I finally managed to get my hands on a copy of 'Sprint'. Together with John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz, Jake Knapp ran over one hundred Sprints with startups working with Google Ventures. This book is a manual for how to get from problem to prototype in just five days, all whilst satisfying and managing multiple different stakeholders, subject-matter experts, users and so on. A must read for product designers, developers, business executives, entrepreneurs and product owners.
Excited is an understatement when describing how I felt reading this book, it left me energised and thirsting for a challenge to tackle. The book itself is organised as a five-day Sprint and gives a detailed and complete breakdown of what to do on each day. It offers readers so much practical content and insight that I almost couldn't wait to finish the book so that I could apply what I'd learnt.
The book lays out the process in full, even including a Sprint shopping list (spoiler: you will need tons of post-it notes!). Packed with real-world hands-on examples of company case studies, the book really hammers down how versatile and transformative the Sprint method can be. Sprint adopts some of the core elements of the Agile methodology and condenses it into a pragmatic week-long framework.
Although I'm currently a user experience design team of one, the method is intended for teams of up to seven members. I will still undoubtedly be applying the techniques I learnt from this book to my own design processes. Time boxing my activities to avoid burn-out and making myself come up with multiple iterations and solutions to a design problem (using methods like crazy eights) are just a few examples of core Design Sprint practices that I have been putting into practice immediately.
After reading this book I will make a point of executing user testing early on before jumping into high-fidelity prototyping and implementation, in order to prevent myself from wasting too much time. This is ideal to avoid getting excessively emotionally attached to a solution that I've designed that is yet to even be tested. Knapp acknowledges that this is a major issue - the more time you spend on a prototype the more committed you are to it and hence the less receptive you are to feedback. As such, he advocates for prototypes built on the fourth day of a Sprint to ideally be of 'Goldilocks quality': 'not too high, not too low, but just right'. See the diagrams below illustrating these concepts.
From an entrepreneurial perspective Sprint is a game changer. The method delivers real value through an outcomes-based approach to problem solving. As the age old adage goes, 'time is money'. The Sprint method is all about speed and controlling costs, minimising risks and making it a no-brainer for companies in all sectors to employ in order to strategically attack their problems. The management graduate within me is brimming with enthusiasm at the magic that happens at the intersection between UX and business. UX is vital to organisations and organisational strategy.
Perhaps the most exciting takeaway for me from this book is the idea that you can't lose in a Sprint, whatever the outcome of your user testing, you are always winning. If a prototype is a hit with real users that is fantastic, you're on the right track! If your prototype is a failure, you've just saved yourself months of expensive engineering work that would have led you nowhere, that's one efficient failure. If your prototype is a flawed success you will have the data and feedback from user tests to know what your next steps should be... As you continue to run Sprints, you become better and better at listening to your users. A company that listens to and knows its users is a company destined for success.
Knapp, J., Zeratsky, J. and Kowitz, B. (2016) Sprint: How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days. Simon & Schuster.
