Sprint

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

By: Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Braden Kowitz

Narrated by: Dan Bittner

From inside Google Ventures, a unique five-day process for solving tough problems, proven at thousands of companies in mobile, e-commerce, healthcare, finance, and more.

Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution?

Now there’s a surefire way to answer these important questions: the Design Sprint, created at Google by Jake Knapp. This method is like fast-forwarding into the future, so you can see how customers react before you invest all the time and expense of creating your new product, service, or campaign.

In a Design Sprint, you take a small team, clear your schedules for a week, and rapidly progress from problem, to prototype, to tested solution using the step-by-step five-day process in this book.

A practical guide to answering critical business questions, Sprint is a book for teams of any size, from small startups to Fortune 100s, from teachers to nonprofits. It can replace the old office defaults with a smarter, more respectful, and more effective way of solving problems that brings out the best contributions of everyone on the team—and helps you spend your time on work that really matters.

Download the accompanying reference guide.©2016 Jake Knapp (P)2016 Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Great for PM's

This is a great book for any project manager, but if you're not, it's still a great read. The author gives specific details on how to get your projects up to speed.

Something to start right away

This book is easy to follow. If had great examples and there are plenty of things that may start right away to work more efficiently and creatively. Is a must read on my opinion!

A bit of repetition

They tend to repeat themselves alot, which lost my attention, but there was a lot of good information.

Full of great ideas!

I loved reading this book, not only for the background on design sprints, but also for the hundreds of little nuggets interspersed throughout the book. There's so much good information in here, much of it backed up by oh my experience, that it really is the kind of thing that everybody in business should read.

Great Advice, But It's All Old News

If your not already familiar with old concepts like, The Lean Startup, Agile Product, Development and User Testing, then this is going to be a great book for you.

But for many of us this book will provide No new information. It's a standard week long sprint ending in some user testing of your prototype, the same stuff that's been preached from the mountain tops for the last 5 years. The authors provide a lot of detail around how to run the sprints, which is nice, but for the most part I was anxious to wrap this book up and move on to something new.

To be clear, if you are Not super familiar with the concepts I mentioned above, then I would Highly recommend this book. The content is absolutely true and this book is a good, albeit basic, summary of the principles needed for rapid, low-cost product development.

Much better than expected!

This book is much better than expected! It's practical, with plenty worksheets (on the Sprint book website) and contains clear, helpful directions based on Jake's experience working with this.

The sprints are like a mix of scrum and design thinking. Leaning more towards the latter.

Some have remarked the book is full of Google-talk. I didn't feel that way at all. They mention Google a few times, but it's never obnoxious or distracting at any level.

Useful and practical

I like the logical structure of this book it goes chronologically step by step and provide short stories alongside so you can understand the whole concept in better context.
I would recommend it to every entrepreneur or SME owner as well as to Enterprise executives who don't put in the practice sprints, scrum or other Lean and agile methods. This book have also dedicated website where you can find additional content and help so it's much easier to apply this techniques in to your life and business. Great stuff.

A Plan and a Story

Any additional comments?

The performance of this was well done and there were tons of examples of sprints in action - it was valuable to hear it from the voice of an expert. The one thing that was tricky was there were a lot of lists and visuals that were hard to envision, so I could see the value in actually being able to sit and look at the text side by side with the graphics. Overall a good overview of a great way to do work.

Great process, but might be impractical

If you could sum up Sprint in three words, what would they be?

SPRINT deals with how to get an idea to prototype over course of a week. It requires both designers and desicion makers to be highly involved in the process. I think as system, the SPRINT system is awesome, however I do feel that it may be impractical in many jobs outside of industry

Interesting!

I’m excited to translate this to my middle school classroom and the IB Design curriculum. Teaching art and being very familiar with the creative thinking cycle, learning the design thinking cycle and teaching design has been an exciting opportunity. For my students who don’t see the relevance or the benefits of learning to think creatively, the minor adjustment to the design thinking cycle and solving problems for a “client” makes the learning more tangible and clarifies the relevance.
We can utilize the unique expertise of each individual student in our classroom just like a company start up. Students love the opportunity to work in groups and share the results of their group’s discussions.
This book helped clarify for me my role as the “sprint facilitator” to help capture ideas, manage time and keep us on task and organize. Letting the students take ownership of the rest.