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

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

What questions do we want to answer in this sprint?

we got great ideas from the people you’d expect, like the roboticists and the head of design. But one of the most important contributors turned out to be Izumi Yaskawa. Izumi wasn’t part of the team that built the robot, but as Savioke’s head of business development, she knew more than anyone about how hotels operated and what they wanted from the

We used voting and structured discussion to decide quickly, quietly, and without argument.

An important part of this exercise is rephrasing assumptions and obstacles into questions.

Good ideas are hard to find. And even the best ideas face an uncertain path to real-world success. That’s true whether you’re running a startup, teaching a class, or working inside a large organization.

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.

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.

To meet our long-term goal, what has to be true?

The sprint is GV’s unique five-day process for answering crucial questions through prototyping and testing ideas with customers.