Sprint book: I read it so you would want to read it too

The Sprint Book makes a promise: Solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days. But it makes a little bit more than that

The sprint gives our startups a superpower: They can fast-forward into the future to see their finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitments. When a risky idea succeeds in a sprint, the payoff is fantastic. But it’s the failures that, while painful, provide the greatest return on investment.

tl;dr

The sprint book gives you a checklist guide on how to come up with an ingenious solution when facing a big problem — usually related to innovation. Work with a team of experts during a 5-day sprint where you start with a concept and finish with the results of a usability test.

My experience, and potentially yours

Ok, so this book saved my life. Starting my first design internship I was part of an Innovation team with other 4 devs where we had to build an invoice builder. For the sake of innovation to happen, we had just a few mentorship sessions. Firstly, I had never built software for the market audience, and second, as a Brazilian, what the hell is an invoice? — Spoiler we figured that one out

Luckily we had time to study and I started reading the Sprint Book, just to page 30. And yeah, we started, using the Sprint Book as our guide and our results were great, so great that we’ve had the opportunity to later do a workshop around our experience.

Just a quick tip, if you are initiating a startup or a new product from scratch I recommend you first to read Paulo Caroli’s book Lean Inception, there you will learn more about how to really conduct longer sprints and evaluate the value of your product. I'm yet to write an article about it so become a subscriber to not miss any of those recommendations.

Key takeaways — Organizing the sprint

Lord is my shepherd and I will not want: If you are reading this you will probably be what they call in the book, the facilitator, so it's nice for you to provide everything that you and your team need to hit the bulls eye, there is a very fancy checklist on their website, so check it out. Don’t forget to get cool healthy snacks and a big whiteboard

We’ve found that magic happens when we use big whiteboards to solve problems. As humans, our short-term memory is not all that good, but our spatial memory is awesome.

Also, don’t forget to choose a decider to be responsible for the, most times, final word. The decider is a senior, team leader, or C-level person that will help you speed up decisions.

Short and sweet: That’s how you have to keep your sprint, make sure that your teammates schedule the full week to be 99% there. We know that cries and calls for help might happen — go there superman, but make sure to get back in minutes — the momentum here is very important to keep the team motivated and at a constant pace, this means, micro activities such as like sketching, prototyping, deciding or really the sprint big picture, time is the main resource. Let everyone know how much time they have by using a visible calendar and clock so the team can have more consciousness, there is this Parkinson’s Law in UX that states:

Any task will inflate until all the available time is spent

So, the bad news: You have 5 minutes to create all those sketches. The good news: you can totally do it, sir.

Avengers assemble: To overcome big great challenges your team should work Megazord style, they should complement and work together in every step of the sprint, engineers will help you design as designers and designers will help you build too. If you are working with a client make sure to include them in the sprint, they are the industry insiders, don’t lose this opportunity.

They had deep expertise and they were excited about the challenge. Those are people you want in your sprint

Key takeaways — The sprint:

Funday Monday: On Monday, you and your team will enter unexplored grounds, as mentioned in my other article: Designing the unknown is a bad trip and as Tim Brown also points out in his book Change by design.

Design thinking is rarely a graceful leap from height to height; it tests our emotional constitution and challenges our collaborative skills, but it can reward perseverance with spectacular results.

But don’t worry, following these steps you will do great, and you can go back and change a little bit.

• Write a problem statement: At this point, you will try to figure out the long-term goal of your project. I like to think like a pitch: Ok, tell me in 2 sentences what is the problem and what are you doing, and how this sprint will affect the future. Here is a cool NN Group article about it.
• Question the right people: Don’t worry about making only the right questions, but make sure to ask the right people. List the HMW questions that you think will help you get to your goal and then call experts, outside the sprint team for quick 20–30 minutes sessions.
• Sketch a map: Do a big picture flow map —It should be an overview — as a designer that worked as a P.O. I know how complicated can this map be in a matter of instants. But right now you’ll just need a maximum 10-step map.
• Set a goal: Vote for the most interesting HMW questions and choose the critical point of your map and revisit your problem statement to set a clear goal for your print. And make it visible for the whole sprint.

By Monday afternoon, you’ve identified a long-term goal and the questions to answer along the way. You’ve made a map and circled the target for your sprint. Everyone on the team will have the same information, and everyone will understand the week’s objective.

Sketch Tuesday: Tuesday is the day to take a look at the green yards on the other side of the fence, every problem has a solution, similar or not, direct or not you are going to take a look at the existing ones out there. So lets start:

What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.

1. SSS Scout, Steal and Show: Just like the quote from Austin Kleon’s book Steal like an artist, first you will take a moment to get inspired and scout some solutions on the market. List those cool features and show them to your team in quick demos to capture the idea of the functionality. This should not take more than 3 minutes.
2. Another S for Sketch: Ok, this can be scary and as a facilitator is your duty to not give people pencils — don’t even think about giving erasers This will help people to get less perfectionist and to accept sketch mistakes, this is also an opportunity to encourage everybody to don’t be afraid and to sketch to tell stories, not to hit a Louvre masterpiece. There is a concept that David Kelley likes to call creative confidence that really sums up the idea

IDEO #1 fan here

You got your notes, your ideas, and a pen, let's start. Pinpoint the feature you and your team feel like it's the most important and crazy 8 — you can also do it for an overview of the main page, but I don’t like to get too macro on the crazy 8. And the crazy 8 is very easy to prepare, fold your paper in half, now fold it again, now one more time, and then unfold it. BOOM! Eight Frames. After that choose one of your solutions and make a more complex sketch.

On the more complex sketch, I like to fold the paper 2 times only so I can have 4 frames, doing a more complex view in each one of them. Give a name to your solution but don’t put your name on it! Here is an overview of the process:

Here is a cool example of the very first sketch I ever made in 2020. For an urban farm management system, I love to show this example because shows how inexperienced I was, and that’s important because most of the people you are going to work with in a sprint have, also, never gone through something like this.

That’s one of the things I’m most proud of

Once everybody is finished, put the solution sketches in a pile, but resist the urge to look at them. You’ll only see them for the first time once, and you should save those fresh eyes for Wednesday.

This is what the book says on when to show sketches, but IF you have the time, I always like to take a look at the sketches, so you can sleep on that.

Decide Wednesday: In design think this means to define, In double diamond, this means to converge. In real life, this means debate. But in an optimized way, because as Jake Knapp points out, not all of us eat Omega 3

These discussions are frustrating, because humans have limited short-term memory and limited energy for decision-making. When we jump from option to option, it’s difficult to hold important details in our heads. On the other hand, when we debate one idea for too long, we get worn out — like a judge at a baking contest who fills up on apple pie before tasting anything else.

So he gives us quick tips on how to make a good decision through dot stickers:

1.Art museum: Put the solution sketches on the wall with masking tape;
2.Heat map: Look at all the solutions in silence, and use dot stickers to mark interesting parts;
3.Speed critique: Quickly discuss the highlights of each solution, and use sticky notes to capture big ideas;
4. Straw poll: Each person chooses one solution, and votes for it with a dot sticker.
5. Supervote: The Decider makes the final decision, with — you guessed it — more stickers.

Once the sprint team decided you can start to draw the journey of the product, one person draws as the team guides this person — mainly the decider — to where to go with the pencil. This part is known as the storyboard, a journey portrait on a comic-like grid. I followed the tip of using an isolation tape or masking tape to do the grid.

Prototype Thursday: There is nothing that defines better this day than the sentence fake it till you make it. Quick feedback is one of the principles of design thinking, but to get quick feedback you need a first a quick prototype, and build a façade. The sprint book shows in a very clever way how building a façade can accelerate your designs.

But that’s only one of the concepts behind the prototype, Jake Knapp defines the full set as the prototype mindset:

1. Do it, try it: M83 banger btw, but that’s how you should start prototyping, thing that’s part of a bigger goal and that can result in an amazing project. Get excited and confident.
2. Prototypes are a one night stand: Treat them with much respect as the result of your ideas, but don’t fall in love with it
3. Build with an objective in mind: Don’t push too much on the realness if that costs you too much time, don’t lose momentum
4. The prototype is a Disney moment: The prototype is going to be used by users that should join you in the journey that is your product, do it realistic to make them act genuine.

No Sherlock Holmes or Mr. Watson should find the truth

One day I had to prototype an app that would let the user create a webpage by just chatting with an A.I. The user would ask for features, colors, and texts, from UX to UI and the bot should answer all questions. OK, so how do we fake it. My idea was to get a real-time chat from this amazing tutorial I found on the internet. Style it a little bit. Woosh chat ready. Now for building the page prepare or get some pages ready from Figma's amazing community let the user test it on my computer with half of the screen with the Figma prototype projected and the chat available. As the user types the commands one of the team members answers on the chat and another team member prepares the page. You are ready for Friday.

Interview Friday: And here we are, the climax of your story. You got all you need to shine! Now what you have to do is, prepare and equip your team to watch the interviewer and take notes on how they use the prototype. And make sure that the interviewer follows The Five-Act interview:

1. Be nice, be cool: So, the first or the last tester came into a room, make sure to treat them very nicely and very respectfully, those people are investing their time to provide feedback to your project. Make them feel free to talk and touch whatever they want on the prototype.
2. Get to know: Before touching and messing with the prototype get into a conversation so you know more about the tester, so get to know more about their occupation, context of use, and really make them feel even more comfortable.
3. The prototype: The time has come, in this part, you can put the prototype and the tester as the protagonists. See how they react and encourage them to do so.
4. Hands-on: Go through a series of tasks, encourage them to think aloud, and ask a couple of open-ended questions as the tasks are complete
5. Conclude: Your customer just had a Disney moment — or maybe not — so now it’s time to ask him a couple more questions about the overall experience and compare it to the experience they are used to.

Now you have so cool notes with smiley faces on the positive moments, and some sad faces on the moments that were kinda bleh so you and your team can study how the interview went and analyze the future of the project. It doesn’t matter if was a complete success or a big no-no. With a sprint you learned what you would have learned in a year in just a week.

Maybe the best part about a sprint is that you can’t lose. If you test your prototype with customers, you’ll win the best prize of all — the chance to learn, in just five days, whether you’re on the right track with your ideas. The results don’t follow a neat template. You can have efficient failures that are good news, flawed successes that need more work, and many other outcomes

Sprint a sprint book

Don’t get me wrong but this article was just a 100-meter sprint compared to the marathon that this book can help you accomplish. I strongly recommend you to read this book and please make sure to check out their website for more tools to prepare for your sprints

This was one of the articles from my ongoing series I read it so you would want to read it too, where I cover mostly design and business books that I’ve read.

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