Jake Knapp - Sprint

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JAKE KNAPP created the Google Ventures sprint process and has run more than a hundred sprints with startups such as 23andMe, Slack, Nest, and Foundation Medicine. Previously, Jake worked at Google, leading sprints for everything from Gmail to Google X. He is among the worlds tallest designers.

JOHN ZERATSKY has designed mobile apps, medical reports, and a daily newspaper (among other things). Before joining Google Ventures, he was a design lead at YouTube and an early employee of FeedBurner, which Google acquired in 2007. John writes about design and productivity for The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Wired. He studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin.

BRADEN KOWITZ founded the Google Ventures design team in 2009 and pioneered the role of design partner at a venture capital firm. He has advised close to two hundred startups on product design, hiring, and team culture. Before joining Google Ventures, Braden led design for several Google products, including Gmail, Google Apps for Business, Google Spreadsheets, and Google Trends.

@jakek @jazer @kowitz

thesprintbook.com

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Author photographs by Graham Hancock

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-5011-2174-6

ISBN 978-1-5011-2177-7 (ebook)

Jake:

To Mom, who helped me make castles out of cardboard And to Holly, who picked me up when I caught the wrong bus

John:

To my grandpa Gib, who would have bought the first hundred books

Braden:

To my parents, who encouraged me to explore the world and make it better

Start with a big problem

Get a Decider, a Facilitator, and a diverse team

Schedule five days and find the right room

Agree to a long-term goal

Diagram the problem

Interview your teammates and other experts

Choose a focus for your sprint

Look for old ideas and inspiration

Put detailed solutions on paper

Choose the best solutions without groupthink

Keep competing ideas alive

Make a plan for the prototype

Build a faade instead of a product

Find the right tools, then divide and conquer

Get big insights from just five customers

Ask the right questions

Find patterns and plan the next step

One last nudge to help you start

What I was doing at work wasnt working.

In 2003, my wife and I had our first child. When I returned to the office, I wanted my time on the job to be as meaningful as my time with family. I took a hard look at my habitsand saw that I wasnt spending my effort on the most important work.

So I started optimizing. I read productivity books. I made spreadsheets to track how efficient I felt when I exercised in the morning versus at lunchtime, or when I drank coffee versus tea. During one month, I experimented with five different kinds of to-do lists. Yes, all of this analysis was weird. But little by little, I got more focused and more organized.

Then, in 2007, I got a job at Google, and there, I found the perfect culture for a process geek. Google encourages experimentation, not only in the products, but in the methods used by individuals... and teams.

Improving team processes became an obsession for me (yes, weird again). My first attempts were brainstorming workshops with teams of engineers. Group brainstorming, where everyone shouts out ideas, is a lot of fun. After a few hours together, wed have a big pile of sticky notes and everyone would be in great spirits.

But one day, in the middle of a brainstorm, an engineer interrupted the process. How do you know brainstorming works? he asked. I wasnt sure what to say. The truth was embarrassing: I had been surveying participants to see if they enjoyed the workshops, but I hadnt been measuring the actual results.

So I reviewed the outcome of the workshops Id run. And I noticed a problem. The ideas that went on to launch and become successful were not generated in the shout-out-loud brainstorms. The best ideas came from somewhere else. But where?

Individuals were still thinking up ideas the same way they always hadwhile sitting at their desks, or waiting at a coffee shop, or taking a shower. Those individual-generated ideas were better. When the excitement of the workshop was over, the brainstorm ideas just couldnt compete.

Maybe there wasnt enough time in these sessions to think deeply. Maybe it was because the brainstorm ended with drawings on paper, instead of something realistic. The more I thought about it, the more flaws I saw in my approach.

I compared the brainstorms with my own day-to-day work at Google. My best work happened when I had a big challenge and not quite enough time.

One such project happened in 2009. A Gmail engineer named Peter Balsiger came up with an idea for automatically organizing email. I got excited about his ideaknown as Priority Inboxand recruited another engineer, Annie Chen, to work on it with us. Annie agreed, but she would only give it one month. If we couldnt prove that the idea was viable in that time, shed switch to a different project. I was certain that one month wasnt enough time, but Annie is an outstanding engineer, so I decided to take what I could get.

We split the month into four weeklong chunks. Each week, we came up with a new design. Annie and Peter built a prototype, and then, at the end of the week, we tested the design with a few hundred people.