JAKE KNAPP

When it’s time to showcase your prototype to customers, you’ll want them to react naturally and honestly to what they believe is a finished product or service. Such reactions are solid gold, but feedback is not. 

If the illusion of a real product is broken, customers switc...

Here are the five steps to go through in order to decide which solutions should be prototyped:

• Art museum: Put the solution sketches on the wall with masking tape. 
• Heat map: Look at all the solutions in silence, and use dot stickers to mark in...

Prototyping is all about creating an illusion. To prototype your solution, you’ll need a temporary change of philosophy: from perfect to just enough, from long-term quality to temporary simulation. This is the “prototype mindset,” and it’s made up of four simple principles:

• 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 testable hypotheses.
• On Thursday, you’ll hammer out a realistic ...

Working in a sprint as a startup means shortcutting the endless debate cycle and compressing months of time into a single week. Instead of waiting to launch a minimal product to understand if an idea is any good, you get clear data from a realistic prototype.

The s...

Sketching is the fastest and easiest way to transform abstract ideas into concrete solutions. Once your ideas become concrete, they can be critically and fairly evaluated by the rest of the team—without any sales pitch. 

And, perhaps most important of all, sketching...

We all want a flash of divine inspiration that changes the world—and impresses our teammates. But amazing ideas don’t happen like that: great innovation is built on existing ideas, repurposed with vision.

In your sprint, follow this rule: remix and improve— but never blind...

Challenging situations where sprints can help: 

• High stakes: you’re facing a big problem and the solution will require a lot of time and money. A sprint is your chance to check the navigation charts and steer in the right direction before going full steam ahead. 

The surface is important. It’s where your product or service meets customers. Human beings are complex and fickle, so it’s impossible to predict how they’ll react to a brand-new solution. 

Get that surface right, and you can work backward to figure out the underlyin...

One of the best aspects of a sprint: It gives you an excuse to work the way you want to work, with a clear calendar and one important goal to address.

There are no context switches between different projects, and no random interruptions.