Sprint Notes

Overview 

Challenge: Solve the surface first. It’s where your product or service meets customers. 

Get a Decider (or two) 

• To build a team with diverse specialities, you need someone with authority to make decisions. They understand the problem in depth, often have strong opinions, and criteria to help find the right solution

• Other traits involve understanding core values and vision, for instance, the chief product officer. Also must have a clear schedule. 

• If a decider is reluctant, try one or more of these arguments: 

1. Rapid Progress

• Emphasize the amount of progress you’ll make in your sprint: In just one week, you’ll have a realistic prototype. Some Deciders are not excited about customer tests (at least, until they see one firsthand), but almost everyone loves fast results.

2. It’s an Experiment

• Consider your first sprint an experiment. When it’s over, the Decider can help evaluate how effective it was. We’ve found that many people who are hesitant to change the way they work are open to a onetime experiment.

3. Explain the Tradeoffs

• Show the Decider a list of big meetings and work items you and your team will miss during the sprint week. Tell her which items you will skip and which you will postpone, and why.

4. It’s About Focus

• Be honest about your motivations. If the quality of your work is suffering because your team’s regular work schedule is too scattered, say so. Tell the Decider that instead of “doing an okay job on everything, you’ll do an excellent job on one thing.

• If a decider can’t spare a full week, invite them to join at a few key points:

  • On Monday, they can share their perspective on the problem

  • On Wednesday, they can help choose the right idea to test

  • On Friday, they can stop by to see how customers react to the prototype

  • Needs to decide a delegate in the room CLARIFY

Building the ideal Sprint team

• The ideal size would be seven or fewer people that have a deep expertise in their perspective fields and are excited about the project. Be sure to include engineers, designers, product managers, business development (who understand the field and customers), and so on. 

• Mix it up from the people that usually work together: the core people who work on execution along with a few extra experts with specialized knowledge. 

• If you happen to have more than seven people, schedule the extras to come in as “experts” for a short visit Monday afternoon. During their visit, they can tell the rest of the team what they know and share their opinions (30min for each expert). It’s an efficient way to boost diversity of perspectives while keeping your team small and nimble. 

Check the whiteboards before the Sprint

• Use BIG whiteboards to solve problems. As humans, our short-term memory isn’t all that good, but our spatial memory is awesome.

• Tim Brown, CEO of the design firm IDEO, writes in his book Change by Design “The simultaneous visibility of these project materials help us identify patterns and encourages creative synthesis to occur much more readily than when these resources are hidden away in file folders, notebooks, or Powerpoint decks.”

• At minimum, you need two whiteboards for space. You can use rolling whiteboards, IdeaPaint, or poster-size Post-it notes. 

List of supplies

• Sticky notes, markers, pens, Time Timers, and paper. Get some snacks (see at the end of the book)  

Time and Space

Scheduling

Convert schedules by starting at 10am and ending at 5pm, with an hour lunch in between. 

Monday

Structured discussions create a path for the sprint week. In the morning, you’ll start at the end and agree to the long-term goal. Next, you’ll make a map of the challenge. In the afternoon, you’ll ask the experts at your company to share what they know. Finally, you’ll pick a target: an ambitious but manageable piece of the problem that you can solve in one week. Ask the group for permission up front to facilitate and keep track of time and process so that they don’t have to. Be sure to record key ideas on the whiteboard. Also reassure clarity from obvious observations. Take frequent breaks (10 min every 60-90min), provide some snacks and no heavy foods. Eat lunch at 1pm, work from 10am-1pm & 2pm-5pm. Call on the Decider whenever a decision is slow or not obvious. 

1 Start at the End: A look ahead

Get organized and sort out your priorities first. Devot the entire first day of the sprint to planning. You and your team need to lay out the basics: the long-term goal and the difficult questions that must be answered. Ask yourself, “If you could jump ahead to the end of your sprint, what questions would be answered?” 

2 Set a long-term goal

3 List sprint questions

Get organized and create assumptions where your project was a disaster. Lurking beneath every goal are dangerous assumptions. Rephrase these assumptions and obstacles into questions. Essentially, convert the problem into a question.

What questions do we want to answer in this sprint?

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

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

4 Map

Create a simple diagram representing complex functions that show customers moving through your service or product. At the end of the day on Monday, use the map to narrow your broad challenge into a specific target for the sprint. Later in the week, the map will provide structure for solution sketches and prototype. As you draw, you should keep asking the team if the map looks right.

6 How Might We Notes

Create a simple diagram representing complex functions that show customers moving through your service or product. Everyone needs their own pad of sticky notes and a thick back dry-erase marker. 

7 Target

After interviewing the experts and organizing your notes, the final task would be to choose a target for your sprint. The Decider needs to choose one target customer and one target event on the map. Use a straw poll if they need help. 

Tuesday

2 Remix and Improve

The day to come up with solutions. It starts with inspiration: a review of existing ideas to remix and improve. In the afternoon, each person will sketch, following a four-step process that emphasizes critical thinking over artistry. Later in the week, the best of these sketches will form the plan for your prototype and test. 

To allocate a composition of existing ideas and synthesize them to create unique solutions, exercise lightning demos. Your team will take turns giving 3min tours of their favorite solutions from other products, different domains, and from within your own company. It’s about finding raw materials, NOT copying your competitors. 

1. Make a list 

   1. Ask your team to come up with a list of products or services to review for inspiring solutions. Assign it Monday night or the day of. Remind them to also consider solutions from within the company. 

2. 3min demos

   1. They can use their tech to show how cool their list of inspo is

   2. Remember to always capture notes by asking: “What’s the big idea here that might be useful?” Then make a quick drawing of that inspiring component, write a simple headline above it, and note the source underneath. 

3 Sketch & work alone together

It’s the fastest and easiest way to transform abstract ideas into concrete solutions. In David Allen’s Getting Things Done, tell us not to think about the task as one monolithic effort (like, “pay taxes”, but instead to make progress (like “Collect tax paperwork”) and go from there.  

Wednesday

In the morning, you’ll critique each solution and decide which ones have the best chance of achieving your long-term goal. 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. 

1 Art Museum

Put the solution sketches on the wall with masking tape. Space them out in one long row, just like the paintings in a museum. This spacing allows the team to spread out and take their time explaining each sketch without crowding. It’s also a good idea to place the sketches in roughly chronological order, following the storyboard. 

2 Heat Map

3 Speed Critique

Steps:

1. Gather around a solution sketch

2. Set a timer for 3min

3. The Facilitator narrates the sketch (“Here it looks like a customer is clicking to play a video, and then clicking over to the details page…”)

4. The Facilitator calls out the standout ideas that have clusters of stickers by them (“Lots of dots by the animated video…”

5. The team calls out standout ideas that the Facilitator missed

6. The Scribe writes standout ideas on sticky notes and sticks them above the sketch. Give each idea a simple name like “Animated video” or “One-step signup”

7. Review concerns and questions

8. The creator explains any missed ideas that the team failed to spot, and answers any questions

9. Move to the next sketch and repeat

4 Straw Poll

Each person chooses one solution, and votes for it with a dot sticker. It’s a quick way for the whole team to express their opinions. 

Steps:

1. Give everyone one vote (represented by a big dot sticker-- pink is cool)

2. Remind everyone of the long-term goal and sprint questions

3. Remind everyone to err on the side of the risky ideas with big potential

4. Set a timer for 10min 

5. Each person privately writes down their choice. It could be a whole sketch, or just one idea in a sketch. 

6. When time is up, or when everyone is finished, placed the votes on the sketches.

7. Each person briefly explains their vote (spend about 1 min per person). The Decider should listen to these explanations and make honest decisions. Ultimately, the Decider has the authority.

5 Supervote

The Decider makes the final decision, with more stickers. The supervote is the ultimate decision. Each Decider will get three special votes (with the Decider’s initials on them) and whatever they vote for will be the prototype to create and test. Remind the Decider of the long-term goal and sprint questions. The sketches with supervotes (even just one) on them are the winners. You’ll plan your prototype around those ideas and put them to test on Friday. Rearrange the sketches on the wall by grouping the supervotes together like this:

Rumble or all-in-one

Since the Decider gets three votes, and there are sometimes two Deciders, there is bound to be more than one winning sketch. Involve the whole team in a short discussion about whether to do a Rumble or combine them to create a single prototype. If you end up with two (or even three) winning sketches that can’t coexist, then create them as separate prototypes to compete against each other in a Rumble. If you can somehow combine the winning sketches, then you don’t need to do a Rumble at all. A combination of these ideas has the advantage to be longer and more detailed.

6 Storyboard

You’ll take the winning sketches and string them together into a storyboard. It’ll be used to imagine your finished prototype, so you can spot problems and points of confusion. Somebody needs to be appointed as the Storyboard Artist. It doesn’t require artistic talent, rather it’s just someone willing to write on the whiteboard a lot. 

Opening Scene

Ask yourselves: How do customers find out your company exists? Where are they and what are they doing just before they use your product? Present your solution alongside the competition. On Friday’s tests, you can ask your customers to test out your competitor’s products alongside your prototype. Some examples of opening scenes are:

1. Web search with your website nestled among the results

2. Magazine with an ad for your service

3. Store self with your product sitting beside its competitors 

4. App Store with your app in it

5. New articles that mentions your service, possible some competitors

6. Social Media feed with your product shared among the other posts

Watch out for discussions that aren’t destined for a quick resolution. When you spot one, push it onto the Decider: 

Thursday

You’ll adopt a “fake it” philosophy to turn that storyboard into a realistic prototype. You can use Keynote 90% of the time instead of Photoshop, Adobe XD, InVision, etc. Plus, for many physical-product sprints, you may not need to prototype the product at all. One of our favorite shortcuts is the Brochure Façade: Instead of prototyping the device, prototype the website, video, brochure, or slide deck that will be used to sell the device. After all, many purchase decisions are made (or at least heavily informed) online or in a sales call. 

This marketing material will give you a great start on understanding how customers will react to the promise of your product—which features are important, whether the price is right, and so on. And guess what: Keynote is the perfect tool for prototyping that kind of marketing.

Makers create the individual components (screens, pages, pieces, and so on) of your prototype. These are typically designers or engineers, but they could include anyone on your sprint team who likes to feel the force of creation flow through his or her fingers.

You’ll want at least two Makers on Thursday. We’ve told you some wild stories about robots and medical reports and videos, but just remember—the people on your team probably already have the skills to make prototypes for your business.

The Stitcher is responsible for collecting components from the Makers and combining them in a seamless fashion. This person is usually a designer or engineer, but can be almost anyone, depending on the format of your prototype. The best Stitcher is detail-oriented. He or she will probably give everyone some style guides to follow in the morning, then start stitching after lunch as the Makers complete their components. It’s the Stitcher’s job to make the prototype consistent from beginning to end—and ensure that every step is as realistic as possible.

Your Stitcher will make sure dates, times, names, and other fake content are consistent throughout the prototype. Don’t mention Jane Smith in one place and Jane Smoot in the other. Look for typos and fix any obvious errors. Small mistakes can remind customers that they are looking at a fake product.

The Stitcher’s job can take many forms, but no matter what you’re prototyping, it’s a critical role. When you divide work, it’s easy to lose track of the whole. The Stitcher will be on the hook to keep everything tight. He may want to check on progress throughout the day, to see if the various parts of the prototype look coherent. And at the end, the Stitcher shouldn’t hesitate to ask the rest of the team to help out if more work is needed.

Every sprint team needs a Writer, and it’s one of the most important roles. “In Chapter 9 on page 103, we talked about the importance of words in your sketches. And earlier in this chapter we told you that your prototype must appear real. It’s impossible to make a realistic prototype with unrealistic text. A dedicated Writer becomes extra important if you work in a scientific, technical, or other specialized industry. Think back to Foundation Medicine’s prototype of a cancer genomics report: It would have been tough for just anyone to write medically realistic text, so we relied on a product manager with domain expertise to act as Writer during the sprint.

You’ll want at least one Asset Collector on Thursday. It’s not a glamorous role (although “asset collector” does sound glamorous), but it’s one of the keys to rapid prototyping. Your prototype will likely include photos, icons, or sample content that you don’t need to make from scratch. Your Asset Collectors will scour the web, image libraries, your own products, and any other conceivable place to find these elements. This speeds up the work of your Makers, who don’t have to pause and go collect every bit and piece they need for the prototype.

Finally, there’s the Interviewer, who will use the finished prototype to conduct Friday’s customer interviews. On Thursday, he should write an interview script. (We’ll go into detail about the structure of this script in Chapter 16 on page 201.) It’s best if the Interviewer doesn’t work on the prototype. This way, he won’t be emotionally invested in Friday’s test, and won’t betray any hurt feelings or glee to the customer.