Forget Failing Fast and Start Sprinting Smart

Solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days with seven people working together for seven hours a day. Author Jake Knapp and his partners from Google Ventures have perfected their five day sprint method with over a hundred real life sprints with companies from Slack to Blue Bottle Coffee and many other portfolio companies.

Sprint gives you a day-by-day breakdown with schedules and checklists. It has high level details like how to set the stage with the right team at the right time and place, medium level details like how to re-frame problems as opportunities, sketch solutions, storyboard, prototype and conduct test interviews and also the nitty-gritty level details like why you should break for lunch at 1 PM, use yellow sticky notes, big and little dots, and use white board markers instead of Sharpies. After completing this easy, but informative read, which includes well placed drawings, pictures and checklists, you’ll be empowered to lead your organization in your own five day sprint that solves the biggest problems your organization faces.

How to Sprint
Unlike many business books, Sprint doesn’t spout platitudes and give over generalizations based on a few experiences. It gives you the tools with examples to make it happen drawn from sprints with organizations of all stripes.

Set the stage: pick.
Pick a big problem. You’ll be taking up a week of time from senior people— it has to be worth their time. You’ll be demanding their full attention and best efforts — it has to engage them. You’ll be paying potential customers for their experience — it has to yield tangible results. Sprint focuses on the surface level problem because that is where the customer interacts with the product. And it’s the surface level that you can prototype and test.

Pick the right team. Two key people you need are the facilitator and the decider. For a startup, the decider should typically be the CEO / Founder or somebody analogous to this. Other roles are the marketing expert, finance / business dev expert, customer expert, technical expert, and design expert. While seven is the magic number one final role to consider is the troublemaker. The troublemaker is the person in the firm who sees things differently and may challenge the solution if not made part of the process.

Pick the time and place. Time boxing is a central premise to Sprint. The time spent is only 10 AM -5 PM with a lunch break at 1 and two small breaks at 11:30 and 3:30 — I’ve worked on a similar schedule and found it ideal. The place should be one comfortable room with two whiteboards. Whiteboarding is essential. Putting the right people in the right space for a week working on the right problem will yield the best results.

Here’s how the week goes:
Monday: Frame the challenge and the key questions the sprint seeks to answer. Put these at the top of every whiteboard and return to them at the start of each new segment. After that Monday is about finding problems and turning them into opportunities — using a technique called How Might We. It’s about asking basic questions, not just to make sure that everyone is on the same page, but also to flesh out assumptions. It also involves bringing in other experts for their insights. You’ll get a visual on the problem by completing a mapping exercise and then targeting areas on the map for improvement. Throughout the techniques render ideas visually.

Tuesday: If Monday looked at opportunities in problems, then Tuesday looks at solutions for those opportunities through techniques called lightning demos and 4 step sketches combined with key ideas such as remix and improve, concrete is better than abstract, and work alone together.

Wednesday: hump day is decision day. An exercise called Art Museum helps kick off the sticky decision themed morning and Heat Map, Speed Critique, Straw Poll and Super Vote follow. By lunch you have either one or two ideas for prototyping. But don’t start prototyping yet, in the afternoon you storyboard the prototype(s) to save time.

Thursday: split up the work and start prototyping. Prepare the interview questions for tomorrow and finish the day with a test run of the prototype. While you could pull all nighters, it’s important to remember you only need a “Goldilocks” level quality prototype — just enough realism to get honest reaction from your test users.

Friday: Five is the magic number — 85% of all feedback can be obtained through just 5 well done one-on-one interviews, which are incidentally broken into five segments. One member conducts, while the rest of the team watches on a video feed and learns together. It’s important to see the results on Friday and finish with a wrap-up session. The team should be taking stickup notes and looking for patterns throughout the day.

Why You Sprint
Scarcity sharpens our problem solving. Our resources need direction to solve problems, the bigger the problem the more important the direction. Sprint gives you the direction with the framework and tools to not simply look at problems differently, but build a prototype with useful test data; a prototype that can be improved in light of the test data. Every sprint is a winner — you either have an efficient failure with data on why or you have a flawed success — a good first start that can be improved based on the interview comments.

I’ve read a lot on productivity and management, but haven’t seen such a coherent and pragmatic guide to problem solving as Sprint. Failure fast or slow has never appealed to me, I’d rather succeed in a sprint.