by Jake Knapp
This advice is partially defensive. If the troublemaker is in the room, even just for a guest appearance, he or she will feel included and invested in the project. But there’s a more important reason. Troublemakers see problems differently from everyone else. Their crazy idea about solving the problem might just be right. And even if it’s wrong, the presence of a dissenting view will push everyone else to do better work.
There’s a fine line between a rebel and a jerk, of course, but don’t avoid people just because they disagree with you. As you’ll see throughout the book, the sprint process turns competing ideas into an asset.
Often, when we list out all of the people we want in a sprint, we have more than seven. That’s okay. It’s a sign of a strong team! But you’ll have to make tough decisions. We can’t tell you which seven people to include, but we can make it easier by telling you what to do with the rest.
Schedule extra experts for Monday
If you have more than seven people you think should participate in your sprint, schedule the extras to come in as “experts” for a short visit on Monday afternoon. During their visit, they can tell the rest of the team what they know and share their opinions. (We’ll tell you all about the Ask the Experts process starting on page 68.) A half an hour should be plenty of time for each expert. It’s an efficient way to boost the diversity of perspectives while keeping your team small and nimble.
Now you’ve got your Decider, your sprinters, and some extra experts coming in for visits. Your team is all set. Except . . . oh yeah. Somebody’s got to run the sprint.
Pick a Facilitator
Brad Pitt’s character in Ocean’s Eleven, Rusty Ryan, is the logistics guy. He keeps the heist running. You need someone to be the Rusty Ryan of your sprint. This person is the Facilitator, and she’s responsible for managing time, conversations, and the overall process. She needs to be confident leading a meeting, including summarizing discussions and telling people it’s time to stop talking and move on. It’s an important job. And since you’re the one reading this book, you might be a good candidate.
The Facilitator needs to remain unbiased about decisions, so it’s not a good idea to combine the Decider and Facilitator roles in one person. It often works well to bring in an outsider who doesn’t normally work with your team to be the Facilitator, but it’s not a requirement.
This book is written to be equally handy to the Facilitator and to anyone else who’s interested in sprints. If you’re going to be the Facilitator, you’ll find that the text speaks directly to you and the activities through which you’ll lead your team, from Monday morning through Friday afternoon. But even if you’re not the Facilitator, it’ll all make sense to you, too.
* * *
One of the great delights of watching Ocean’s Eleven unfold is seeing how each member of the team utilizes his unique skill to help pull off the heist. You know all the characters are in the script for a reason, but you don’t know exactly what they’re going to do until they do it.
Sprints are the same way. Each expert in the room will provide a key contribution—whether it’s background information, a fresh idea, or even a shrewd observation of your customers. Exactly what they’ll say and do is impossible to predict. But with the right team in place, unexpected solutions will appear.
* * *
I. Or Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, if you prefer the original.
II. We’ve included several stories in this book of sprints that went awry. After a lot of deliberation, we decided to use fake names for the companies and people involved. The anonymity allows us to be honest about what went wrong, without embarrassing our friends. We hope you understand.
III. Exception to the rule: There are times when a team willfully goes against management because they’re convinced that a prototype and real data will prove their case. If your team has decided to run a sprint without the official Decider in the room, proceed with care. We applaud your courage, but remember: Deciders are well known for squashing results when they’re not in the sprint.
3
Time and Space
The typical day in the typical office goes something like this:
This day is long and busy, but it’s not necessarily productive. Every meeting, email, and phone call fragments attention and prevents real work from getting done. Taken together, these interruptions are a wasp’s nest dropped into the picnic of productivity.
There are stacks of studies about the cost of interruption. Researchers at George Mason University found that people wrote shorter, lower-quality essays when interrupted in the middle of their work. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, reported that it takes on average twenty-three minutes for distracted workers to return to their tasks. (We plan to read more of these studies, right after we answer this text message.)
No doubt about it: Fragmentation hurts productivity. Of course, nobody wants to work this way. We all want to get important work done. And we know that meaningful work, especially the kind of creative effort needed to solve big problems, requires long, uninterrupted blocks of time.
That’s 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. A sprint day looks like this:
You’ll start at 10 a.m. and end at 5 p.m., with an hour-long lunch in between. That’s right: There are only six working hours in the typical sprint day. Longer hours don’t equal better results. By getting the right people together, structuring the activities, and eliminating distraction, we’ve found that it’s possible to make rapid progress while working a reasonable schedule.
Sprints require high energy and focus, but the team won’t be able to give that effort if they’re stressed out or fatigued. By starting at 10 a.m., we give everyone time to check email and feel caught up before the day begins. By ending before people get too tired, we ensure the energy level stays high throughout the week.
Block five full days on the calendar
This step is obvious, but important. The sprint team must be in the same room Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday’s test starts a little earlier, at 9 a.m.
Why five days? We tried shorter sprints, but they were exhausting and didn’t allow time to build and test a prototype. We’ve experimented with a six-week sprint, a monthlong sprint, and a ten-day sprint. We never accomplished significantly more than we did in a week. Weekends caused a loss of continuity. Distractions and procrastination crept in. And more time to work made us more attached to our ideas and, in turn, less willing to learn from our colleagues or our customers.
Five days provide enough urgency to sharpen focus and cut out useless debate, but enough breathing room to build and test a prototype without working to exhaustion. And because most companies use a five-day workweek, it’s feasible to slot a five-day sprint into existing schedules.
Your team will take a short morning break (around 11:30 a.m.), an hour-long lunch (around 1 p.m.), and a short afternoon break (around 3:30 p.m.). These breaks are a sort of “pressure-release valve,” allowing people to rest their brains and catch up on work happening outside the sprint.
Inside the sprint room, everybody will be 100 percent focused on the sprint’s challenge. The entire team must shut their laptops and put away their phones.
The no-device rule
In a sprint, time is precious, and we can’t afford distractions in the room. So we have a simple rule: No laptops, phones, or iPads allowed. No virtual-reality headsets. If you’re reading this book in the future, no holograms. If you’re reading it in the past, no Game Boys.
These devices can suck the momentum out of a sprint. If you’re looking at a screen, you’re not paying attention to what’s going on in the room, so you won’t be able to help the team. What’s worse, you’re unconsciously saying, “This work isn’t interesting.”
Going without devices can b
e uncomfortable at first, but it’s freeing. And don’t worry. You won’t be completely cut off. To make sure nobody misses anything important, there are two exceptions to the no-device rule:
1. It’s okay to check your device during a break.
2. It’s okay to leave the room to check your device. At any time. No judgment. Take a call, check an email, tweet a Tweet, whatever—just take it outside.
We also use devices for some specific purposes: when we need to show something to the whole team, and on Thursday for prototyping. See, we’re not so mean.
Let people know ahead of time that the sprint will be device-free, and also let them know that they can step out of the room at any time. That escape hatch allows busy people to participate in the sprint without losing track of their regular jobs. The combination of a clear schedule and no devices gives your team a huge supply of raw attention. To make the best use of that time and attention, you need a good workspace. It won’t have to be fancy, but it will need some whiteboards.
Whiteboards make you smarter
BadgerCo (again, not the company’s real name) had one of the nicest offices we’d ever seen in San Francisco. A prime location in the SoMa neighborhood, a remodeled building with exposed wood beams, polished concrete, and lots and lots of glass. But there was one problem: the whiteboard.
For starters, it was tiny. Three feet wide at the most. The surface was grayish pink from being written on and erased so many times, and that dingy haze would not come off, no matter what we sprayed on it. BadgerCo also suffered from a common workplace ailment: worn-out whiteboard markers. The result was gray ink on a gray background . . . not a recipe for visibility.
The whiteboard’s small surface area hampered us. We drew out a map showing how customers would discover BadgerCo’s new mobile app, and it filled almost all of the available space. Then BadgerCo’s head of engineering started explaining how their subscription plans worked. The plan structure was important stuff, so Braden did his best to capture it on what was left of the whiteboard.
But there just wasn’t room. For a few minutes, Braden tried to MacGyver his way out of it, writing cramped words in the margins and even taping notebook paper to the wall. Finally, we called time-out and walked to Office Depot to buy some of those giant poster-size Post-it notes. It cost us about an hour and a half and taught us an important lesson: Check the whiteboards before the sprint starts.
• • •
Why did we burn 90 minutes with BadgerCo just to get more writing space? We’ve found that magic happens when we use big whiteboards to solve problems. As humans, our short-term memory is not all that good, but our spatial memory is awesome. A sprint room, plastered with notes, diagrams, printouts, and more, takes advantage of that spatial memory. The room itself becomes a sort of shared brain for the team. As our friend Tim Brown, CEO of the design firm IDEO, writes in his book Change by Design: “The simultaneous visibility of these project materials helps us identify patterns and encourages creative synthesis to occur much more readily than when these resources are hidden away in file folders, notebooks, or PowerPoint decks.”
Get two big whiteboards
At minimum, you’ll need two big whiteboards. That will provide enough space to do most of the sprint activities (you’ll still have to take photos and do some erasing and reorganizing as you go) and enough to keep the most important notes visible for the entire week. If there aren’t two whiteboards already mounted to the wall in your sprint room, there are a few easy ways to add more:
Rolling Whiteboards
These come in small and giant sizes. The small ones have a lot of unusable space down by the floor, and they shake when you draw on them. The giant ones cost a lot more, but they’re actually usable.
IdeaPaint
IdeaPaint is paint that turns regular walls into whiteboards. It works great on smooth walls, and less great on rough walls. One word of advice: If you use IdeaPaint, be sure to paint all the walls. If you don’t, it’s just a matter of time before somebody writes on the non-IdeaPaint wall by accident.
Paper
If you can’t get hold of whiteboards, paper is better than nothing. Those poster-size Post-it notes are pricey but easy to arrange and swap when you make mistakes. Butcher paper provides serious surface area, but sticking it to the wall requires serious ingenuity.
Ideally, you should run your sprint in the same room all day, every day. Unfortunately, that’s not always possible. We’re surprised how many tech companies make space for foosball tables, video games, and even music rooms—all fun but seldom used—yet can’t dedicate a room to their most important project. If you have to share your sprint room, try to get rolling whiteboards that you can take with you. Don’t let the team’s “shared brain” be erased overnight.
Even if you don’t have a conference room to yourself, you can always make an ad hoc space for your sprint by using rolling whiteboards as partitions. It’s kind of like you’re a kid again, building a fort out of chairs and blankets. Tape stuff to walls, move around furniture—do what you have to do to create a good workspace.
Stock up on the right supplies
Before starting your sprint, you’ll need a bunch of basic office supplies, including sticky notes, markers, pens, Time Timers (see below), and regular old printer paper. You’ll also need healthy snacks to keep up the team’s energy. We’ve got strong opinions about which supplies are best, so we’ve included a shopping list at the end of the book.
FACILITATOR NOTES
The Magic Clock
“How much longer?” In the fall of 1983, Jan Rogers was hearing this question a dozen times a day in her Cincinnati home. Her four-year-old daughter, Loran, was unusually curious about time. Jan tried every conceivable answer:
“Until the little hand moves here.”
“Until the alarm dings.”
“Two Sesame Streets.”
No matter what Jan said, little Loran just didn’t get it. So Jan went searching for a better clock. She tried digital clocks and analog clocks. She tried egg timers and alarms. She scoured Cincinnati’s shopping malls for a clock that could make the abstract idea of time clear to a four-year-old. But none of them worked. “I’m not giving up,” Jan thought. “I’ll invent a clock if I have to.” And that’s what she did.
That evening, Jan sat down at the kitchen table with scissors and a pile of paper and cardboard and started experimenting. “That first prototype was really simple,” Jan recalls. “A red paper plate cut to slide into a white paper plate. It was all manual, so I had to actually move the plates as time elapsed.”
Loran got it. And Jan realized she was onto something. She called her invention the “Time Timer.” At first, Jan manufactured the timers in her basement, using double-sided tape to hold the pieces together. Slowly but steadily, Jan Rogers turned the Time Timer into an enterprise. Today, Jan is CEO of a multimillion-dollar business, and you can find Time Timers in classrooms around the world, from kindergartens in Amsterdam to Stanford University.
The Time Timer itself is an object of simple beauty. True to Jan’s original design, it has a red disk that moves as time elapses. It makes the abstract passage of time vivid and concrete. When Jake first saw a Time Timer, in his son’s classroom, he fell in love. “Please,” he said to the teacher. “Tell me where to get one of these.” After all, if the timer worked for preschoolers, it should be perfect for CEOs. And it was.
We use Time Timers in our sprints to mark small chunks of time, anywhere from three minutes to one hour. These tiny deadlines give everyone an added sense of focus and urgency. Now, there are plenty of ways to keep time that don’t require a special device, but the Time Timer is worth the extra cost. Because it’s a large mechanical object, it’s visible to everyone in the room in a way that no phone or iPad app could ever be. And unlike with a traditional clock, no math or memory is required to figure out how much time is remaining. When time is visible, it becomes easy to understand and discuss, and that’s as important
for a team of professionals as it was for Jan’s daughter Loran.
If you’re the Facilitator, using the Time Timer comes with two extra benefits. First, it makes you look like you know what you’re doing. After all, you’ve got a crazy clock! Second, although most would never admit it, people like having a tight schedule. It builds confidence in the sprint process, and in you as a Facilitator.
Jake likes to introduce the Time Timer with a bit of narrative, because timing people while they talk can be socially awkward. He says something like:
“I’m going to use this timer to keep things moving. When it goes off, it’s a reminder to us to see if we can move on to the next topic. If you’re talking when the timer beeps, just keep talking, and I’ll add a little more time. It’s a guideline, not a fire alarm.”
The first time you set it, people’s eyes may get big, and blood pressure may rise a little. But give it a chance. By the afternoon, they’ll be used to it, and most likely, they’ll want to take it with them after the sprint.
Monday
Monday’s structured discussions create a path for the sprint week. In the morning, you’ll start at the end and agree to a long-term goal. Next, you’ll make a map of the challenge. In the afternoon, you’ll ask the experts at your company to share what they know. Finally, you’ll pick a target: an ambitious but manageable piece of the problem that you can solve in one week.