Book Summary #1: Solve big problems and test new ideas using sprints in just 5 days
Learnings from the book by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz of Google ventures
The Sprint is a Google venture’s process for answering crucial questions through prototyping and testing ideas with target customers in only 5-days, saving your and your teams countless hours and money. Sprints can be used for prioritization, marketing strategy, naming companies, etc.
Before publishing the article, I shared the draft with one of my friends. Talking to him helped me understand the questions that might arise in people’s mind by looking at the title of the book. Here is how the conversation went.
Reason to go with sprint
- Enough time for each team member to develop ideas independently. All stakeholders solve their own part of the problem so that they can answer others' questions.
- Deadlines force team members to focus. Team members cannot afford to overthink or get caught in other less important work. As a result of additional challenges in less amount of time, their best works emerge.
- The sprint process is story-centered. It focuses on the overall customer experience instead of individual technology components.
- The team gets time to prototype together and finish each sprint with real-world tests to get clear results in just one day.
- Zero tolerance for baloney.
Bad — “We have already moved forward with the idea but I don’t see much results.”
Good — “I am nervous about_____, but this is the time to take risks.” - When a risky idea succeeds, the payoff is fantastic in sprints. But failures provide greater ‘Return on Investment’ by letting us fail early.
Test fast, fail fast, adjust first. _Tom Peters (Coauthor, In Search of Excellence )
New ideas usually fail when we are overconfident about how well customers would understand and how much they would care. Sprint lets us solve the surface first by working backward to figure out the underlying system and technology.
Sprint rules
- Right people: Ideal number of the sprint team members is 7 (with 8–9 members, the project slows down).
- Eliminate distraction: On average it takes 23 minutes for distracted members to return to work. Gadgets suck the momentum out of a sprint.
- Structured activities: The discussion room should have whiteboards (rolling whiteboards or idea paint) to write discussion points. Humans short term memory is not good but spatial memory is awesome. Sprint room acts as a shared brain.
The simultaneous visibility of these project materials help us identify patterns and encourage creative synthesis to occur much more readily than when these resources are hidden away in folders, notebooks or power point decks.
_Tim Brown in his book ‘Change by Design’
MONDAY: MAP
Start at the end
Writing a clear goal helps focus on the right problems. Think, if you would jump to the end of your sprint, what would you have answered or what would you have improved. Note down all possible goals that your team might want to achieve.
Set long term goals
Note what can cause failure. Turn these assumptions and obstacles into questions. Discuss, what among these has to be true to meet the goal. Answer them.
Turning potential problem into questions makes them easier to track, easier to answer with sketches, prototypes and tests. It creates a shift from uncertainty to curiosity. By seeing them listed at one place reduces the fear of not knowing what you are afraid of.
Map
Including only major user-centric steps(not detailed) helps narrow down broader challenges into the specific targets for the sprint and provides the structure for the solution.
Ask the experts
Check previous efforts/failures in the area and examine pre-existing solutions. Find and tell experts about the sprint. Ask them to review the progress. Ask what they already know about the topic. Enquire, where you might go wrong. Ask them to retell you what they think you already know. Ask what is incomplete. Ask what opportunities they can see. Experts will tell you things that you wouldn’t know how to ask.
Ask why, even if you know the answer. Conveying the obvious ensures that there is no interpretation. It often draws detail that not everyone is clear about.
Update your questions and goals accordingly. Note every important fact on the wall. Use the ‘How might we?’ method developed by Procter and Gamble to organize and prioritize team member’s notes. Each person writes their own ideas/notes on sticky notes starting with “How might we”.
Then move prioritized notes from the group and stick them in one place.
TUESDAY: SKETCH
Remix and improve
Use Lightning Demos. Ask team members one by one to give 3-minute tours to their ideas and tell what’s cool about it. Looking at similar products from the same industry may not be very beneficial. One can get more ideas by looking at similar problems in different environments. Look at the ideas inside your own organization. Look for ideas that are in progress or have been abandoned. Most won’t turn into anything, but ½ may inspire great solutions.
Sprints aren’t about new ideas but better non existing ideas. Great innovations are built on existing ideas, repurposed with vision.
To divide task after sort listing, ask team members to write which part of the task they would like to work in . If too many people are interested in one area, ask them to volunteer to switch.
Sketch
Sketches help develop individual ideas while working alone. They help convert abstract ideas to concrete solutions which can be fairly evaluated by the team.
Work alone together. Working alone gives a pressure of responsibility along with offering time to research, think about a problem, and find inspiration.
The best idea come from people when they are alone and not from brainstorming. Maybe because there isn’t enough time in these session to think deeply.
_ Excerpt from the book
Plan how to recruit testers for Friday
Someone(except the facilitator) needs to take this responsibility. You may post something generic to attract an audience than link it to a screener.
Steps recommended to create the screener survey:
- Write characters of your target audience whom you would like to recruit as testers.
- Form indirect questions (to ensure people don’t game the survey for gift cards) to figure out those characteristics
WEDNESDAY: DECIDE
Rumble
When you end up with more than one winning sketch, you may prototype both or postpone one for now. In case winning sketches conflict with one another or maybe can’t co-exist in the same prototype, note and use dot vote to save time.
Storyboard
10–15 panels connected into a cohesive story makes it easier to spot problems before prototyping. It removes all guesswork on what to include.
Draw a 5 X 3 grid on the whiteboard. Discuss each step with the team and start filling boxes in each step. 1st scene should be the best opening scene for the prototype. Try placing your product among web search results, magazines with ads, place beside the competitor in a store shelf, show app store view, news article mentioning your service, etc.
In case something wasn’t discussed during the week, ignore it for Friday’s test. Or fill that section from maybe later sketches or from existing products. Avoid any new invention to save time. Make notes of new ‘might include’ ideas for later. 1st finish the sprint. Include only enough details. Take risks when in doubt.
Each scene in the storyboard should ideally take 1 minute to test. While testing users should get enough time to think aloud and answer questions.
THURSDAY: PROTOTYPE
Divide the team.
- 2 or more makers
- 1 detail-oriented stitcher
- 1 writer possessing realistic text to make a realistic prototype
- 1 asset collector
- 1 interviewer who creates the script in advance
Use ‘Fake it’ philosophy (not ‘perfect’ but ‘just enough’) to turn storyboard into a prototype. Just make sure that your prototype appears real. We cannot expect users to imagine.
The ideal prototype should have Goldilocks quality. Not too high, not too low, but just right.
Keep revisiting sprint questions. Trial run in presence of the entire team around 3 pm so that you still have time to patch any holes if found. If you are not sure whether any bold idea is going to work, it’s better to find it early. The longer you append, the more your team gets attached to it. After one day you are receptive to feedback, later you get committed to the idea.
FRIDAY
“There is this gap between the vision and the customer. To make the two fit, you have to talk to people.” _ Joe Gebbia 2008 (Airbnb)
Testing with the target audience helps know their reaction before making an expensive commitment to launch. 5 interviews should be enough to trace patterns/faults.
One team member acts as the interviewer while other members observe the live/recorded video of the interview. Testers are asked to test competitor’s products before coming for Friday’s test.
The interviewer follows the following steps to find the answers to why things work or don’t work.
- Make users comfortable by telling, “If you get stuck somewhere, it is not your fault. In fact, it will help us figure out and fix those problems.” Tell them about the objective of the study. You may want to get a non-disclosure form signed. Remember to take the necessary permissions to record the session.
- Ask few open-ended questions related to daily activities to set the context. Question structure and body language help people think aloud.
- Introduce testers to the prototype. Remind them that you are testing the prototype and not them. Tell them that you didn’t design this & you won’t be hurt. They will give honest feedback if they know that the interviewer is not emotionally attached to the idea.
- Detail out the open-ended tasks that you want them to carry out.
- Ask debrief questions at the end. Don’t ask MCQ or Y/N questions. Instead, ask 5Ws and 1H.
Example:
* How does the product compare to what you do now?
* What did you like/not like about the product?
* How would you describe the product to your friend?
Meanwhile, other members watch the video of the interview. When they hear something interesting, they write it in form of quotes, observations or interpretations on sticky notes and place it on the table drawn on the whiteboard.
Write + or — in case of positive or negative comments respectively. Leave it blank if neutral. In the end, each member stands in front of the chart and silently reviews. As a team, they analyze the sticky notes later to find patterns. If there are any major points, they are worked on before closing the sprint.
Not wasting time in endless meetings, but working together WITH THE RIGHT MIX OF PEOPLE to build something that matters to real people is best use of your time. This is sprint.
Get to know more about Sprints at thesprintbook.com or sprintstories.com.
For any feedback or queries, reach out to me at sakshi.kumari.1@nift.ac.in or on LinkedIn or Instagram.
Note: The summary was originally posted in another account of mine on @booknstuffs — Medium.
