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

Sprints are most successful with a mix of people: the core people who work on execution along with a few extra experts with specialized knowledge.

And if your Decider doesn’t believe the sprint to be worthwhile? If she won’t even stop by for a cameo? Hold up! That’s a giant red flag. You might have the wrong project.

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.

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

Imagine we travel into the future and our project failed. What might have caused that?

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.)

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

It’s a “greatest hits” of business strategy, innovation, behavioral science, design, and more—packaged into a step-by-step process that any team can use.