Sprint

Sprint completely overhauls your project management process so it allows you to go from zero to prototype in just five days and figure out if your idea is worth creating faster than ever.

Most good things are born out of necessity. Sprints are no different. The idea came to Jake when he had to come up with an important feature for Gmail, which would automatically sort messages. With just one month left on the clock, he had to innovate. Fast.

To successfully pull it off, he designed a new process to manage the project – and it worked. He has since perfected the structure and today, it is marked by three key aspects:

Have a very tight deadline. This eliminates procrastination. Work always fills the time allotted to it per Parkinson’s Law, so the shorter, the better. A sprint usually lasts for five days, from Monday to Friday. Get people with different skill sets into one room. Engineers, marketers, designers, accountants, operators, managers, the more diverse your team’s perspectives, the better. Sprints teams usually consist of seven people with different backgrounds. All hierarchy levels welcome. The result must be a concrete prototype. Brainstorming vague ideas is easy. Having something functional you can present is hard, but it’s what gets real user feedback.

These three simple rules make sure that for each sprint, people get together, see eye to eye, work and produce something of actual value. That’s what makes this process perfect for startups, which have very limited resources.

One of the first steps in your sprint is defining the challenge, a task whose success hinges on your ability to reverse engineer the end result. Savioke, a company who builds service robots, wanted to design a delivery robot for hotels, which could bring certain items to guests’ rooms and save the staff lots of time.

Jake helped them first determine who they wanted to impact with this, by asking how and when the product would be used. After all, the defining moment is when your (potential) customer and product first meet. For Savioke, that target turned out to be the moment a hotel guest opens the door and is presented with a brand new item, like a toothbrush, by the robot.

Every step from then on out was in service of that moment. For example, this instantly raised concerns that some people might be scared by the robot, so it would have to look non-threatening.

I love this approach and it’s already got my gears spinning about how I can improve the embedding of products like The 4 Minute Folio into your experience here on Four Minute Books.