Ever wondered how Blue Bottle Coffee doubled their online sales or how Slack became a household name? How did the Wright Brothers' prototyping method inspire today's sprint process? What if you could achieve significant results by Friday starting with just a challenge on Monday? Dive into the world of sprints, where teams rapidly prototype and test ideas, delivering remarkable results in just five days!

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

Before diving into a sprint, you need the right challenge, team, and space. 

In 2002, James Freeman, a clarinet player turned coffee enthusiast, started Blue Bottle Coffee in a shed, roasting beans and selling them at farmers' markets. By 2012, Blue Bottle had become a beloved chain of cafés with locations across San Francisco and New York. Despite its success, James aimed higher—he wanted to expand further and deliver freshly roasted coffee to more homes. To accomplish this, Blue Bottle needed a stellar online store. 

James, along with Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky from GV, embarked on a sprint to tackle this challenge. They gathered a diverse team including the programmer, COO, CFO, communications manager, customer service lead, and executive chairman. The goal: make the online store as inviting and efficient as their cafés. 

On Monday, the team mapped out a new customer's journey on the website. A major hurdle was how to organize the coffee beans for easy selection without a barista's guidance. Instead of categorizing by region, they decided to focus on how customers brew their coffee at home, inspired by their café experience. 

By Wednesday, the team had fifteen different ideas. They voted and chose three to prototype: one that mirrored the café’s interior, another that included lots of text to mimic barista conversations, and a third that organized coffee by brew method. They used Keynote to create realistic prototypes without extensive programming.

On Friday, customer tests revealed that while the café-look website was deemed "cheesy," the other two designs were well-received. The “How do you make coffee at home?” approach and the text-heavy design both resonated with customers. A few months later, Blue Bottle launched their new website, doubling their online sales growth.

Sprints are perfect for high-stakes projects, tight deadlines, or when you're stuck. They force your team to focus on the most pressing questions and allow you to learn from prototypes quickly. Even large challenges can benefit from a sprint if you tackle the "surface" first—how your product meets customers.

To run a successful sprint, you need a dedicated team, ideally seven people or fewer, including decision-makers (Deciders), and experts from various departments. A facilitator helps keep the process on track. The sprint requires a clear schedule and a distraction-free environment, with big whiteboards to visualize ideas and Time Timers to manage time.

The magic of a sprint lies in its structure and focus. By the end of the week, your team will have a prototype and valuable insights, ready to tackle even the biggest challenges.

Can a Clarinet Player Revolutionize Online Coffee Sales in Just One Week?

Monday’s structured discussions set the tone for the week. The day kicks off by establishing a long-term goal and creating a map of challenges. Just like in Apollo 13, where Mission Control had a clear path drawn on a blackboard to guide them, your team will create a roadmap. This ensures that everyone remains focused on the right problems.

For example, Blue Bottle Coffee aimed to bring quality coffee to new customers online, while Savioke sought to improve guest experiences with their Relay delivery robot. Setting clear goals helps teams prioritize effectively.

Next, list out your sprint questions. Think about what must be true to meet your goal and what could cause failure. For instance, Blue Bottle Coffee questioned if customers would trust their expertise online, while Savioke pondered if guests would find the robot awkward.

After establishing goals and questions, create a simple map. Take inspiration from J.R.R. Tolkien’s maps in "The Lord of the Rings." Flatiron Health, for instance, mapped out the process of enrolling patients in clinical trials, mapping out from diagnosis to treatment.

In the afternoon, conduct "Ask the Experts" interviews. This involves gathering insights from various team members and external experts. For example, while working with Walrus Co., an unexpected insight from a sales team member significantly altered their map. Each team member takes notes and converts them into "How Might We" questions to turn problems into opportunities.

After organizing and voting on these notes, the Decider picks a target for the sprint. For instance, Flatiron Health chose to focus on research coordinators during the patient-trial matching process.

By the end of Monday, your team will have a clear long-term goal, key sprint questions, a map, and a specific target to focus on. This structured approach ensures that the team is aligned and ready to tackle the week’s challenges head-on.

Blueprinting Success with Inspired Goal-Setting

Tuesday is a pivotal day in your sprint, where you and your team will brainstorm solutions after defining the challenge on Monday. The day begins with an inspirational review of existing ideas to remix and improve.

Take a cue from Melitta Bentz, who, in 1908, revolutionized coffee brewing by combining blotting paper with a brass pot to create the paper coffee filter. This innovation was built on existing ideas, reimagined with vision. Your team will follow her example by engaging in Lightning Demos, sharing three-minute presentations of inspiring solutions from various fields.

The goal is to gather raw materials—not to copy competitors but to find ideas from different environments. For instance, Blue Bottle Coffee found inspiration from a chocolate-bar wrapper for describing coffee flavors, which led to a successful new flavor vocabulary for their online store.

Teams should also look within their own organization for unfinished or overlooked ideas. Savioke, a robotics company, revitalized an old design for their robot’s eyes, creating a friendly, non-talking personality.

After gathering ideas, decide whether to tackle different parts of the problem individually or as a group. This ensures a comprehensive range of solutions.

In the afternoon, despite some team members' concerns about their drawing skills, you'll sketch solutions individually, emphasizing clarity over artistry. This method transforms abstract ideas into concrete, critiquable solutions. The sketching process, broken into four steps—Notes, Ideas, Crazy 8s, and Solution Sketch—helps you develop detailed, thoughtful concepts. By working alone, you ensure deep thought and avoid groupthink, leading to higher quality solutions.

On Wednesday, these sketches will be evaluated, leading to the creation of a prototype on Thursday and testing with customers on Friday. This structured approach helps transform raw ideas into practical solutions, setting the stage for innovative breakthroughs.

How Can Bentz's Coffee Filter Innovation Inspire Your Team's Next Big Idea?

By Wednesday morning, you'll have a stack of solutions, but you can't prototype them all. You need one solid plan. The key to success is a structured, efficient process that avoids the typical pitfalls of endless, unfocused meetings. You'll critique all solutions in the morning, then decide which ones have the best chance of achieving your long-term goal. In the afternoon, you'll weave the winning scenes into a storyboard—a step-by-step plan for your prototype.

To illustrate this, let's look at Slack's journey. Originally a video game company, their game Glitch didn't catch on. So, they shifted focus to a side project: a messaging system called Slack. It exploded in popularity, but the challenge was explaining its benefits to a broader audience. Merci Grace, a product manager at Slack, decided to conduct a sprint to tackle this problem.

On Wednesday morning, the sprint team had about a dozen solution sketches. They reviewed these silently, placing dot stickers on interesting parts and making notes on standout ideas. This created a "heat map" showing which ideas were intriguing. They then discussed each sketch briefly, noted standout ideas, and voted on the best ones using dot stickers. Finally, the Decider, often the CEO, made the final call with a supervote, choosing which ideas to prototype.

For Slack, the winning sketches included "Bot Team," where customers interacted with bots, and "The Tenacious Tour," a step-by-step guide. These ideas conflicted, so the team decided on a "Rumble," where both prototypes would be tested head-to-head to see which resonated more with customers.

After deciding on the winning ideas, the team created a storyboard. This storyboard detailed every step the customer would experience, ensuring a smooth, cohesive prototype. For Slack, the storyboard started with a fake New York Times article about office software, leading customers to try Slack and its competitor, "Gather."

The structured process of critiquing, voting, and storyboarding ensures that you make informed, efficient decisions, leading to a well-planned prototype ready for testing. This method helps you avoid the pitfalls of endless debates and ensures you leverage the team's expertise effectively. By the end of Wednesday, you'll have a clear, actionable plan for your prototype, ready to be tested with real customers.

Slack's Success: From Glitch to Global Messaging Powerhouse

On Wednesday, you and your team created a storyboard, and now it's time to turn that storyboard into a realistic prototype. This "fake it" philosophy helps you build a prototype in just one day, allowing you to test it with customers on Friday.

Think of it like an old Western movie set: the saloon might just be a façade, but it looks real enough to the audience. Similarly, your prototype just needs to appear real enough to get genuine reactions from your customers.

Building a prototype in one day might seem impossible, but you’ve already done the hard work on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Now, it's about assembling those pieces into something that looks real. This approach is faster and prevents you from becoming too attached to an idea that might not work.

The key to success lies in adopting a "prototype mindset," which consists of four principles: believe you can prototype anything, remember prototypes are disposable, build just enough to learn, and make sure the prototype appears real. This mindset helps you stay focused and flexible.

Take FitStar, for instance. They needed to explain their new fitness app better. Without their star trainer Tony Gonzalez available, they faked it by having the CEO record videos and used Keynote to create a realistic-looking app prototype. By Friday, they got valuable feedback that helped refine their product.

Similarly, Slack used a mix of slides and live acting to test different ways of explaining their software, while Foundation Medicine created realistic paper reports to test with oncologists. Savioke even used a remote-controlled robot and an iPad to simulate their hotel delivery robot's interactions.

One Medical took it a step further by transforming an existing clinic into a temporary family clinic for one night, testing their setup with real families. They learned crucial insights about space and staff interactions that helped them refine their approach before opening a new clinic.

To build a successful prototype in one day, pick the right tools (like Keynote or PowerPoint), divide the work among your team, stitch everything together, and do a trial run to ensure everything works smoothly. This method not only speeds up learning but also keeps you receptive to feedback, allowing you to make quick adjustments and avoid wasting time on flawed ideas.

Ready to prototype? Remember, it's all about creating a realistic façade to learn fast and iterate quickly.

Can You Fake It Like FitStar and Slack to Build a Successful Prototype in Just One Day?

Imagine kicking off a project on a Monday with a big challenge and a great team, but not much else. By Friday, you've developed promising solutions, chosen the best ideas, and built a realistic prototype. But the real magic happens when you test it with real customers. This is the heart of the "Friday Sprints," where you learn from observing customer reactions to your prototype, giving you actionable insights by the end of the day.

Take the story of Nigel Newton, a publisher who almost passed on a manuscript that had been rejected by eight other publishers. It was his eight-year-old daughter Alice who saw its potential. That manuscript was "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone." This anecdote underscores the importance of getting feedback from the actual target audience, something grown-ups predicting children's preferences missed.

On a Friday sprint, your team will interview five target customers, each interacting with your prototype. One person acts as the interviewer while the rest watch via a video stream, noting reactions. According to user research expert Jakob Nielsen, five interviews are enough to uncover 85% of usability issues, making this approach both efficient and effective.

Consider the experience of the Slack team. They tested two competing ideas to improve how they explained their software. Watching real customers use their prototypes revealed which ideas worked and which didn’t, saving them from costly mistakes.

The process involves conducting a "Five-Act Interview," a structured conversation designed to make the customer comfortable, gather context, and get honest feedback. This approach is powerful but simple, requiring no special expertise or equipment—just a friendly demeanor and curiosity.

The story of Joe Gebbia from Airbnb is a testament to the power of customer interviews. When their business struggled, they conducted face-to-face interviews with users. These sessions revealed flaws in their website, which they fixed, leading to rapid growth and success.

By the end of a Friday sprint, your team will have gathered enough insights to determine the next steps. Whether your prototype is a success or reveals flaws, you will have learned invaluable lessons. As seen with companies like Slack, Savioke, and Medium, this process can lead to significant improvements and successful product launches.

In essence, a sprint is not just about rapid prototyping but about closing the gap between your vision and the real needs of your customers. It's about building something that truly matters, making the entire process not just productive but profoundly fulfilling.

Unlocking Success: Lessons from Nigel Newton, Slack, and Airbnb's 'Friday Sprints'

It was a bitterly cold December day in 1903 when Orville and Wilbur Wright prepared to test their latest flying prototype. Though their previous attempt had failed, they had made adjustments and felt hopeful. With a determined mindset, they launched their aircraft, and for twelve glorious seconds, it flew. They repeated the success three more times, culminating in a fifty-nine-second flight, marking the first powered flight in history.

The Wright brothers didn't achieve this feat overnight. They had an ambitious goal, asked experts for advice, studied existing technologies, and constantly refined their prototypes. Even after numerous crashes, they learned from each attempt and kept pushing forward. This method of continuous prototyping and testing can be applied in various contexts, not just aviation.

Since 2012, the sprint process—an intensive, five-day method to solve problems and test ideas—has been used by startups, schools, and large organizations alike. At Columbia University, a professor adapted the sprint process for his business and engineering students. In Seattle, high school math teachers used it to teach probability through a board game. Companies like McKinsey, Airbnb, and Facebook have also adopted sprints to innovate quickly and effectively.

The sprint process encourages teams to map out problems, independently create detailed sketches, make decisive choices, and test prototypes with real customers. This approach fosters a culture of rapid learning and progress toward ambitious goals.

The techniques learned from the Wright brothers and the sprint process can help any team work faster and smarter. Start by setting a clear goal, involve diverse skills, and use structured methods to prototype and test solutions. Remember, with dedication and the right process, you can achieve remarkable things.

Could the Wright Brothers' Determination and Modern Sprint Process Unlock Your Team's Potential?

Imagine starting a project on Monday with a big challenge and a great team, but not much else. By Friday, you've developed solutions, chosen the best ideas, built a realistic prototype, and tested it with real customers. This is the essence of the sprint process.

In 2002, James Freeman, a clarinet player turned coffee enthusiast, started Blue Bottle Coffee. By 2012, it had become a beloved chain of cafés in San Francisco and New York. James aimed higher, wanting to deliver freshly roasted coffee to more homes through an online store. To achieve this, he embarked on a sprint with Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky from GV, assembling a diverse team including the programmer, COO, CFO, and more. Their goal was to make the online store as inviting as their cafés.

On Monday, they mapped a new customer's journey on the website, focusing on how customers brew coffee at home. By Wednesday, they had fifteen different ideas and prototyped three: one mirroring the café’s interior, another with text-heavy barista conversations, and a third organized by brew method. Friday's customer tests revealed that while the café-look was "cheesy," the other two designs resonated well. Blue Bottle's new website, launched a few months later, doubled their online sales growth.

Sprints are perfect for high-stakes projects or tight deadlines, forcing teams to focus on pressing questions and learn quickly from prototypes. A dedicated team, a clear schedule, and a distraction-free environment are essential. By the end of the week, you'll have a prototype and valuable insights.

Take Slack's journey: originally a video game company, they shifted focus to a side project—a messaging system called Slack. To explain its benefits to a broader audience, they conducted a sprint. Reviewing solution sketches on Wednesday, they chose the best ideas, storyboarded a plan, and built a prototype. By Friday, customer tests revealed which ideas worked, saving them from costly mistakes.

The sprint process encourages mapping problems, independently sketching solutions, making decisive choices, and testing prototypes with real customers. This method, used by companies like McKinsey, Airbnb, and Facebook, fosters rapid learning and progress toward ambitious goals.

Inspired by the Wright brothers' continuous prototyping and testing, the sprint process can help any team work faster and smarter. With dedication and the right process, you can achieve remarkable things.

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