Sprint Day One
It was the third day of the conference when Jill and I sat at the bar in this little Cuban restaurant. After our second pitcher of mojitos, Jill pulled out a Sharpie and quickly sketched on a bar napkin. That was it. That was where our big idea came from.
I’d wager you’ve heard such a tale before. It’s such a common trope that it’s often repeated, even in fiction. Where did Doc get the idea for the Flux Capacitor? Well, he was standing on a toilet, trying to hang a clock, when he fell…
While bar napkin doodles may actually be a possible source of your next great product, they probably won’t be. However, our apocryphal Jill probably had been thinking about her idea for some time. You’re probably not going to want to wait for “The Ballmer Peak,” and neither are/were we.
Enter ten a.m. on a Rocky Mountain, high summer Monday. It would be the first day of our Sprint week and, of course, we were going to start at the end.
(Aside: if you have not read the Sprint book, I should point out that it is a strict process. One of the biggest rules is: no devices in the room. This would be slightly problematic later, but it does help to eliminate distractions and keep everyone on task.)
Much like Jill, we certainly had preconceived ideas about what we were going to look at: the problem space itself and the solution we would provide. You can do much to restrain your impulses, and I think it’s rather fair to say that we were all well aware of our biases. Our Sprint team was a mixture of Engineering R&D and our DART group (a product focused research group). Seven strangers, picked to live in a house… kidding. It would be foolhardy to think that even with the best of intentions, we were not coming to the table with some ideas in our heads.
The Sprint process acknowledges this and it does much to mitigate those problems (you’ll see this more in the posts on the next few days). They aren’t even problems per se. Having some background and some concept of what you’re going to be going after is certainly useful. But we needed to divorce our egos (even if they’re just wee lil’ chaps) from the equation, or we’d just have one of those “ownership of ideas” sort of fiascos.
Before I get too far into the events of that first day, I should point out a few things. The Sprint process outlines a few key roles. The one most worth mentioning is that of The Decider. The Decider is sort of your “super-delegate,” but beyond that, is really the person who gets to make the call. Our Decider was a Level 23 Half-elf, ahem, apologies. Our Decider was an external entity to the Sprint team, Beth, who heads up our webinar focused product line. She would get to swoop in and make tough calls. Not without input from ourselves, but ultimately we all agreed (as part of the process) that what she would say would go. We’ll get back to her in a bit.
The Sprint process is, as I said, very strict and very structured. Your days are broken down into increments as short as fifteen minutes. This is important. I, personally, have witnessed many “brainstorming” and other such design activities wallow in tangents (some of which were certainly my progeny), and it’s important to not get hung up on such things.
The first day is not necessarily dissimilar from the first day of school. Instead of new sneakers and haircuts, Trapper Keepers, and Lisa Frank notebooks, we had clean stacks of Post It notes, reams of white paper, a vast library of junk food, and, of course, a not-yet-hated-for-its-chime-or-knocked-over Time Timer to keep us to task.
I’m not going to bore you with a minute by minute chronicle of the events of Monday. You can actually read through the break down of time from the Sprint folks here. But I do want to highlight the big pieces we covered on Monday.
- Start at The End
- How Can We Fail?
- Talk to the Experts
- How Might We…
Starting at the end is akin to coining a mission statement. It’s a long term goal. It’s probably not a concrete technology decision or even the notion of a design. E.g. Doc didn’t fall from the toilet and say “I’d really like to get a Delorean up to eighty-eight miles per hour!” This is basically what we want to do with whatever it is we’re going to build, whatever problem we are going to solve. I think it’s very crucial to have it be neither the solution (or smack of such), nor be the problem itself. More of the space. The Sprint book uses the Blue Bottle Coffee example, who said “We want out customers to have better coffee.”
The second part of this Start at The End bit is asking how we might fail. In the Blue Bottle case, failure might have been an inability to source beans or roasters. For us it could be a technology hurdle or perhaps an inability to identify the real part of the problem, the actual pain point we were seeking to alleviate.
Having this in mind, asking experts is the next logical step. Not only did this change the way we viewed the problem (and, for me, certainly made me re-think my assumptions while it did validate others), but it also gave us a chance to get into the heads of our customers.
This is very very important. This is probably not news, but when you ideate, it is just human nature to think of the problems you see with something. But, of course, therein lies damnation. I might find the worst part about getting my Delorean up to eighty-eight miles an hour, the uncomfortable seats Doc put into the car, but that is probably not going to be the same for everyone and might be so specific to me that it isn’t even useful to pursue.
By asking the experts, you’re afforded the opportunity to role play a bit. Perhaps it’s just my wont to pursue science, but I actually really enjoy this part of the process. I want to see your problems from your point of view, not my own. I have spent a good bit of time with myself, and let me be honest, I’m kind of sick of me. (This is a joke, by the way. Laugh, please.)
From a session of interviews, we’d move on to writing “How Might We…” notes. These are basically informed by both our long term goal (Start at the End) and our expert interviews (that is, interviews of experts, not our Mike Wallace interview skills). You can read more on these in the book, but basically this is a way of reframing problems outlined by our experts into potential solutions. These are not specific solutions, but rather things like “How might we get the Deloreon up to eighty-eight miles an hour?” or “How might we pretend that Elizabeth Shue and Claudia Wells are the same person?” Even these contrived examples are a wee bit too specific, but you get the idea.
After we spent some time on our notes, there was a period of organizing, and we all got a chance to vote on which area or “How Might We…” would be the most useful to solve. Then, after we had our say, The Decider would swoop in (callback!), ask a few questions and ignore all of our straw-polling (thanks, primary election process).
All in all, Monday went pretty smoothly. We had a chance to push our egos aside, take a deep breath, and dive into the world of our potential customers. We had yet to make any crucial mistakes, though I will have to point out one. You see, we’d never done this before. Our company had never done this before and there was some understandable skepticism regarding burning the money it would take for all of us to sit in a room for five days and do little else. Because of this, we really needed another role, probably someone external. I shall call him “The Archivist.” It would have been useful to take more photos of the process and if someone had been there to wrangle a DSLR, we’d have more. Really, we could have just said “no devices NOT in Airplane Mode” and managed it ourselves, but it would also be easy to skew observational artifacts by restricting subject selection… so yeah, if you’ve got to evangelize your Sprint week, bring in the paparazzi.
How did the rest of the week go? Well, I’ll let some other folks tell those stories. I will say this: we didn’t really settle on the best Time Travel method. There are pros and cons to a Delorean, phone booth, Tardis, or what have you. I’ll leave that discussion as an exercise for the reader.
And with that, on to Tuesday!
