’t use “lorem ipsum” or draw those squiggly lines that mean “text will go here.” That text will go a long way to explain your idea – so make it good and make it real!

some people will try to game the survey just so they can get the gift card. For example, rather than asking people whether they go to restaurants, ask: “In a typical week, how many times do you eat out?” Instead of asking if applicants read food blogs, try something like this: “Do you regularly read blogs or magazines dedicated to any of the following topics? Sports Food News

Individuals competed with brainstorming groups to solve the same problem. The individuals dominated. They generated more solutions, and their solutions were independently judged to be higher quality and more original.

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.

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

Our motto for these decisions is “unnatural but efficient.” Instead of meandering, your team’s conversations will follow a script.

Luckily, we didn’t have to make any choices right away. Instead, we placed dot stickers beside the parts of ideas we found interesting. After a few minutes, there were clusters of dots on almost every sketch. When we were done with our silent review, we gathered into a group

if we had spent an hour discussing each idea, the whole day could have gone by without any clear conclusion. Instead, we used the sprint process to reshape that open-ended discussion into efficient critique and decision-making. By the end of the morning, we knew which ideas we wanted to test.

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.

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.

It’s not hard for creators to make great arguments for their mediocre ideas, or give great explanations for their indecipherable ideas. But in the real world, the creators won’t be there to give sales pitches and clues. In the real world, the ideas will have to stand on their own. If they’re confusing to the experts in a sprint, chances are good they’ll be confusing to customers.

1. Don’t talk. 2. Look at a solution sketch. 3. Put dot stickers beside the parts you like (if any). 4. Put two or three dots on the most exciting ideas. 5. If you have a concern or question, write it on a sticky note and place it below the sketch. 6. Move on to the next sketch, and repeat.