by Jake Knapp
Luckily, the solution to all these problems is simple: Watch the interviews together. It’s much faster, because everyone is absorbing the results at once. Your conclusions will be better as a group, since you have seven brains working together. You’ll avoid problems of credibility and trust, because each sprinter can see the results with his or her own eyes. And at the end of the day, your team can make an informed decision about what to do next—the results of the interviews (and the sprint) are still clear in everyone’s short-term memory.
This wonderful teamwork doesn’t happen by itself, but with a few simple steps, you can create it every time. Here’s what to do:
Take interview notes as a group
Before the first interview begins, draw a grid on a large whiteboard in the sprint room. Create five columns—one for each customer you’ll be interviewing—and a few rows—one for each prototype, or section of the prototype, or sprint question you’re trying to answer.
Distribute sticky notes and whiteboard markers to everyone in the room. Give everyone instructions for how to take notes during the interviews: “When you hear or see something interesting, write it down on a sticky note. You can write down quotes, observations, or your interpretation of what happened.”
Use a different color marker depending on the note: green for positive, red for negative, black for neutral. If you only have black markers, write a plus or minus in the corner, or leave it blank for neutral.
During the interviews, the room should be quiet. The interview itself is a time for careful listening and detailed note-taking, not boisterous reactions or problem solving on the spot. It’s also important to be respectful of the customer being interviewed. Even though the customer can’t hear you (the video should stream “one way”) keep in mind that if she struggles with your prototype, it’s your problem, not the customer’s.
At the end of each interview, collect the notes and stick them to the whiteboard. Put them into the correct row and column, but don’t worry about any other organizing just yet. Then, take a break. Focusing and taking notes for five hours is tiring, so get some downtime between each interview.
• • •
By Friday afternoon, five target customers had tried the two Slack prototypes, and the whiteboard was covered with sticky notes. We gathered around to organize them and look for patterns.
We started by looking at the reactions to “The Tenacious Tour,” the solution that featured a straightforward, step-by-step guide to Slack. There was still general confusion about how Slack worked with email, but four out of five customers had understood the overall value—a huge success. Just two of the five had tried to sign up, but there appeared to be many easy-to-fix problems that might improve that number. (One forehead slapper: the “Tour” sign-up button was too far down the page.) Everyone agreed: “The Tenacious Tour” wasn’t perfect, but it was way better than Slack’s current marketing.
Then we shifted our attention to the results for “Bot Team.” Customer by customer, we read the notes. It wasn’t pretty. The observations were dominated by comments like “She’s confused,” “Doesn’t seem better than email,” and “I’m not really sure what this is.” Only one person had enjoyed talking to the computer-controlled characters, and even that person was bewildered by the purpose of the software.
We’d all watched these interviews, of course, but as we looked at the notes, it sunk in: Stewart’s hunch had been wrong. That was a surprise—Stewart’s intuition was normally excellent—but it was also a relief. Building “Bot Team” and getting it right would have been a big, expensive undertaking. We had given the realistic prototype our best effort, and it had failed. Now the whole team felt confident about focusing elsewhere.
On the other hand, “The Tenacious Tour” looked promising. The pieces were there, and some of the problems would be easy to fix. The next step was obvious. To close the gap, Merci and her team would run another sprint.
• • •
The Slack team had hoped for a breakthrough success; instead they got mixed results. But there was good news: they knew “The Tenacious Tour” was an improvement, they knew “Bot Team” was trouble, and they knew they had to focus on the “Slack vs. email” question.
Turning a whiteboard full of sticky notes into a list of patterns and next steps may sound like alchemy, but when everyone has watched the interviews together, it’s straightforward.
Look for patterns
Ask the entire team to gather near the whiteboard. Everyone should stand close enough to read the sticky notes. Take about five minutes to silently review the notes; give each person a notepad and pen to write down patterns he or she sees. Look for patterns that show up with three or more customers. If only two customers reacted in the same way but it was an especially strong reaction, make note of that, too.
After five minutes looking for patterns individually, ask the team to share what they found and read the patterns aloud. On another whiteboard, list every pattern and label each one as positive, negative, or neutral. Once the patterns are listed, it’s time to make sense of the results.
Back to the future
On Monday, you came up with a list of sprint questions. These are the unknowns that stand between your team and your long-term goal. Now that you’ve run your test and identified patterns in the results, it’s time to look back at those sprint questions. These questions will help you decide which patterns are most important, and also point you toward next steps.
Slack had two big sprint questions. First, they wondered, “Can we explain Slack to people who have never tried it?” After the sprint, the answer was “Yes . . . maybe.” “The Tenacious Tour” had done a decent job of explaining Slack. But Merci and the rest of the team weren’t satisfied with a “decent job.” They wanted to fix “The Tenacious Tour” and make it even better.
Their second question was “Can we help an individual understand Slack before their team joins?” Every team that adopts Slack starts with a single person. That person has to imagine what it will be like to use the software with a whole team before convincing his or her coworkers to join. The fake team in “Bot Team” was an attempt to solve this problem, and it was a failure. Still, Slack thought there might be a different way to approach this challenge on the marketing page. So they answered, “No . . . maybe,” and vowed to try again in their next sprint.
At the end of your own sprint, you’ll do the same. Review your long-term goal and sprint questions from Monday. You probably won’t answer every question, but like Slack, you’ll make progress.
After looking back, it’s usually easy to figure out the next step. The team can have a short discussion, and then (you guessed it) the Decider decides how to follow up.
A winner every time
Maybe the best part about a sprint is that you can’t lose. If you test your prototype with customers, you’ll win the best prize of all—the chance to learn, in just five days, whether you’re on the right track with your ideas. The results don’t follow a neat template. You can have efficient failures that are good news, flawed successes that need more work, and many other outcomes. Let’s look at how five teams interpreted their test results, and what they decided to do next.
Slack had two outcomes from their sprint. First, they had an efficient failure when they discovered that one solution didn’t work, saving months of engineering work and extraordinary cost. Their other prototype was a flawed success. Three weeks later, the team reconvened for a follow-up sprint to improve on “The Tenacious Tour.” They better explained how messaging worked. They improved their diagrams and clarified the guide. When they tested the improved prototype, the results were stark: The new website was understood by five out of five customers, and Slack built and launched it afterward.
The robot makers Savioke had a sprint with a rare outcome—virtually every idea we tested was successful. Afterward, the team poured their efforts into bringing those ideas to market, and it paid off in the form of great press coverage and new ho
tel customers.
Blue Bottle Coffee tested three competing prototypes in a classic Rumble. One idea was an efficient failure; the other two were flawed successes. Blue Bottle took the best elements from those two winners and merged them into a website that dramatically increased sales.
Flatiron’s sprint question was a big one: Would cancer clinics change their workflow to use a new tool? The stakes were high. If they convinced research coordinators to switch, they could enroll more patients in clinical trials. Working together, we prototyped new software, then tested it with research coordinators. The result was an exciting flawed success. The coordinators didn’t love every part of the prototype, but their enthusiastic reaction to the concept gave Flatiron the confidence to continue designing and developing the software. Six months later, clinics were using the real thing to match patients to trials.
Many times, a successful test is not the end of the process, but the beginning. In 2014 we ran a sprint with Medium, a writing platform created by Twitter founder Ev Williams. Ev and his team had several ideas for improving Medium’s commenting and discussion tools, and after Friday’s test, there were several flawed successes worth pursuing. Medium’s engineering team spent the next week building two of the strongest ideas from the sprint. Then, as a test, they launched them to a fraction of Medium’s users. It was a follow-up sprint with large-scale data. (It turned out that both ideas increased discussion.)
Many companies want to launch quickly so they can get data from hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people. That large-scale data is great. But in the rush to get there, it’s easy to miss the opportunity to gather small-scale data early, when there’s still time to course-correct. As Medium’s story illustrates, you can have the best of both worlds. You can talk to your customers, and you can learn from large-scale data.
Made for people
When you get into a regular rhythm of listening to customers, it can remind you why you’re working so hard in the first place. Every interview draws you and your team closer to the people you’re trying to help with your product or service.
If you continue running sprints, and if you’re true to your vision, the day will come when you’ll close that gap. You’ll be watching some Friday’s test, and you’ll see people understand your idea, believe it will improve their lives, and ask the Interviewer how to buy it.
In these moments, it’s like Mission Control cheering when the Apollo 13 module safely splashes down in the Pacific. It’s like the thieves from Ocean’s Eleven watching the fountain after the heist, or Gandalf swooping in on a giant eagle to rescue Frodo and Sam. It’s amazing. It’s what work should be about—not wasting time in endless meetings, then seeking camaraderie in a team-building event at a bowling alley—but working together to build something that matters to real people. This is the best use of your time. This is a sprint.
Liftoff
It’s a freezing December day, overcast and blustery. Two cofounders lean close to each other and exchange a few words. One week ago, their latest prototype failed, but they think they know why. They’ve made a few fixes, and this morning, both men feel confident. After more than three years of building and testing, their crazy long-term goal might be in reach.
A cutting twenty-mile-per-hour wind curls fine spray off the sand. Most people would say the weather sucks, but the two men hardly seem to notice. If their prototype fails, they’ll still learn something, and they know that only five people will see it happen. They make the final preparations and check in with the observers. It’s time to begin.
And it works. For twelve glorious seconds, everything goes right. Their second test is another success, and the third. Hours after beginning, they run the fourth and final test of the day, and boom! Four-for-four. In the last test, the prototype works for a full fifty-nine seconds, and the cofounders are elated.
It’s 1903, and Orville and Wilbur Wright have just become the first humans to fly a powered aircraft.
• • •
It’s easy to think of the Wright brothers as otherworldly historic figures whose famous flight was an unparalleled work of genius. But as a reader of this book, you might recognize the methods and hard work that got them off the ground.
The Wright brothers started with an ambitious, practically crazy goal. At first, they didn’t know how to get there. So they figured out which big questions they needed to answer. In 1899, the Wrights did their own version of Ask the Experts by corresponding with others who had tried to fly and writing to the Smithsonian Institute for technical papers on aerodynamics. They found existing ideas by researching kites and hang gliders, observing birds, and studying boat propellers. Then they combined, remixed, and improved.
For the next few years, they made progress by staying in a prototype mindset. One step at a time, they isolated challenges and broke through obstacles. Could they get enough lift? Would a person be able to keep an aircraft steady? Could they add an engine? Along the way, they crashed. A lot. But each time, they used a new prototype purpose-built to answer one specific question. They remained fixed on the long-term goal, and they kept going.
Sound familiar? The Wright brothers didn’t use sprints to invent the airplane. But they used a similar toolkit. And they used it, and used it, and used it. Forming a question, building a prototype, and running a test became a way of life.
Sprints can create those habits in your company. After your first sprint, you might notice a shift in the way your team works. You’ll look for ways to turn discussions into testable hypotheses. You’ll look for ways to answer big questions, not someday, but this week. You’ll build confidence in one another’s expertise and in your collective ability to make progress toward ambitious goals.
The phrase “ambitious goal” might sound like corporate-speak or the headline of a bad inspirational poster. But we shouldn’t be embarrassed to have ambitious goals at work. Each of us has only so much time in a day, in a year, and in our lives. When you go to work in the morning, you should know that your time and effort will count. You should have confidence that you’re making a difference in real people’s lives. With the techniques in this book, you can bring focus to the work that matters.
Since 2012 we’ve run more than one hundred sprints with startups. That’s a big number, but it pales in comparison to the number of people who have taken the sprint process and used it on their own to solve problems, reduce risk, and make better decisions at work.
We’ve heard about sprints in classrooms. At Columbia University in New York City, professor R. A. Farrokhnia wanted to teach his business and engineering students how to run a sprint, but—with the typical class schedule—there was no way to get a solid week of time. So he hacked the system. Professor Farrokhnia found a free week at the end of summer term and organized an experimental “block week” class that would stretch across the full five days. The typical classroom at Columbia is arranged in auditorium seating, not ideal for a sprint, so he tracked down classrooms being remodeled and hauled in some whiteboards. The sprint was on.
In Seattle, Washington, two high school math teachers named Nate Chipps and Taylor Dunn used a sprint to teach their students about probability. The students created high-fidelity prototypes of a board game in one class period. In the next class, they watched as their peers played the prototype game, making notes about which ideas worked and which didn’t. By the time they turned in their final assignment (a revised version of the game), they’d observed how the probability principles operated in real life.
We’ve heard about sprints in all kinds of contexts. Legendary consulting firm McKinsey & Company began running sprints, as did advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy. The sprint process is used at government agencies and nonprofits, as well as at major tech firms, at companies like Airbnb and Facebook. We’ve heard sprint stories from Munich, Johannesburg, Warsaw, Budapest, São Paulo, Montreal, Amsterdam, Singapore, and even Wisconsin.
It’s become clear that sprints are versatile, and that when teams follow
the process, it’s transformative. We hope you’ve got the itch to go run your own first sprint—at work, in a volunteer organization, at school, or even to try a change in your personal life.
You can run a sprint anytime you’re not sure what to do, or struggling to get started, or dealing with a high-stakes decision. The best sprints are used to solve important problems, so we encourage you to pick a big fight.
Throughout the book, you learned a handful of unconventional ideas about how to work faster and smarter:
• Instead of jumping right into solutions, take your time to map out the problem and agree on an initial target. Start slow so you can go fast.
• Instead of shouting out ideas, work independently to make detailed sketches of possible solutions. Group brainstorming is broken, but there is a better way.
• Instead of abstract debate and endless meetings, use voting and a Decider to make crisp decisions that reflect your team’s priorities. It’s the wisdom of the crowd without the groupthink.
• Instead of getting all the details right before testing your solution, create a façade. Adopt the “prototype mindset” so you can learn quickly.
• And instead of guessing and hoping you’re on the right track—all the while investing piles of money and months of time into your ideas—test your prototype with target customers and get their honest reactions.
At GV, we invest in startups because we want them to change the world for the better. We want you to change the world, too. To that end, we’ll leave you with one more thought about the Wright brothers, this one from their friend John T. Daniels, who was present at their famous flight on December 17, 1903.