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

by Jake Knapp

  Our method for collecting and synthesizing these existing ideas is an exercise we call Lightning Demos. Your team will take turns giving three-minute tours of their favorite solutions: from other products, from different domains, and from within your own company. This exercise is about finding raw materials, not about copying your competitors. We’ve found limited benefit in looking at products from the same industry. Time and time again, the ideas that spark the best solutions come from similar problems in different environments.

  Blue Bottle wanted to help customers find coffee they’d love. But coffee beans all look alike, so photos wouldn’t be helpful. To find useful solutions, the team did Lightning Demos of websites selling everything from clothes to wine, looking for ways to describe sensory details such as flavor, aroma, and texture.

  In the end, it was a chocolate-bar wrapper that provided the most useful idea. Tcho is a chocolate manufacturer in Berkeley, California. Printed on the wrapper of every Tcho bar is a simple flavor wheel with just six words: Bright, Fruity, Floral, Earthy, Nutty, and Chocolatey. When Blue Bottle looked at that wheel, they got inspired, and when we sketched, someone repurposed the idea as a simple flavor vocabulary for describing Blue Bottle’s coffee beans:

  In Friday’s test, and later, at the new online store, customers loved the simple descriptions. It’s a prime example of finding inspiration outside your domain (and yet another reason to be grateful for chocolate).

  Sometimes, the best way to broaden your search is to look inside your own organization. Great solutions often come along at the wrong time, and the sprint can be a perfect opportunity to rejuvenate them. Also look for ideas that are in progress but unfinished—and even old ideas that have been abandoned. In Savioke’s sprint, an unfinished design for the robot’s eyes became the heart of the Relay’s personality.

  Savioke wanted to avoid the expectations of fictional robots who can carry on conversations and think independently. Both Steve, the CEO, and Adrian, the head designer, were convinced they could convey the right feeling with just a pair of eyes. So on Tuesday morning of our sprint with Savioke, we spent an hour looking at eyes. We reviewed the eyes of robots in movies. We reviewed the eyes of animated characters. One stood out: a nontalking cartoon creature from the Japanese movie My Neighbor Totoro, who conveyed a peaceful expression with a placid, slow-moving gaze.

  But the eyes that won our hearts had been there all along. Adrian showed us a variety of styles he had created long before the sprint. One design had the peaceful manner of the Totoro creature, combined with a simple visual style that perfectly fit the robot’s aesthetic. In Friday’s test, those simple blinking eyes conveyed a friendly personality, without promising conversation.

  Like Savioke, you and your team should look far afield and close to home in your search for existing solutions. If you do, you’re sure to uncover surprising and useful ideas.

  Lightning Demos

  Lightning Demos are pretty informal. Here’s how they work:

  Make a list

  Ask everyone on your team to come up with a list of products or services to review for inspiring solutions. (Coming up with these lists on the spot is easier than it sounds—but if you like, you can assign it as homework on Monday night.) Remind people to think outside of your industry or field, and to consider inspiration from within the company. In Flatiron’s sprint, the team looked at products in the medical field, such as websites for clinical trials and software that analyzed DNA. But they also looked at similar problems in different fields. They looked at tools for filtering email, task apps that sorted to-dos, management software that sorted projects and deadlines, and even the way airlines let passengers configure flight notifications. Finally, they looked at experimental projects that their own engineers had built, but not quite finished.

  Everything you review should contain something good you can learn from. It’s not helpful to review crummy products. After a few minutes of thinking, everyone should narrow down to his or her top one or two products. Write the collected list on the whiteboard. It’s time to begin the demos.

  Give three-minute demos

  One at a time, the person who suggested each product gives a tour—showing the whole team what’s so cool about it. It’s a good idea to keep a timer going: Each tour should be around three minutes long. (In case you’re wondering, yes, you can use laptops, phones, and other devices for these tours. We like to connect them to a big screen so everyone can easily see.)

  Capture big ideas as you go

  Your three-minute Lightning Demos will go by quickly, and you don’t want to rely on short-term memory to keep track of all the good ideas. Remember the “Always be capturing” mantra and take notes on the whiteboard as you go. Start by asking the person who’s giving the tour, “What’s the big idea here that might be useful?” Then make a quick drawing of that inspiring component, write a simple headline above it, and note the source underneath.

  For example, someone from the Flatiron team thought it would be interesting to see how comments worked in Google spreadsheets, in case we wanted to add commenting to our clinical trial matching tool. We quickly demonstrated the software, wrote the big idea (“Inline Commenting”), and jotted a quick drawing:

  These notes are just to jog your memory later in the day, so they don’t have to be fancy or detailed. We usually end up with a whiteboard full of ideas, such as this one from Flatiron’s sprint:

  Flatiron found plenty of interesting elements, but in the end they discarded most of them. If you record on the whiteboard as you go, you don’t have to decide which ideas should be discarded and which are worth remixing and improving. You can figure that out later, when you sketch—a much more efficient use of your energy. For now, don’t make decisions and don’t debate. Just capture anything that might be useful.

  By the end of your Lightning Demos, you should have a whiteboard full of ten to twenty ideas. That’s enough to make sure you’ve captured each person’s best inspiration—but it’s a small enough set that you won’t be overwhelmed when you start to sketch. Like the ideas on Flatiron’s list, most won’t turn into anything, but one or two may inspire a great solution. If you look hard enough, you can usually find your blotting paper.

  • • •

  When you combine the ideas you just captured with Monday’s map, your sprint questions, and your How Might We notes, you’ve got a wealth of raw material. In the afternoon, you’ll turn that raw material into solutions. But before you do, you need to form a quick strategy. Should your team split up to tackle different parts of the problem, or should you all focus on the same spot?

  Blue Bottle Coffee had one specific target for their sprint: helping customers choose beans. But there were several smaller pieces of the website that were involved: the home page, the list of coffees, and the shopping cart. Without a plan, every person in the sprint might sketch the same part—say, the home page—leaving Blue Bottle without enough ideas for a whole prototype. So they divided up. Each person picked a spot, then the team checked the distribution on the map (page 102).

  As you can see, the distribution wasn’t even, but the team was spread out enough to ensure there would be at least a couple of solutions for each important part.

  Divide or swarm

  Should you divide the problem? Take a good look at your map and have a quick team discussion. If you’ve picked a super-focused target, it might be fine to skip assignments and have the whole team swarm the same part of your problem. If there are several key pieces to cover, you should divide up.

  If you do decide to divide up, the easiest approach is to ask each person to write down the part he or she is most interested in. Then go around the room and mark each person’s name next to the piece of the map that person wants to tackle in the sketches. If you end up with too many people on one spot and not enough on another, ask for volunteers to switch.

  Once each person knows his or her assignment, it’s time to get yourself some lunch. You’ll need energy for
the afternoon, because after all of your preparation, you’re finally going to get a chance to sketch some solutions.

  Wait a minute. Did somebody say “sketch”?

  9

  Sketch

  Serah Giarusso, Blue Bottle Coffee’s customer support lead, looked uneasy. And she wasn’t the only one. James Freeman, the CEO, furrowed his brow.

  It was Tuesday afternoon of Blue Bottle’s sprint. Sunlight made rectangles on the carpet. Somewhere on the street below, a car honked. And there, in the middle of the sprint room, on a coffee table, was the source of the team’s consternation: a stack of paper, a dozen clipboards, and a paper cup filled with black pens.

  Somebody cleared his throat. It was Byard Duncan, Blue Bottle’s communications manager. As everyone turned, he cracked a sheepish smile.

  “So . . . ,” he said. “What if I can’t draw?”

  * * *

  On Tuesday afternoon, it’s time to come up with solutions. But there will be no brainstorming; no shouting over one another; no deferring judgment so wacky ideas can flourish. Instead, you’ll work individually, take your time, and sketch.

  Even though we’re total tech nerds, we’re believers in the importance of starting on paper. It’s a great equalizer. Everyone can write words, draw boxes, and express his or her ideas with the same clarity. If you can’t draw (or rather, if you think you can’t draw), don’t freak out. Plenty of people worry about putting pen to paper, but anybody—absolutely anybody—can sketch a great solution.

  To show you what we’re talking about, let’s take a look at one of the sketches that came out of Blue Bottle Coffee’s sprint—a solution called “The Mind Reader.” Each sticky note represents one page on Blue Bottle’s website.

  The big idea behind “The Mind Reader” was to organize the online store the same way a barista might talk with a customer. As you can see in the three frames, this solution leads with a welcome, then asks how the customer prepares coffee at home, before offering recommendations and a brewing guide. There’s a lot of complexity to the idea, but the drawing itself was straightforward: mostly boxes and text, the kind of thing anyone can draw.

  Later in the week, the team made a realistic prototype based on “The Mind Reader,” with details filled in from some of the other sketches. The prototype is on page 106.

  On Friday, when shown to real customers, “The Mind Reader” was remarkably effective. Customers grew confident in the quality of the coffee as they clicked through the website. They found beans they wanted to order. They described the prototype as “way better” than competing retailers and mentioned that “clearly, these people know coffee.” It was the big winner of Friday’s test, and it became the foundation for Blue Bottle’s new website.

  A solution from Blue Bottle Coffee’s sprint. Each sticky note represents one screen.

  So, who sketched that solution? It wasn’t a designer, an architect, or an illustrator. It was Byard Duncan, the Man Who Couldn’t Draw.

  See, Tuesday afternoon is about sketching, but more importantly, it’s about solutions. When your team evaluates these sketches on Wednesday to decide which are best, and when you test your prototype on Friday, it will be the quality of the solutions that matters, not the artistry of the drawings from which they came.

  The power of sketching

  Imagine you’ve got a great idea. You’ve been thinking about it for weeks. You go to work, describe the idea to your teammates, and . . . they just stare at you. Maybe you aren’t explaining it well. Maybe the timing isn’t right. For whatever reason, they just can’t picture it. Totally frustrating, right? It’s about to get worse.

  Now imagine your boss suggests an alternative idea. It just popped into his head, and you can tell right away that the idea isn’t thought out and won’t work. But all your teammates nod their heads! Maybe it’s because the boss’s idea is vague and each person is interpreting it in his or her own way. Maybe everyone is just supporting him because he’s the boss. Either way, it’s game over.

  Okay, come back to reality. That was an imaginary scenario, but it’s the sort of thing that happens when people make decisions about abstract ideas. Because abstract ideas lack concrete detail, it’s easy for them to be undervalued (like your idea) or overvalued (like the boss’s idea).

  On Tuesday, we’re not asking you to sketch because we think it’s fun. We’re asking you to sketch because we’re convinced it’s the fastest and easiest way to transform abstract ideas into concrete solutions. 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.

  Work alone together

  We know that individuals working alone generate better solutions than groups brainstorming out loud.I Working alone offers time to do research, find inspiration, and think about the problem. And the pressure of responsibility that comes with working alone often spurs us to our best work.

  But working alone isn’t easy. The individual has to not only solve the problem, but also invent a strategy for solving the problem. If you’ve ever sat down to work on a big project and wound up reading the news instead, you know how hard this work can be.

  In our sprints, we work alone, but we follow specific steps to help everyone focus and make progress. When each person sketches alone, he or she will have time for deep thought. When the whole team works in parallel, they’ll generate competing ideas, without the groupthink of a group brainstorm. You might call this method “work alone together.”

  The sketches you create on Tuesday will become the fuel for the rest of the sprint. On Wednesday, you’ll critique everyone’s sketches and pick the best ones. On Thursday, you’ll turn them into a prototype. And on Friday you’ll test the ideas with customers. That’s a lot of mileage out of a few drawings, and it might make you think we’re expecting a work of genius straight out of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook. Not so. To put the power of the sketch in perspective, let’s check out a few more solutions from the Blue Bottle sprint:

  Three solution sketches from Blue Bottle Coffee’s sprint.

  As you can see, these sketches are detailed, but they’re not works of art. Each sketch consists of words, boxes, and the occasional stick figure, drawn on normal printer paper and normal sticky notes with a normal pen.

  Simple, right? So . . . Okay, you’re all set. Go ahead and sketch a great solution!

  We’re just kidding. That blank sheet of paper always intimidates us. So, inspired by productivity expert David Allen, we break the process into steps. In his book Getting Things Done, Allen provides a smart strategy for daunting jobs. The secret, Allen writes, is not to think about the task as one monolithic effort (like “Pay taxes”), but instead to find the first small action needed to make progress (like “Collect tax paperwork”) and go from there.

  The four-step sketch

  When Jake first started running sprints, he tried to re-create his own most successful work sessions. He was most effective when he took time to “boot up” by reviewing key information, started his design work on paper, considered multiple variations, and then took time to create a detailed solution. And, since Jake is a world-class procrastinator, he was also most effective when under a tight deadline.

  The four-step sketch contains each of these important elements. You’ll start with twenty minutes to “boot up” by taking notes on the goals, opportunities, and inspiration you’ve collected around the room. Then you’ll have another twenty minutes to write down rough ideas. Next, it’s time to limber up and explore alternative ideas with a rapid sketching exercise called Crazy 8s. And finally, you’ll take thirty minutes or more to draw your solution sketch—a single well-formed concept with all the details worked out.

  1. Notes

  This first step is super-easy. You and your team will walk around the room, look at the whiteboards, and take notes. These notes are a “greatest hit
s” from the past twenty-four hours of the sprint. They’re a way to refresh your memory before you commit to a solution.

  First, copy down the long-term goal. Next, look at the map, the How Might We questions, and the notes from your Lightning Demos. Write down anything that looks useful. Don’t worry about coming up with any new ideas, and don’t worry about being neat. These notes are for your eyes only.

  Give your team twenty minutes to take notes. During this time, feel free to look up reference material on your laptop or phone. Sometimes people want to take a second look at something they saw in the morning’s Lightning Demos or research some specific details from their company’s own product or website. Whatever the purpose, this moment is a rare exception to the no-devices rule. And don’t forget to reexamine old ideas. Remember, they’re often the strongest solutions of all.

  At the end of notes time, the team closes their laptops and phones. Take another three minutes to review what you wrote down. Circle the notes that stand out. They’ll help you in the next step.

  2. Ideas

  Now that everyone has a pile of notes, it’s time to switch into idea mode. In this step, each person will jot down rough ideas, filling a sheet of paper with doodles, sample headlines, diagrams, stick figures doing stuff—anything that gives form to his or her thoughts.

  It doesn’t matter if these ideas are messy or incomplete. Just like the notes, these pages won’t be shared with the whole team. Think of them as a “scratch pad.” And there’s no wrong way to do it. As long as everyone is thinking and writing stuff on paper, you’re on the golden path.