Sprint

by Jake Knapp

My best work happened when I had a big challenge and not quite enough time.

the robot. They had no trouble receiving their toothbrushes, confirming delivery on the touch screen, and sending the robot on its way. People wanted to call the robot back to make a second delivery, just so they could see it again. They even took selfies with the robot. But no one, not one person, tried to engage the robot in any conversation. At the end of the day, green check marks filled our whiteboard. The risky robot personality – those blinking eyes, sound effects, and, yeah, even the “happy dance” – was a complete success. Prior to the sprint, Savioke had been nervous about overpromising the robot’s capability. Now they realized that giving the robot a winsome character might be the secret to boosting guest satisfaction. Not every detail was perfect, of course. The touch screen was sluggish. The timing was off on some of the sound effects. One idea, to include games on the

Good ideas are hard to find. And even the best ideas face an uncertain path to real-world success. That’s true whether you’re running a startup, teaching a class, or working inside a large organization. Execution can be difficult. What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? Should you assign one smart person to figure it out or have the whole team brainstorm? And how do you know when you’ve got the right solution? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure? And, once it’s done, will anybody care?

Working together with our startups in a sprint, we shortcut the endless-debate cycle and compress months of time into a single week. 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.

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.

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 your customers one-on-one? Examples: researcher, sales, customer support Tech/logistics expert Who best understands what your company can build and deliver? Examples: CTO, engineer Design expert Who designs the products your company makes? Examples: designer, product manager

Monday begins with an exercise we call 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. Starting at the end is like being handed the keys to a time machine. If you could jump ahead to the end of your sprint, what questions would be answered? If you went six months or a year further into the future, what would have improved about your business as a result of this project?

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?”

Now it’s time to get pessimistic. 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.

1. A friendly welcome to start the interview 2. A series of general, open-ended context questions about the customer 3. Introduction to the prototype(s) 4. Detailed tasks to get the customer reacting to the prototype 5. A quick debrief to capture the customer’s overarching thoughts and impressions