Book Report: Sprint
Sprint
How To Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
By Jake Knapp with John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz
New York Times best seller Sprint takes you behind the scenes with some of America’s most fascinating startups. You’ll meet a robotics maker searching for the perfect robot personality, a coffee roaster expanding to new markets, a company organizing the world’s cancer data, and Slack, the fastest-growing business app in history.
I picked up Sprint because in my search for a new job, I ran across this skill numerous times: “experience leading design sprints”. I would not list this as one of my skills currently, so I wanted to gain a deeper understanding.
In Sprint, author Jake Knapp describe a fascinating process for finding ambitious solutions for businesses and products. The process brings together 5-7 people from all corners of the business over an intensive 5 day work session each day of which the authors explain in great detail. Within that week, the team works together to reframe problems into opportunities, identify myriad solutions, develop a prototype and then finally test the prototype with real users. The idea is that companies and teams can use this workshop format to quickly find and refine the best solutions before making huge investments in company resources.
The design sprint sounds like an exhilarating, deeply rewarding exercise for everyone involved. The processes are similar to many UX methods that I am familiar with, but in hyper-speed. It’s interesting to me as a product design professional that they don’t specifically require a product designer in their roster of suggested interdisciplinary sprint participants. They recommend including people who will be working on the project plus other key stakeholders and then consulting with experts from all corners of the business by scheduling brief interviews with them. I like how inclusive this approach is, and how it recognizes that a lot of companies don’t have a dedicated product design department devoted to finding data driven solutions, but they can still arrive at amazing user-centered solutions. On the other hand, having a UX /product design facilitator would elevate the experience that much more—kind of like having a product design Sherpa take you on a journey to the top of validated solution mountain.
My takeaways:
I have worked for companies that have very little transparency into business initiatives, and this results in negativity and apathy about the work that trickles all the way down. I love that this process involves people from all over the company. I can see how this would create maximum buy-in from everyone involved, and could set the stage for a passionate, positive company culture.