Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just 5 Days Book Review

Book review – Charlotte Flohberg

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

The book “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days” by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz, published in March 2016, deals with the plan how to combine imagination, design-thinking, and a stop-clock to solve some of the most pressing challenges you’ll ever face. Jake Knapp, who created the Google Venture sprint process has run more than hundred sprints with startups. John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz were just as successful as Jake Knapp before they worked together at Google Ventures. John Zeratsky has designed mobile apps, medical reports, and a daily newspaper, among a lot of other things. Before joining Google Ventures, he was a design lead at YouTube and an early employee of FeedBurner, which Google acquired in 2007. Braden Kowitz founded the Google Ventures design team in 2009 and pioneered the role of “design partner” at a venture capital firm. These three partners at Google Ventures, published a unique five-day process for solving tough problems, proven at more than a hundred companies. Sprint offers a transformative formula for testing ideas that works whether for a start up or a large organization. Within five days, the plan moves from idea to prototype to decision, saving the company and their team countless hours and countless dollars.

This book is a Do-it-yourself guide for running your very own sprint to meet your most urgent challenge. – But how does it work?

The first step according to the Sprint is to set the stage, which includes choosing a big challenge, the right team and making time and space. Knapp recommends putting together a team out of 7 people – the “Decider” like the CEO and a finance, marketing, customer, tech/logistic expert as well as a design expert, and finally the troublemaker. Knapp thinks that it is defensive if the troublemaker feels includes and invested in the project and furthermore the troublemaker see problems differently and their crazy ideas about solving the problem might just be right.

The 5-day process is structured and gives each day a problem to solve, which will be described detailed in the following review.

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Those 5 days will proceed in the following way: the day starts at 10.00 am and ends at 5.00pm, with an hour-long lunch break and one small break each. There are only 6 working hours in a typical Sprint day – except of the Friday from 9.00 am to 5.00 pm - because longer hours don’t equal better results but by getting the right people together, structuring the activities, and eliminating distraction.

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The sprint should take place in a room with plenty of whiteboards and should be free from any kind of distraction like laptops, mobile phones, and tablets.

After setting the stage, Monday, the first day of the Sprint week can begin with creating a path. The day’s focus isn’t on solving the problem, but defining it. The team member out of different areas of expertise will have different information and problems to lay out as well as the “Decider” like the CEO. The Decider will talk about the success and the biggest risk of the project as well as the unique advantage or opportunity. Together the team should decide on a long-term goal for the company. Furthermore the first day serves to pick a target for the upcoming week.