Talha Mumtaz ✔️'s Key Ideas from Sprint
by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Braden Kowitz

So what makes a sprint “The Sprint”? For Jake Knapp, the idea came to him when he was working on an important feature for Gmail that would help automatically sort messages.

He only had a month before the lead member would pull the plug on the project. Jake Knapp and his members designed the sprint approach, focused on creating multiple prototypes and ended up managing the project successfully.

Since then, he has perfected the structure and divides it into three aspects.

Jake Knapp’s idea of an ideal sprint can be broken down into three aspects:

• Have a very tight deadline: While Jake Knapp has tested different timelines for a sprint, a five day sprint works best.
• Seven Person Team: Next, focus on gathering the right experts in the team. Engineers, marketers, designers, managers and other experts who will achieve the prototype in five days.
• Have a concrete Prototype: On Friday, your team should have a concrete prototype which should be shown to your customers to check their reaction in real time.

You don’t start the sprint with only the solution or process in mind. You also need to have the challenge in mind. Then you will need to reverse engineer the end result.

For example, Jake Knapp tells us about Savioke, a robotics company that created a robot to help with hospitality in restaurants and hotels. To help them cope with the challenge, Jake asked them questions about the kind of customers/users they wanted to impact. Questions about the product usage and expectations and reactions of the users.

Once Jake helped the Savioke team question and find the moment their product would need to meet and impress the end users, the team went hell-bent on brainstorming about that one ideal moment.

Later, they found that they wanted to focus on the moment when the client would open the door and see the robot for the first time. Then, they tried adding some personality to the robot so clients wouldn’t get scared.

This resulted in a successful prototype testing where the clients were happy to see Savioke’s robot delivering their toothbrushes.

While brainstorming alone may not be enough, it is still a very valuable part of a sprint. For example, you can use the concept of Lightning demos where each team member gets the chance to present existing solutions to match with different parts of the problem you are trying to solve.

After the presentations, everyone will need to sketch simple visualisations of the solutions. This helps especially with:

• Seeing the bigger picture: Can solutions be merged to get a solution you need
• Breaking down the project: Into stages so you can tackle them separately.

After this exercise, you will have enough blueprints of the solution you are trying to achieve. Next would be for you to work hard, get to the finish line and launch your solution.