by Jake Knapp
Your ideas might look like this, or they might not. As long as you’re writing things down, you’re on the right track.
Take twenty minutes for idea generation. When you’re finished, spend an extra three minutes to review and circle your favorite ideas. In the next step, you’ll refine those promising elements.
3. Crazy 8s
Crazy 8s is a fast-paced exercise. Each person takes his or her strongest ideas and rapidly sketches eight variations in eight minutes. Crazy 8s forces you to push past your first reasonable solutions and make them better, or at least consider alternatives.
And before you get the wrong idea, the “crazy” in Crazy 8s refers to the pace, not the nature of the ideas. Forget about the traditional brainstorm advice to be goofy. We want you to focus on good ideas—the ones you believe will work and help you hit your goals—and use Crazy 8s to tweak and expand on those good ideas.
Each person begins Crazy 8s with a single sheet of letter-size paper. Fold the paper in half three times, so you have eight panels. Set a timer to sixty seconds. Hit “start” and begin sketching—you have sixty seconds per section, for a total of eight minutes to create eight miniature sketches. Go fast and be messy: As with the notes and ideas, Crazy 8s will not be shared with the team.
The exercise works best when you sketch several variations of the same idea. Take a favorite piece from your ideas sheet and ask yourself, “What would be another good way to do this?” Keep going until you can’t think of any more variations, then look back at your ideas sheet, choose a new idea, and start riffing on it instead.
Crazy 8s is also a great writing exercise. If your idea contains words or marketing headlines or any other bits of text, you can use Crazy 8s to improve your phrasing. As you’ll see in the next step, writing is often the most important component of the solution sketch.
Crazy 8s from the Blue Bottle Coffee sprint. The frames show experiments with phrasing (“hand pour coffee” vs. “pour over coffee”), navigation, and page layout.
Sometimes Crazy 8s leads to a revelation. You might come away with several new ways of looking at your ideas. Other times, it feels less productive. Sometimes that first idea really is the best idea. Either way, Crazy 8s helps you consider alternatives—and also serves as an excellent warm-up for the main event.
The GV team sketches with the founders of a startup called Move Loot.
4. Solution sketch
Remember how we kept saying, “Don’t worry, nobody’s going to look at this”? That time is over. The solution sketch is each person’s best idea, put down on paper in detail. Each one is an opinionated hypothesis for how to solve the challenge at hand. These sketches will be looked at—and judged!—by the rest of the team. They need to be detailed, thought-out, and easy to understand.
Each sketch will be a three-panel storyboard drawn on sticky notes, showing what your customers see as they interact with your product or service. We like this storyboard format because products and services are more like movies than snapshots. Customers don’t just appear in one freeze frame and then disappear in the next. Instead, they move through your solution like actors in a scene. Your solution has to move right along with them.
We usually use the three-panel format, but there are exceptions. Sometimes, a sprint will be focused on a single part of the customer experience. For instance: the home page, the front page of a medical report, the office lobby, or even the cover of a book. If your team has a “single scene” challenge, you might want to create a full-page sketch so you can show even more detail.
With either format, there are a few important rules to keep in mind:
1. Make it self-explanatory
On Wednesday morning, you’ll post your sketch on the wall for everyone to see. It needs to explain itself. Think of this sketch as the first test for your idea. If no one can understand it in sketch form, it’s not likely to do any better when it’s polished.
2. Keep it anonymous
Don’t put your name on your sketch, and be sure that everyone uses the same paper and the same black pens. On Wednesday, when you evaluate everyone’s sketch, this anonymity will make it much easier to critique and choose the best ideas.
3. Ugly is okay
Your sketch does not have to be fancy (boxes, stick figures, and words are fine), but it does have to be detailed, thoughtful, and complete. Be as neat as you can, but don’t worry if you’re not much of an artist. However . . .
4. Words matter
We’ve used sprints with startups in all kinds of industries. One surprising constant: the importance of writing. Strong writing is especially necessary for software and marketing, where words often make up most of the screen. But choosing the right words is critical in every medium. So pay extra close attention to the writing in your sketch. Don’t use “lorem ipsum” or draw those squiggly lines that mean “text will go here.” That text will go a long way to explain your idea—so make it good and make it real!
5. Give it a catchy title
Since your name won’t be on your sketch, give it a title. Later, these titles will help you keep track of the different solutions as you’re reviewing and choosing. They’re also a way to draw attention to the big idea in your solution sketch. (Byard Duncan titled his “The Mind Reader,” partly for fun and partly to highlight the idea of making the perfect coffee match.)
Okay, get your paper ready. Refer to your notes, ideas, and Crazy 8s. Then uncap your pens, fasten your safety belts, and make sure your seat backs and tray tables are in their fully upright and locked positions. Your solution sketches are ready for takeoff.
A solution sketch from the Blue Bottle Coffee sprint. To understand how this idea works, read the notes from top to bottom—as you would a comic book: In the top frame, the customer reads a how-to guide for brewing coffee. In the second frame, she clicks on a link to recommended coffee beans. In the third frame, she finds details about the beans.
Here’s a single-sheet version of that same sketch from Blue Bottle’s sprint. Instead of a storyboard, the entire page portrays one screen of the online store in detail.
Each person is responsible for creating one solution sketch. If a few folks get inspired and want to sketch more than one, that’s okay, but don’t overdo it. Each additional sketch means more work reviewing and narrowing down on Wednesday. Not only that, but we’ve noticed that the first batch tend to be the strongest and there are diminishing returns beyond ten to twelve solution sketches. Thirty minutes should be enough time for everyone to finish one sketch.
Once everybody is finished, put the solution sketches in a pile, but resist the urge to look at them. You’ll only see them for the first time once, and you should save those fresh eyes for Wednesday.
FACILITATOR NOTES
Find Customers for Friday
On Monday or Tuesday, we start the process of finding customers for Friday’s test. That means one person needs to do some extra work outside of the sprint. It takes all week—but only an hour or two a day—to screen, select, and recruit the best matches. Ideally, someone besides the Facilitator should take responsibility for recruiting, since the Facilitator will be busy enough as it is.
There are two ways to find the right customers for your test. If you have fairly easy-to-find customers, you’ll use Craigslist. If you have hard-to-find customers, you’ll use your network.
Recruit customers with Craigslist
Most of the time, to recruit people who exactly match our target customer, we use Craigslist. We know it sounds crazy, but it works. It’s how we found perfect participants for our tests with Savioke and Blue Bottle Coffee—and dozens of other companies. The secret is to post a generic ad that will attract a broad audience, then link to a screener survey to narrow down to your target customers.
First, you’ll write your generic ad. You want to be sure you don’t reveal what you’re testing or the kind of customer you’re seeking. We offer a small stipend or token of appreciation—usually a $100 gift card—to
pique the interest of potential customers. Post in the “et cetera jobs” with something like this:
$100 customer research interviews on August 2 (San Francisco)
I’m scheduling 60-minute research interviews in San Francisco on Thursday, August 2. Selected participants who complete the interviews will receive $100 Amazon gift cards. Please complete this short questionnaire. Click here.
As you can see, this ad could be about anything—coffee, robots, coffee robots, whatever. A generic ad in a big city may attract hundreds of applicants, so with the right screener, you’ll be able to find five people who fit your customer profile.
Write a screener survey
The screener survey is a simple questionnaire for interested people to fill out. You’ll need to ask the right questions to find the right people. Start by writing down characteristics of the customers you want to test with, then translate those characteristics into something you can discover with your survey. Do the same thing for characteristics you want to exclude (for example, people with too much expertise in your industry).
Blue Bottle Coffee wanted to interview “coffee-drinking foodies.” To find these customers, we used measurable criteria like: they drink at least one cup of coffee per day, they read food-related blogs and magazines, and they eat at restaurants at least once per week. We excluded people who didn’t make coffee at home or drank coffee infrequently.
Next, write questions for every one of your criteria. It’s important to write questions that don’t reveal the “right” answers—some people will try to game the survey just so they can get the gift card. For example, rather than asking people whether they go to restaurants, ask: “In a typical week, how many times do you eat out?” Instead of asking if applicants read food blogs, try something like this: “Do you regularly read blogs or magazines dedicated to any of the following topics?
• Sports
• Food
• News
• Coffee
• Cocktails
• Parenting
• Gardening
• Cars
In each of these examples, we had a “right” answer in mind, but there was no way that the person filling out the survey could predict what it was.
After you’ve turned your criteria into questions, create your survey. We always use Google Forms—it’s easy to set up, and the responses go right into a Google spreadsheet that you can sort and filter.
Once your screener survey is ready and your ad is live on Craigslist, the responses will start rolling in. Look through the survey results and pick out customers who match your criteria. By Wednesday afternoon, you can start getting in touch with people and scheduling your interviews for Friday.
* * *
Craigslist works surprisingly well for finding customers who aren’t familiar with your company. But what about existing customers or “hard-to-find” professionals with uncommon jobs? You’ll need a different strategy.
Recruit customers through your network
Finding existing customers is generally pretty easy. You probably already have the means to reach them—consider email newsletters, in-store posters, Twitter, Facebook, or even your own website.
The hard-to-find customers are not actually so hard to find, either. Here’s why: If you’re an oncology company, you probably know some oncologists. If you’re working in finance, you probably know other people who work in finance. And so on. Your sales or business-development teams can help you get in touch. And if that fails, you can reach out to professional associations, community groups, student groups, or your personal network. When we interviewed restaurant managers for a sprint back in 2011, we got in touch with the membership director of a local restaurant association.
Whether you’re seeking out hard-to-find customers, existing customers, or recruiting a broad audience on Craigslist, there’s one part of the process that shouldn’t change. Make sure potential interview candidates match your screening criteria. With only five interviews, it’s important to talk to the right people.
The entire sprint depends on getting good data in Friday’s test, so whoever takes charge of recruiting your customers should take the job seriously. Even though this recruiting happens behind the scenes, it’s as important as the team activities. For a sample screening survey and other online resources, take a look at thesprintbook.com.
* * *
I. Jake learned the trouble with group brainstorms the hard way, but plenty of researchers have come to the same conclusion. One example is a study at Yale in 1958. Individuals competed with brainstorming groups to solve the same problem. The individuals dominated. They generated more solutions, and their solutions were independently judged to be higher quality and more original. In your face, group brainstorming! And yet . . . over half a century later, teams are still running group brainstorms. Perhaps it’s because “brainstorm” is such a catchy name.
Wednesday
By Wednesday morning, you and your team will have a stack of solutions. That’s great, but it’s also a problem. You can’t prototype and test them all—you need one solid plan. In the morning, you’ll critique each solution, and decide which ones have the best chance of achieving your long-term goal. Then, in the afternoon, you’ll take the winning scenes from your sketches and weave them into a storyboard: a step-by-step plan for your prototype.
10
Decide
You know those meetings. The ones that go on and on, wandering off on tangents, burning up time and energy. The ones that end in a decision nobody’s happy about—or worse, end without any decision at all. We’re not anthropologists, but we have observed (and engaged in) a lot of human behavior in the office environment. Left to our own devices, we humans tend to debate this way:
Okay, we’re exaggerating, but not that much. You might recognize this kind of back-and-forth. Someone comes up with a solution, the group critiques it, someone tries to explain the details, and then someone else has a new idea:
These discussions are frustrating, because humans have limited short-term memory and limited energy for decision-making. When we jump from option to option, it’s difficult to hold important details in our heads. On the other hand, when we debate one idea for too long, we get worn out—like a judge at a baking contest who fills up on apple pie before tasting anything else.
Normally, if we want the benefit of everyone’s perspective, we’re forced to endure these slogs. But not in a sprint. We’ve structured Wednesday to do one thing at a time—and do it well. We’ll evaluate solutions all at once, critique all at once, and then make a decision all at once. Kind of like this:
Your goal for Wednesday morning is to decide which solutions to prototype. Our motto for these decisions is “unnatural but efficient.” Instead of meandering, your team’s conversations will follow a script. This structure is socially awkward, but logical—if you feel like Spock from Star Trek, you’re doing it right. It’s all designed to get the most out of the team’s expertise, accommodate for our human strengths and shortcomings, and make it as easy as possible to come to a great decision.
To show you what Wednesday looks like, we’d like to introduce you to another startup. This company makes business software, but they didn’t start out that way. In fact, their first product was a video game called Glitch.
Glitch was unusual: a multiplayer game with no combat. Instead of fighting, the game encouraged players to collaborate, solve problems, and chat together in groups. Unfortunately—say what you will about society—this unusual game with its emphasis on good behavior never caught on with a big audience.
When it became obvious that Glitch wasn’t going to be a hit, the company did something strange. Instead of making a different game or closing down, they shifted their efforts to a side project: a messaging system they had originally built for their own use. The startup’s founder, Stewart Butterfield, had a hunch that this messaging system could be useful to other companies, too. So they launched it to the public, and named it Slack
.
Technology companies went bonkers for Slack. A year after launch, more than 500,000 people on more than 60,000 teams used Slack every single day. For workplace software, this kind of growth was unheard of. When Slack announced they were the fastest growing business app of all time, the press agreed.
Slack was growing fast, but—like any team—they had challenges. One of those challenges was maintaining their rapid growth. Many of the teams adopting Slack were at tech companies, which are often more willing to try new software. But there were only so many tech companies in the world. To keep expanding, Slack needed to get better at explaining their product to all kinds of businesses. It was a tricky problem. On the surface, Slack was simple: a messaging app for the workplace. But under the surface, the story was more complicated.
Slack had become so popular because it changed the way teams functioned. Teams started by using the service to send instant messages to one another, and then often abandoned email in favor of it. But Slack wasn’t just for one-to-one messages. When a team used Slack, all of its employees were in a chat room, so they could communicate as a group. Soon, Slack replaced check-in meetings and phone calls. Teams used it to manage projects and stay up to speed on what the whole company was doing. They connected other software and services to Slack, so that everything was in one place. Slack became the hub for all of their work, and that efficiency and connectedness somehow made work feel good. As a reporter for the New York Times—one of the workplaces that had adopted Slack—put it, “I have a feeling of intimacy with coworkers on the other side of the country that is almost fun. That’s a big deal, for a job.”