Sprint

by Jake Knapp

team. Braden Kowitz added story-centered design to the sprint process, an unconventional approach that focuses on the whole customer experience instead of individual components or technologies.

Ev Williams

(founder of Twitter, Blogger, and Medium), and Chad Hurley and Steve Chen (founders of YouTube).

Sprints offer a path to solve big problems, test new ideas, get more done, and do it faster. They also allow you to have more fun along the way. In other words, you’ve absolutely got to try one for yourself. Let’s get to work.

The sprint is GV’s unique five-day process for answering crucial questions through prototyping and testing ideas with customers.

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

It’s learning the hard way, without the “hard way.”

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.

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. Blue Bottle could use a slide show to prototype the surface of a website – before they built the software and

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.

In the chaos of Mission Control, the simple diagram helps keep the team focused on the right problems.

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.

Your final task on Monday is to choose a target for your sprint. Who is the most important customer, and what’s the critical moment of that customer’s experience? The rest of the sprint will flow from this decision. Throughout the week, you’ll be focused on that target – sketching solutions, making a plan, and building a prototype of that moment and the events around it.

To our team, it was as clear as Gene Kranz’s diagram of the Apollo 13 flight path.

Amy needed to choose one target customer and one target moment on the map.

The Decider needs to choose one target customer and one target event on the map. Whatever she chooses will become the focus of the rest of the sprint – the sketches, prototype, and test all flow from this decision.

“work alone together.”

For example, rather than asking people whether they go to restaurants, ask: “In a typical week, how many times do you eat out?”

It was her team’s job to figure out how to explain Slack to potential customers.

This kind of long-form storyboarding is a common practice in movie production. Pixar, the film studio behind movies like Toy Story and The Incredibles, spends months getting their storyboards right before committing to animation. For Pixar, the up-front effort makes sense: It’s much easier to change storyboards than to re-render animation or re-record voice tracks with super-famous actors.

“It wasn’t luck that made them fly; it was hard work and common sense,” said Daniels. He went on: “Good Lord, I’m a-wondering what all of us could do if we had faith in our ideas and put all our heart and mind and energy into them like those Wright boys did!”