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

Execution can be difficult. What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life?

My best work happened when I had a big challenge and not quite enough time.

magic ingredients—a focus on individual work, time to prototype, and an inescapable deadline? I decided to call it a design “sprint.”

On Monday, you’ll map out the problem and pick an important place to focus. On Tuesday, you’ll sketch competing solutions on paper. On Wednesday, you’ll make difficult decisions and turn your ideas into a testable hypothesis. On Thursday, you’ll hammer out a realistic prototype. And on Friday, you’ll test it with real live humans.

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.

The Decider must be involved in the sprint. If you, dear reader, are the Decider, clear your schedule and get in the room. If you’re not, you must convince the Decider to join.

The Decider should have been in the room.

First, the team cleared a full week on their calendars. From Monday to Friday, they canceled all meetings, set the “out of office” responders on their email, and completely focused on one question: How should their robot behave around humans?

To build the perfect sprint team, first you’re going to need a Danny Ocean: someone with authority to make decisions. That person is the Decider, a role so important we went ahead and capitalized it. The Decider is the official decision-maker for the project.

On Tuesday, the team switched from problem to solutions.