Sprinting to Success
Last Thursday, I sat in the corner of a packed, impressively furnished SecondHome in East London. In front of us stood Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky of GV (formerly Google Ventures). The idea of walking in and reinventing an established organisation is laughable. Somehow these guys are managing it, and they kindly began to share.
Jake spoke about their new book, Sprint. It‘s an instruction manual on running a five-day sprint — a Bible for a start-up, design agency or, well, anyone trying to solve problems. In brief, the Sprint process goes a little something like this:
- Monday: Research & Problem Identification Day
- Tuesday: Thinking Day (Individual, followed by group)
- Wednesday: Decision and Pre-building Day
- Thursday: Building Day (or, ‘making it look built’ day)
- Friday: Testing Day
Or, as written in Sprint, “map” the challenge, “sketch” solutions, “decide”, “fake it” and “interview” real users. Jake et al. expand much more on the Sprint process in their book, which I’d highly recommend reading.
Beyond this, Jake and John discussed the flexibility of Sprint — from A/B testing an ad campaign with users for Slack; or determining how a robot should interact with a human. For the later, Jake spoke through the process, specifically speaking of how the team spent Tuesday — individually sketching robots on paper. This was interesting.
Often, we’re institutionalised to come up with ideas in a group. This usually translates to five-to-ten individuals collectively ‘brainstorming’ at 93dB. As social psychologist Irving Janis taught us in 1972, group thinking can be bad.
“The advantages of having decisions made by groups are often lost because of powerful psychological pressures that arise when the members work closely together, share the same set of values and, above all, face a crisis situation that puts everyone under intense stress” Irving Janis
How many times have you, in a group, faced a minor crisis that inadvertently leads to colossal failure? Or had a situation in which a team member can’t let go of their own beliefs? Sprint gives the solution to this — individual idea sketching.
With game-changing ideas decided, and a prototype built, Friday arrives. Normally, this means time for drinks. In Sprint, however, this is the most important day—test day. The GV team speak of their ways to recruit users and test in a matter of hours; this is where there are a few questions around the validity of Sprint.
A five-day sprint isn’t fit for purpose for exploring new planets, reforming governments, or solving inequality. It does, however, provide a strong platform that enables organisations to deliver results, quickly.
Any statistician would question the statistical significance of an output from testing five users, while those versed in experimental sciences will challenge the idea of having no control group to assess the results. John answered the former of these challenges with Neilsen Norman’s analysis of usability testing, but further discussion is necessary. While government groups and user research teams at leading tech companies are implementing experimental control similar to the sciences.
Should startups and accelerators be using randomised control trials to test? Probably. Should they recruit participants off Craigslist? Probably not. Are GV able to answer big problems in five days? Absolutely.
Thank you for reading! Hola at me if you want to chat: Nick Smith, or @nicksmithr
