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 superpower working in a sprint: it fast-forwards you into the future to see your finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitments.

Working together in a sprint

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 allows every person to develop those concrete ideas while working alone.Individuals working alone generate better solutions than groups brainstorming out loud. It allows for everyone to do research, find inspiration, think about the problem, and create unique ideas.

The power of sketching

Even when the future seems obvious, it’s worth taking the time on Monday to make it specific and write it down. Consider these questions: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?

Start at the end

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 underlying systems or technology. Focusing on the surface allows you to move fast and answer big questions before you commit to execution, which is why any challenge, no matter how large, can benefit from a sprint.

Solve the surface first

<ul><li>On Monday, you’ll map out the problem and pick an important place to focus. </li><li>On Tuesday, you’ll sketch competing solutions on paper.</li><li>On Wednesday, you’ll make difficult decisions and turn your ideas into testable hypotheses.</li><li>On Thursday, you’ll hammer out a realistic prototype. </li><li>And on Friday, you’ll test it with real live humans.</li></ul>

Running your own sprint

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 switch into feedback mode. They’ll try to be helpful and think up suggestions instead of providing genuine reactions.In the real world, your product will stand alone—people will find it, evaluate it, and use it without you there to guide them. Give them nudges, but don’t tell them exactly what to do. Seeing where customers struggle and where they succeed is useful.

Gather customer reactions

Here are the five steps to go through in order to decide which solutions should be prototyped:<ul><li>Art museum: Put the solution sketches on the wall with masking tape. </li><li>Heat map: Look at all the solutions in silence, and use dot stickers to mark interesting parts. </li><li>Speed critique: Quickly discuss the highlights of each solution, and use sticky notes to capture big ideas. </li><li>Straw poll: Each person chooses one solution, and votes for it with a dot sticker. </li><li>Supervote: The Decider makes the final decision, with—you guessed it—more stickers.</li></ul>

The sticky decision

Challenging situations where sprints can help: <ul><li>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. </li><li>Not enough time: You’re up against a deadline. As the name suggests, a sprint is built for speed. </li><li>Just plain stuck: Some important projects are hard to start. Others lose momentum along the way. In these situations, a sprint can be a booster rocket: a fresh approach to problem-solving that helps you escape gravity’s clutches.</li></ul>

The bigger the challenge, the better the sprint

A sprint resembles that perfectly orchestrated heist. You and your team put your talents, time, and energy to their best use, taking on an overwhelming challenge and using your wits (and a little trickery) to overcome every obstacle that crosses your path. To pull it off, you need the right team. You shouldn’t need a pickpocket, but you will need a leader and a set of diverse skills.

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 blindly copy.

Remix and improve

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.

Time and space

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.

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:<ol><li>You can prototype anything. </li><li>Prototypes are disposable: don’t prototype anything you aren’t willing to throw away. </li><li>Build just enough to learn, but not more: a prototype is meant to answer questions, so keep it focused. You don’t need a fully functional product.</li><li>The prototype must appear real: to get trustworthy results in your test, you can’t ask your customers to use their imaginations. You’ve got to show them something realistic. </li></ol>

The prototype mindset

We’ve collected a list of our favourites on a range of topics from entry-level to expert.

books

Books

problemsolving

Problem Solving

business

Business

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

communication

Communication

Top 7 books for Product Managers

From three design partners at Google Ventures, a unique five-day process--called the sprint--for solving tough problems using design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers.

productivity

Productivity

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

startup

Startups

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER "Sprint offers a transformative formula for testing ideas that works whether you're at a startup or a large organization. Within five days, you'll move from idea to prototype to decision, saving you and your team countless hours and countless dollars. A must read for entrepreneurs of all stripes." --Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup From three partners at Google Ventures, a unique five-day process for solving tough problems, proven at more than a hundred companies. Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What's the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution? Now there's a surefire way to answer these important questions: the sprint. Designer Jake Knapp created the five-day process at Google, where sprints were used on everything from Google Search to Google X. He joined Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky at Google Ventures, and together they have completed more than a hundred sprints with companies in mobile, e-commerce, healthcare, finance, and more. A practical guide to answering critical business questions, Sprint is a book for teams of any size, from small startups to Fortune 100s, from teachers to nonprofits. It's for anyone with a big opportunity, problem, or idea who needs to get answers today.

Jake Knapp created the Design Sprint at Google, where he also helped build Gmail, cofounded Google Meet, and was a design partner at GV. He has since coached hundreds of teams on product strategy at places like Miro, Slack, Nike, LEGO, IDEO, the Wall Street Journal, and the Harvard Business School. Today, Jake is a cofounder at Character, where he helps startups find product-market fit with Design Sprints.


Jake Knapp

John Zeratsky is a design partner at GV and the co-author of Sprint. Before joining GV, he was a design lead at YouTube and an early employee of FeedBurner, which Google acquired in 2007. John has written about design and productivity for Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Wired, and Time. Originally from rural Wisconsin, John now lives in San Francisco with his wife.

John Zeratsky

Braden Kowitz is an accomplished writer whose work has resonated with readers around the world. Braden Kowitz has published several books that explore a range of topics, from fiction to nonfiction, and has received critical acclaim for the ability to weave compelling narratives. Braden Kowitz's writing style is known for its depth and authenticity, and has earned quite a loyal following of readers.