A design sprint is an accelerated approach to innovation and problem-solving. In this book, Jake Knapp—the inventor of Sprint—explains how you can compress your design-thinking to significantly reduce the risk of launching a new innovation or product. Specifically, this step-by-step guide will show you how to define your target, find a concrete solution, create and test a prototype within 5 days. These insights can be applied to any development team challenge. In this free Sprint summary, we’ll outline the key principles and steps involved in running a design sprint.
Sprint: An Overview
Like many people, Jake Knapp was frustrated with his busy but unproductive work days. He started to research and experiment with productivity, process improvements, and product development. After he joined Google, he invented Sprints, which quickly became a hit in Google. Knapp’s Agile team continued to test and refine the sprint process, and also ran 100+ sprints with Google Venture (GV) start-ups. This book distills their insights into a detailed blueprint for running shorter sprints in just 5 days.
Why Bother with Sprints?
A good idea, when executed properly, can bring huge payoffs. Sprint planning can be used by almost anyone to solve real-world problems and make your workdays more efficient and meaningful.
Basically, current sprints allow you to fast-forward into the future to figure out (i) if an idea would work, and (ii) what are the risks and challenges you must address for it to work. The 5-day timeframe is long enough to develop good solutions, yet short enough to force people to stay focused.
In the book, Jake Knapp shares many detailed case studies, such as: (i) a new fitness app trying to explain what it offers so customers will download the app, (ii) a health records company trying to help oncologists to easily find the right treatments for patients, and (iii) a café chain trying to create its online store. We’ll now outline some of the main principles in this free Sprint summary — do get a copy of our full 16-page summary for more implementation tips, details and 1 detailed case study.
SPRINT: PRINCIPLES AND PRIOR PREPARATION
There are several pre-requisites and ingredients that you must prepare prior to the sprint week, including:
- Choose an important challenge (e.g. a project with high stakes, an urgent problem, and/or a problem where you’re stuck in). Ideally, focus on the point where potential customers meet your solution and consider any additional risk factors that could impact the agile sprint.
- Assemble a diverse team with the critical skills, including 1-2 Deciders (official decision-makers) and experts in these areas: finance, marketing, customer experience, tech/logistics, and design. You’ll also need a separate Facilitator to manage the sprint schedule effectively. Ensure the Facilitator has clear facilitation notes prepared to guide the process.
- Block out the entire project team’s calendar for 5 days (Mon-Fri), during which the agile team ship will lock itself inside an actual Sprint room without digital devices (except to present a prototype or idea), so they can focus 100% on the challenge.
- Prepare the supplies/logistics in advance.
In our complete Sprint summary, we’ll explain more about each of these components, as well as the specific considerations and tips for the 5 days of Sprint. For now, let’s take a quick look at what’s involved.
The Sprint Process: A Day-by-Day Guide
Over the 5-day sprint, you will map out the challenge, choose a target, sketch out your ideas, select the best solution and prototype it, before testing it with target customers. The book gives a step-by-step breakdown of the exact manageable tasks and actions by the hour, and how you can execute them effectively with the help of a facilitator. For a detailed summary of the steps with examples per day, do get our full 16-page Sprint summary.
Monday: Map out the Challenge and Choose a Target
This is the day you get crystal-clear on the questions you’ll address by the end of your 5-day sprint, and how exactly they’ll support your long-term goals. In our full book summary, we’ll address the key questions to ask, how to draw a map of your challenge, how to conduct your expert interviews, and use the “How Might We” approach to organize and prioritize your insights. Your end-goal is to choose a target that’s ambitious but achievable within 1 week.
Tuesday: Come up with Solutions
All good innovations are built on other ideas. On Tuesday, you’ll gather and integrate existing ideas using “Lightning Demos”, and use the Four-Step Sketch process to flesh out solution details and alternatives.
Wednesday: Critique and Choose the Best Solution
This is the day for decision-making. You’ll be reviewing the solutions from the previous day, critiquing all of them, then selecting the best option (or combination of options) to be tested. In our full Sprint summary, we’ll explain the 5 steps to reach a “sticky decision” and how to develop a storyboard (which will be used to develop your prototype).
Thursday: Build a Realistic Prototype
On this day, you’re going to build a prototype in just 7 hours. Your prototype is like a movie set—it looks realistic, but it’s not real. Check out our complete 16-page summary to learn about how to think about and choose the right tools for your prototype, how go about building it and doing a trial run, all in 1 day.
Friday: Test with Target Customers
Within 4 days, you’d have progressed from a vague challenge to a realistic prototype. By the end of Friday, you’d know how much further you have to go, and exactly what to do next. You’ll need to set up 2 rooms in advance: an interview room (where you’ll interview 5 target customers sequentially), and an observer room (where the team will observe the interviews using live video feeds, facilitate the tests, and take additional notes).
Putting it Together
Here’s a quick overview of the key tasks/steps to expect over the 5 days. In our full summary bundle, we’ll explain how to go about implementing them, along with additional tips for the facilitator and interviewer.
Getting the Most from Sprint
In this article, we’ve briefly outlined some of the key insights and strategies you can use to achieve desired change. For more examples, details, and actionable tips to apply these strategies, do get our complete book summary bundle summary, which includes an infographic, a 16-page text summary and a 28-minute audio summary.
This is an extremely detailed book with loads of useful examples, diagrams, checklists and FAQs to help you run your own sprints. Jake Knapp recommends beginners to follow all the steps and checklists initially. Once you’ve grasped the process, you can experiment with other alternatives. You can purchase the book here for the full details. You can also visit www.thesprintbook.com or jakeknapp.com for more details and resources.
About the Author of Sprint
Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days is written by Jake Knapp–an American author and designer. He spent 10 years at Google and Google Ventures, where he invented the Design Sprint process. Jake also co-founded Google Meet and helped to build products like Gmail and Microsoft Encarta. He has written two books, Sprint and Make Time, and coaches teams on design strategy and time management.
Sprint Quotes
“Work should be about…working together to build something that matters to real people.”
“Great innovation is built on existing ideas, repurposed with vision.”
“If you don’t know why a product or service isn’t working, it’s hard to fix it.”
“The sprint only works if you stick together until the end.”
“A successful test is not the end of the process, but the beginning.”
