Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days

Sprint book review The Sprint book is easy read and could be dealt with as a story. The format of Sprint moving through the working week creates atmosphere that I was hearing Jake(the main author) telling me a story. Watching some videos on YouTube for Jake helped me better understand the book. As they say, our writing is kind of reflection of who we are beyond the subject of the book. While it is simple read, the underlying concepts have roots in Human Centered Design, Anthropology, Prototyping, UX, Innovation, App Design, Software Development, Agile Management, ….. The book stitches these concepts in a simple 5 days intuitive road-map for any organization that wants to solve big challenge in 5 days. No bluff, no extended plans, not procrastination, no top-down solutions, and no naysayers. By solving a challenge, I mean ‘learning’ what to do about it. Design Sprint is about learning what we need to do about the challenge. The bigger the challenge the higher the applicability of Design Sprint and the bigger the reward can be. I am familiar with Human Centered Design from IDEO. For me Design Sprint cuts to the chase if we want to apply the whole Design Thinking process in a week. There could be follow-up after the Sprint to iterate on the feedback from users on Friday, but that followup will be shorter. In days , it is like 5+3+2; 5 days for the first Sprint. And every segment has definitive outcomes that provides concrete learning to the organization. Having key stakeholders in the Design Sprint team, would help having timely feedback and decisions on the progress of the Sprint. Meaning, those stakeholders will bring us to the reality about the aspects of the business applicability of the solution. For me this reduces the risk of implementing a solution which despite of being desirable by users, is non-implementable due technical feasibility or business sustainability. The book includes examples of companies from diverse industries including healthcare, software development, hotels, coffee-shops, and fitness. I am more comfortable applying Sprint process to design services that primarily utilize digital solutions. However, the author mentioned he implemented the same process for designing non-digital solutions. Again, this is a Design Thinking mentality where we start from complete uncertainty about what we need to do and go through a discovery process for learning about the context and what probably can work. What probably works is based on user testing of a facade solution (prototype). Sprint book is complete and can be the main source for anyone who wants to facilitate Design Sprint, like me:) Like any other process, learning can happen only through practicing using the right process. and mindset. Based on the lessons learned from tens of Sprints the author facilitated, I believe this book can be valuable for team facilitators. It is about time for organizations to be transparent about their challenges and empower their employees to help ‘learning’ about what to do regarding them. Historically, organizations provide top-down solutions without engaging the right people who understand the complexity of the existing situation. Meaningful learning can be done in 5 days using the Sprint process detailed in this book and with the right skill-mix of team members. Design Sprint can be incorporated as habitual process for ‘learning’ about challenges and designing solutions/services using Design Thinking mentality. It is all in one week! Similar to Design Thinking and Learn Startup which focus on learning, Design Sprint aims to reduce the risk of having wrong a product/ solution. Although customer usage of solutions is the final judge, Design Sprint can reduce the risk of developing the wrong feature in the first place. In Agile language, before adding a feature into the product backlog, we need to ensure first that it was tested earlier with the target audience using tangible prototype rather than words. Design Sprint can enable that!

Most of the books on innovation and design espouse ideas about what it means. This book is designed for you to put to work, tomorrow if necessary. Sprint is unique in presenting a step by step guide of interactive design sessions without coming across as a cookbook or boring methodology. The authors skip past the 'theory' or design and go right to the action and that is a welcome change. Sprint is a 5 day intensive design process for exploring, defining and prototyping solutions to specific problems. The book presents a readily understandable and very engaging description of the process that follows three or four companies through the process. The authors even discuss failures and how they learned that obvious things do not work. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED for anyone who needs to engage a team to start and solve large and complex problems. This is a well designed book, engagingly written with the right amount of prescription. The authors create just enough structure to allow the creativity of teams to come out. They also provide very practical advice on building the kinds of prototypes needed to successfully test ideas and solutions. Strengths: Actionable advice provided in a highly accessible way. Clear instructions and guidance on the fundamental things to get right, without being picky about the things that will work themselves out Simple and understandable illustrations and actions Example stories of others, including success and failures Practical discussion of tools you will need from advice about not using sharpie markers to prototyping tools. Support materials at the end that condense the process into a few pages Respect for the reader, a real issue in many design books that view the uninitiated as somewhat inferior, not this book. Challenges The authors assume that you have some appreciation for the creative or a design process. This is a structure to make that process flourish and therefore it does not try to convince you that design is the way to go. It is written for people who think before they act, blindly following this recipe will not create great results because the value is in the interactions between people and the creative process that happens within the structure. Overall -- great book to USE rather than just one to read and think about.

What Jake and his co-authors prescribe in the book sounds rather too good to be true and unconventional, but it has made a world of sense to me. What usually takes months and months of hopeless meetings, emails and expenditure has been narrowed down to just 5 days of intensive work by all the KEY parties. Emphasis has been put on 'key' parties as most often businesses approach to answer their biggest questions with just 2 or 3 people from the top management involved. I like how they advise startups to focus on most pressing questions. I can see how many founders and deciders can get lost in a web of questions during startup. They recommend an ideal size of the sprint to be seven people or less, I couldn't have agreed more. And this is only one of the many ingenious tips I liked. Another one is the 'no device rule'. I've always been a fan of whiteboards but these guys have taken the idea to another level. I quote: " the simultaneous visibility of project material helps us identify patterns and encourages creative synthesis to occur more readily than when these resources are hidden away in file folders, notebooks, or PowerPoint decks." Another key insight I got from the book is the reminder that 'nobody knows everything'. I can imagine many CEOs thinking this way due to hubris. I quote: "..the information is distributed asymmetrically across the team and across the company. In the sprint, you've got to gather it and make sense of it, and asking experts is the best and fastest way to do that." The 'How might we' method was also a great light-bulb. Rephrasing business obstacles into helpful questions. Another helpful method is the 'lightning demos which involves finding inspirational ideas from both within your company and even outside your industry. I could imagine limiting myself to my competitors only, but stretching as far as other businesses who do nothing remotely similar is a revelation. Another ingenious solution suggested by the authors is the 'mind reader' - a sketch of complex ideas as a simple drawing of boxes and text. This then forms a basis for a prototype.They emphasize on the quality of the solution as opposed to the artistry of the drawings - they really do give hope to people like us who wouldn't know what do with a brush :) They further elaborate on the usefulness of sketching, I quote, "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." Crazy 8s is another brilliant idea introduced by the team. An 8 minute exercise of sketching 8 variations of your strongest ideas. I found it quite unconventional, and hence my belief that it will work. Basically the exercise helps you consider alternatives and also serves as an excellent warm up for the main event. I found the 'prototype mindset' to be the best idea in the whole book. The authors suggest building a facade and testing it, this initially sounded uncomfortable to me, but I later saw the genius in it. I quote, "To prototype your solution, you'll need a temporary change of philosophy: from perfect to just enough, from long-term quality to temporary simulation." I can see how this idea can save a huge amount of time and money for a company down the line. In the end the authors emphasize the best part about the sprint, which is the chance to learn whether you are on the right track with your ideas in just 5 days. "You can have efficient failures that are good news, flawed successes that need more work, and many other outcomes." I couldn't agree more. The choice of examples used in the book was also great, not exactly Malcolm Gladwell level, but still inspiring nonetheless. I recommend the book to Startup founders, top company management or any one looking for unconventional methods to improve productivity on any sphere of their lives.

"It's what work should be about – working together to build something that matters to people. This is the best use of your time. This is a sprint." This was a great sentence to finish the book, and it's a great sentence to begin working in a better way. In the preface, the author states he had his first child. When he returned to the office, he wanted his time on the job to be as meaningful as his time with his family. He took a hard look at his habits and saw that, "I wasn’t spending my effort on the most important work". He discussed how improving team processes became an obsession for him. Through his experience of working with teams to create new products at Google, and experimenting on improving the way teams work, he found that focusing on individual work, having time to prototype, and an inescapable deadline produced far better results. Running the 5 day sprint described in the book enables a team to easily find out if they are on the right track before they commit to the risky business of building and launching their products. The sprint process however is just as applicable to teams launching internal products/solutions/services. This way of work is applicable to any company, not just startups. The author shares how other Google Ventures team members added to the sprint process to make it better through the years. Braden Kowitz added story-centered design – which focuses on the whole customer experience instead of individual components or technologies. John Zeratsky helped to ensure that each sprint starts at the end, so the business's would be able to identify and answer their most important questions. Michael Margolis encouraged them to finish each sprint with a real world test. By putting your prototype in front of real customers/prospects, you didn't have to guess whether your solutions were good, at the end of the sprint you got answers. Over the last 10 years, I have facilitated interactive workshops to help teams get a shared understanding of the business problem they are trying to solve, which is a precursor to a shared commitment to solve the problem. Having a solid understanding of the research behind collaborative approaches to work, and understanding the approach to use based on the problem domain you are in is critical to a successful outcome. Because of my background and real-world experience, I recognize how effective the sprint design is, and feel confident in using the process with any client I work with. The psychology behind the methods is real, the creativity of the design will engage all who participate, and you will build better products. If you are passionate about helping teams work more effectively, if you care about making work a more engaging experience, if you have a burning desire to improve customers' lives, read this book and then USE this book to run sprints.

Excellent content prepared with actual experiences. Easy read. Easy to understand. I read this as part of a 3 day design sprint workshop training session. The only thing worse than not doing a design sprint is to do it poorly, and have it backfire. I strongly recommend getting some professional training or mentoring before you try this in real life. Enlist the help of a seasoned designer. I am a project manager and while the concepts and examples in this book are very easy to understand and each concept on its own is relatively simple and doable, the real value is in executing the entire process end-to-end, and on a suitable project. Read it, enjoy it, wrap your head around it, then find the right project and team to implement this with. The results will amaze you.

This was an enjoyable, quick read and I tested it out on my team. We are all pretty familiar with Lean Startup and are just getting into Design Thinking at our company. Our group reported back that they enjoyed the project. It's a very detailed, practical guide and I just went for it and followed all the instructions in detail (down to buying the office supplies) - it gets you from big picture thinking to testing your ideas in a week. I found each person in our group seemed to excel at a different part of it: Introverts and Extroverts, techies and non techies. The hardest part was convincing people to spend five days in a meeting, but I found their timetable pretty generous -- we finished early some days. We found Monday the most meeting-heavy day so one tip might be to let the team know that it won't be as intensive after that. Some might be worried they'd be in for five full days of intense discussion -- they aren't.

A very comprehensive book on sprints and teaches you the practical aspects of running sprints. A lot of it appears intuitive but really isn't and that is what makes this book a good go to guide for sprints.

This book is the single most tactical problem-solving book. If you've been wondering what you need to do to get something done and build a solution to a real problem, this book and the sprint method just cuts right to the chase and gives you a set of tools you can actually use. Sprint is an excellent read with a real tangible approach to solving problems. There's so much that has gone into the design sprint method behind this book and so much to learn from the design sprint experience itself - e.g. human behavior, team work, focus, efficiency, success/failure, etc. I've been using their design sprint method for years now and I am really excited to see it codified in this book. The best part is that you can use the sprint method for almost any kind of project that's aiming to solve a problem. If the key to getting something done is to just "do it", this book and the sprint demonstrates the how to "do" part.