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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER
“Sprint offers a transformative formula for testing ideas that works whether you’re at a startup or a large organization. Within five days, you’ll move from idea to prototype to decision, saving you and your team countless hours and countless dollars. A must read for entrepreneurs of all stripes.” —Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup
From three partners at Google Ventures, a unique five-day process for solving tough problems, proven at more than a hundred companies.
Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution?
Now there’s a surefire way to answer these important questions: the sprint. Designer Jake Knapp created the five-day process at Google, where sprints were used on everything from Google Search to Google X. He joined Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky at Google Ventures, and together they have completed more than a hundred sprints with companies in mobile, e-commerce, healthcare, finance, and more.
A practical guide to answering critical business questions, Sprint is a book for teams of any size, from small startups to Fortune 100s, from teachers to nonprofits. It’s for anyone with a big opportunity, problem, or idea who needs to get answers today.
“Every business leader I know worries about the same thing: Are we moving fast enough? The genius of Jake Knapp’s Sprint is its step-by-step breakdown of what it takes to solve big problems and do work that matters with speed and urgency. A sprint is a cure for what ails companies in an ever faster world.” —Beth Comstock, vice chair of GE
"The key to success, often, is building the right habits. But which habits work best? Sprint offers powerful methods for hatching ideas, solving problems, testing solutions—and finding those small, correct habits that make all the right behaviors fall in place." – Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit
"To quote one of my colleagues, “don’t get ready, get started”. Through hard won experience Jake Knapp and the team at Google Ventures have refined an efficient, hands-on approach to solving your product, service and experience design challenges. Try the book and try a Sprint." – Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO and author of Change By Design
"Read this book and do what it says if you want to build better products faster." – Ev Williams, founder of Medium, Blogger, and Twitter
"Sprint teaches you a novel process for solving really thorny problems in just 5 days. It's full of helpful, entertaining stories that will make it easier for you to succeed. What more, exactly, would you demand from a book? I wish all business books were this useful." – Dan Heath, co-author of Made to Stick, Switch, and Decisive
About the Author
Jake Knapp created the Google Ventures sprint process and has run more than a hundred sprints with startups such as 23andme, Slack, Nest, and Foundation Medicine. Previously, Jake worked at Google, leading sprints for everything from Gmail to Google X. He is currently among the world’s tallest designers.
John Zeratsky has designed mobile apps, medical reports, and a daily newspaper (among other things). Before joining Google Ventures, he was a design lead at YouTube and an early employee of FeedBurner, which Google acquired in 2007. John writes about design and productivity for Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Wired. He studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin.
Braden Kowitz founded the Google Ventures design team in 2009 and pioneered the role of “design partner” at a venture capital firm. He has advised close to two hundred startups on product design, hiring, and team culture. Before joining Google Ventures, Braden led design for several Google products, including Gmail, Google Apps for Business, Google Spreadsheets, and Google Trends.
In 2002, a clarinet player named James Freeman quit his job as a professional musician and founded . . . a coffee cart.
James was obsessed with freshly roasted coffee. In those days in the San Francisco area, it was nearly impossible to find coffee beans with a roast date printed on the bag. So James decided to do it himself. He carefully roasted beans in a potting shed at home, then drove to farmers’ markets in Berkeley and Oakland, California, where he brewed and sold coffee by the cup. His manner was polite and accommodating, and the coffee was delicious.
Soon James and his cart, called Blue Bottle Coffee, developed a following. In 2005, he established a permanent Blue Bottle location in a friend’s San Francisco garage. Over the next few years, as the business grew, he slowly opened more cafés. By 2012, Blue Bottle had locations in San Francisco, Oakland, Manhattan, and Brooklyn. It was a business that many would have considered perfect. The coffee was ranked among the best nationwide. The baristas were friendly and knowledgeable. Even the interior design of the cafés was perfect: wooden shelves, tasteful ceramic tiles, and an understated logo in the perfect shade of sky blue.
But James didn’t consider the business perfect, or complete. He was still just as passionate about coffee and hospitality, and he wanted to bring the Blue Bottle experience to even more coffee lovers. He wanted to open more cafés. He wanted to deliver freshly roasted coffee to people’s homes, even if they didn’t live anywhere near a Blue Bottle location. If that coffee cart had been Sputnik, the next phase would be more like a moon shot.
So in October 2012, Blue Bottle Coffee raised $20 million from a group of Silicon Valley investors, including GV. James had many plans for that money, but one of the most obvious was building a better online store for selling fresh coffee beans. But Blue Bottle wasn’t a tech company and James was no expert at online retail. How could he translate the magic of his cafés to smartphones and laptops?
Several weeks later, on a bright December afternoon, Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky met up with James. They sat around a counter, drank coffee, and discussed the challenge. The online store was important to the company. It would take time and money to get it right, and it was difficult to know where to start. In other words, it sounded like a perfect candidate for a sprint. James agreed.
They talked about who should be in the sprint. An obvious choice was the programmer who would be responsible for building Blue Bottle’s online store. But James also included Blue Bottle’s chief operating officer, chief finance officer, and communications manager. He included the customer service lead who handled questions and complaints. He even included the company’s executive chairman: Bryan Meehan, a retail expert who started a chain of organic grocery stores in the UK. And, of course, James himself would be in the room.
The online store was essentially a software project—something our team at GV was very familiar with. But this group looked almost nothing like a traditional software team. These were busy people, who would be missing a full week of important work. Would the sprint be worth their time?
• • •
On Monday morning of our sprint week, the Blue Bottle team gathered in a conference room at GV’s office in San Francisco. We made a diagram on the whiteboard showing how coffee buyers might move through the online store. The Blue Bottle team targeted a new customer purchasing coffee beans. James wanted to focus the sprint on this scenario because it was so difficult. If they could establish credibility and create a great experience for someone who had never heard of Blue Bottle, let alone visited their cafés or tasted their coffee, then every other situation should be easy by comparison.
We ran into a big question: How should we organize the coffee? The shopper in this scenario would be choosing between a dozen or so varieties of bean, each in a nearly identical bag. And—unlike in Blue Bottle’s cafés—there would be no barista there to help choose.
At first, the answer seemed obvious. From boutique coffee roasters to mainstream giants like Starbucks, retailers tend to organize coffee by the geographic region where it was grown. Africa, Latin America, the Pacific. Honduran coffee vs. Ethiopian coffee. It would be logical for Blue Bottle to categorize their beans the same way.
“I have to admit something,” Braden announced. Everyone turned. “I’m into coffee, okay? I have a scale at home and everything.” Electronic scales are the hallmark of a true coffee freak. Owning a scale meant Braden weighed the water and coffee beans so that he could experiment and adjust ratios as he brewed. We’re talking science here. Coffee scales are accurate to a fraction of a gram.
Braden smiled and held his hands palm up. “I don’t know what the regions mean.” There was silence. We avoided looking at James. After all, Braden’s brave admission might be seen as heresy.
“That’s okay,” said James. The floodgate opened. John and Jake didn’t know the difference between coffee regions, and neither did Daniel Burka. We drank coffee together constantly, but none of us had ever admitted to our lack of sophistication.
Then Serah Giarusso, Blue Bottle’s customer service lead, snapped her fingers. “What do we do in the cafés?” she asked. After all, she went on, The Braden Situation must happen to baristas all the time: a customer comes in for coffee beans, but isn’t sure which kind to buy.
James is a slow and thoughtful speaker. He paused for a moment before he answered. “The brew method is very important,” he said. “So we train the baristas to ask the customer a simple question: ‘How do you make coffee at home?’ ” James explained that, depending on whether the customer used a Chemex, or a French press, or a Mr. Coffee, or whatever, the baristas could recommend a bean to match.
“ ‘How do you make coffee at home . . . ?’ ” Braden repeated. Everyone jotted notes. James had started the sprint by explaining his vision: that the online store should match the hospitality of the cafés. It felt as if we were onto something.
The team spent the following day sketching ideas for the store. On Wednesday morning we had fifteen different solutions. That’s too many to test with customers, so the team voted on their favorites as a way to narrow it down. Then James, the decision-maker, made the final pick of three sketches to test.
The first sketch showed a literal approach to making the website match the cafés: It looked like the inside of a Blue Bottle café, complete with wooden shelves. The second sketch included lots of text, to mirror the conversations baristas often have with customers. Finally, James chose a third sketch that organized coffee by brew method, bringing the “How do you make coffee at home?” question right onto the computer screen.
James had chosen three competing ideas. So which one should we prototype and test? The idea of a website that looked like the café was the most appealing. Blue Bottle’s aesthetic is celebrated, and a matching website would look different from anything else in the market. We had to try that idea, and it wasn’t compatible with the other solutions. But those other solutions were also really intriguing. We couldn’t quite decide.
So we decided to prototype all three. After all, we didn’t need a functioning website. To appear real in our test, each fake online store only required a few key screens. Working together with the Blue Bottle team, we used Keynote presentation software to make a series of slides that looked like three real websites. With a little ingenuity, and without any computer programming at all, we stitched those screens into a prototype that our test customers could use.
On Friday, the team watched the customer interviews. One at a time, coffee drinkers shopped on several websites, with Blue Bottle’s three prototypes slipped in among the competitors. (To avoid tipping off the customers, we gave each prototype a fake name.)
Patterns emerged. The store with wooden shelves, which everyone had such high hopes for? We thought the prototype was beautiful, but customers said it was “cheesy” and “not trustworthy.” But the other two prototypes fared far better. The “How do you make coffee at home?” design worked seamlessly. And the “lots of text” design shocked us: People actually read all those words, and the extra information brought Blue Bottle’s voice and expertise to life. As one customer said, “These guys know coffee.”
James and the Blue Bottle team built confidence with their sprint. They were much closer to defining how their online store would work. What’s more, they’d done it in a way that felt true to their principles of hospitality. They believed the online store could be an authentic Blue Bottle experience.
A few months later, Blue Bottle launched their new website, and their online sales growth doubled. The next year, they acquired a coffee subscription company. With a bigger team and new technology, they expanded the web store and began experimenting with new offerings. They knew it would take years to get the online store right—but in the sprint, they started on their path.
The bigger the challenge, the better the sprint
If you’re starting a project that will take months or years—like Blue Bottle and their new online store—a sprint makes an excellent kickoff. But sprints aren’t only for long-term projects. Here are three challenging situations where sprints can help:
High Stakes
Like Blue Bottle Coffee, you’re facing a big problem and the solution will require a lot of time and money. It’s as if you’re the captain of a ship. A sprint is your chance to check the navigation charts and steer in the right direction before going full steam ahead.
Not Enough Time
You’re up against a deadline, like Savioke rushing to get their robot ready for the hotel pilot. You need good solutions, fast. As the name suggests, a sprint is built for speed.
Just Plain Stuck
Some important projects are hard to start. Others lose momentum along the way. In these situations, a sprint can be a booster rocket: a fresh approach to problem solving that helps you escape gravity’s clutches.
When we talk to startups about sprints, we encourage them to go after their most important problem. Running a sprint requires a lot of energy and focus. Don’t go for the small win, or the nice-to-have project, because people won’t bring their best efforts. They probably won’t even clear their schedules in the first place.
So how big is too big? Sure, sprints work great for websites and other software challenges. But what about really large, complicated problems?
Not long ago, Jake visited his friend David Lowe, a vice president of a company called Graco that manufactures pumps and sprayers. Graco is not a small startup. They’re a multinational company who have been in business for more than ninety years.
The company was developing a new kind of industrial pump—a machine used in assembly lines. David, the VP, wondered if a sprint might help lower the risk of the project. After all, it would take eighteen months and millions of dollars to design and manufacture the new pump. How could he be sure they were on the right track?
Jake doesn’t know anything about industrial assembly lines, but out of curiosity, he joined a meeting with the engineering team. “I’ll be honest,” Jake said. “An industrial pump sounds too complicated to prototype and test in a week.”
But the team wouldn’t give up so easily. If limited to just five days, they could prototype a brochure for the pump’s new features and try it in sales visits. That kind of test could answer questions about marketability.
But what about the pump itself? The engineers had ideas for that, too. To test ease-of-use, they could 3D print new nozzles and attach them to existing pumps. To test installation, they could bring cables and hoses to nearby manufacturing plants and get reactions from assembly line workers. These tests wouldn’t be perfect. But they would answer big questions, before the pump even existed.
Jake was wrong. The industrial pump wasn’t too complicated for a sprint. The team of engineers accepted the five-day constraint and used their domain expertise to think creatively. They sliced the challenge into important questions, and shortcuts started to appear.
The lesson? No problem is too large for a sprint. Yes, this statement sounds absurd, but there are two big reasons why it’s true. First, the sprint forces your team to focus on the most pressing questions. Second, the sprint allows you to learn from just the surface of a finished product. Blue Bottle could use a slide show to prototype the surface of a website—before they built the software and inventory processes to make it really work. Graco could use a brochure to prototype the surface of a sales conversation—before they engineered and built the product they were selling.
Solve the surface first
The surface is important. It’s where your product or service meets customers. Human beings are complex and fickle, so it’s impossible to predict how they’ll react to a brand-new solution. When our new ideas fail, it’s usually because we were overconfident about how well customers would understand and how much they would care.
Get that surface right, and you can work backward to figure out the underlying systems or technology. Focusing on the surface allows you to move fast and answer big questions before you commit to execution, which is why any challenge, no matter how large, can benefit from a sprint.
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Jake Knapp is the author of "Make Time" and the New York Times bestseller "Sprint".
Jake spent ten years at Google and Google Ventures, where he created the design sprint. He has coached over 150 companies on the process, including teams at Slack, Uber, the New York Times, and LEGO. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and sons.
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John Zeratsky is the bestselling author of Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days and Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day.
John’s writing has been published by The Wall Street Journal, TIME, Harvard Business Review, Wired, Fast Company, and many other publications. He has appeared on stage nearly 200 times, including at Netflix, IDEO, McKinsey, the Code Conference, and The London School of Economics.
For nearly 15 years, John was a designer for technology companies. At Google Ventures (GV), he helped develop the design sprint process and worked with close to 200 startups, including Uber, Slack, 23andMe, Flatiron Health, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Nest. He was also GV’s in-house copywriter, editor, and content strategist; he created and edited the GV Library, which has reached millions of readers since 2012. Previously, John was a designer at YouTube and Google, and an early employee at FeedBurner, which Google acquired in 2007.
John studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from the UW School of Human Ecology, where he’s now an advisor to the Dean and faculty.
Originally from small-town Wisconsin, John and his wife Michelle have lived in Chicago and San Francisco. They spent 18 months traveling in Central America aboard their sailboat Pineapple before moving to Milwaukee in 2019.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzes reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Sprints as described in Jake’s book are just like those in Scrum...and are not.
Using the Scrum framework for discovery is certainly possible, but Scrum’s deliberately limited set of constraints might not be sufficient during this stage when there are still so many degrees of freedom.
Enter the constrained design of the Sprint. As defined in this book the Sprint is highly structured enabling a laser-sharp focus on defining the problem, generating solution options, deciding what to explore, building a prototype and finally testing the prototype with enough real customers to get valuable feedback and learning.
While I do feel some discomfort with the apparent lack of opportunity for the team to self-organise, I see huge advantages in running a process that closes a real customer feedback loop in just 5 days (even 4 with Sprint 2.0).
Excellent content prepared with actual experiences. Easy read. Easy to understand. I read this as part of a 3 day design sprint workshop training session. The only thing worse than not doing a design sprint is to do it poorly, and have it backfire. I strongly recommend getting some professional training or mentoring before you try this in real life. Enlist the help of a seasoned designer. I am a project manager and while the concepts and examples in this book are very easy to understand and each concept on its own is relatively simple and doable, the real value is in executing the entire process end-to-end, and on a suitable project. Read it, enjoy it, wrap your head around it, then find the right project and team to implement this with. The results will amaze you.
Most of us who really care about strategic product innovation have implemented bits and pieces of the Sprint system. But thanks to the writer's extensive experimentation, there is no more comprehensive guide to doing it successfully.
This book is thorough without being tiresome. It provides excellent case studies to illustrate the concepts (and provides interesting insights to major tech wins). The exhaustive checklists and supplies recommendations are invaluable. And, most importantly, the lessons learned from sprint team structure and decision making models will make us all better and faster at identifying, developing, and prototyping product and service opportunities.
I would give this book six stars if I could. Five seems inadequate.
I'm a product manager and the Sprint Book has been a great new strategy for our product team to validate quickly! It's a flexible method to build on your team's energy and domain knowledge in 5 days. Our team is entirely remote so when we get together it's helpful to have proven strategy guide our product initiatives. I also highly recommend picking up Design Sprint Kits to accompany the Sorint Book because it has all the supplies included:
Design Sprint Office Kit for Creativity and Productivity
. Either way, read this book.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Product teams should all read this book.
By Taz on June 17, 2017
I'm a product manager and the Sprint Book has been a great new strategy for our product team to validate quickly! It's a flexible method to build on your team's energy and domain knowledge in 5 days. Our team is entirely remote so when we get together it's helpful to have proven strategy guide our product initiatives. I also highly recommend picking up Design Sprint Kits to accompany the Sorint Book because it has all the supplies included: [[ASIN:B06XFX2TFR Design Sprint Office Kit for Creativity and Productivity]]. Either way, read this book.
It's an interesting approach, but smacks of "this solves everything" - like many business books written by consultants. The author focuses on perhaps half a dozen success stories - really doesn't give you much of an idea how successful this approach is likely to be on any given project/issue to which it is applied. The emphasis on progress over perfection is good, and having a specific outcome and deadline to which the group is accountable is also good practice. It's perhaps a good arrow to have in your quiver.
This is really a guide with every single step and detail to successfully conduct a sprint session on your own. As the whole process reminded me a lot those off-site sessions big corporations hire from expensive consulting firms to improve engagement or motivation, the book itself sounded like those pre-work materials one would receive for those off-site meetings, or maybe the tutor's manual. But here the whole dynamics is employed with a much more objective and clear purpose (different from off-sites, which seldom result in anything meaningful but a hangover) and that what makes the whole difference.
This book is the single most tactical problem-solving book.
If you've been wondering what you need to do to get something done and build a solution to a real problem, this book and the sprint method just cuts right to the chase and gives you a set of tools you can actually use.
Sprint is an excellent read with a real tangible approach to solving problems. There's so much that has gone into the design sprint method behind this book and so much to learn from the design sprint experience itself - e.g. human behavior, team work, focus, efficiency, success/failure, etc. I've been using their design sprint method for years now and I am really excited to see it codified in this book. The best part is that you can use the sprint method for almost any kind of project that's aiming to solve a problem.
If the key to getting something done is to just "do it", this book and the sprint demonstrates the how to "do" part.
Reading this book has been inspirational. It is about developing products in 5-day sprints. However, I have been using it to think about organizing course projects over long periods. I also have just found the case studies spark many many ideas for me.
For people who have studied design (me) and scientific method (also me), these ideas aren't new. But I found bringing them together very refreshing in sparking creative rethinking. The many practical suggestions are also insightful, particularly with regards to managing people in sessions.
4.0 out of 5 starsExcellent but not for all scenarios
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 25, 2020
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It’s been a tough call whether to give this book a 4 or 5 star review. The process outlined in the book is good but very prescriptive and Labour and resource intensive. As soon as someone doesn’t show up or focuses on other things then the process breaks down. Also for a regular Agile development sprint when maybe solving minor customer feedback issues it’s not appropriate. I think it’s clearly a case of trying the process learning from it and working out when it’s appropriate to use it and then getting EVERYONE to commit to it. I found the biggest issue is getting people 100% of the time for 5 consecutive days without taking calls, fielding emails, having other meetings or leaving early, arriving late or whatever.
5.0 out of 5 starsGame Changer. Repeatable Process for Solving Real Problems in Any Context
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 28, 2018
Verified Purchase
Game changer. I pre-ordered this book while working at a leading UX agency in Brighton. I read it at the beginning of a new project and tried the method Jake describes in the book.
We ran two sprints with the client, on two different problems. We solved core usability issues, built shared understanding with the team and exceeded stakeholder expectations.
It is an effective and fun process that anyone can follow, not just designers.
I highly recommend reading this book if you have thorny problems to solve and are looking for a reliable and repeatable method for solving them quickly.
5.0 out of 5 starsA Clear Fire Way of Building and Testing Ideas fast
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 25, 2018
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Ever been in the situation where you are working on a project and you have all the time and resource in the world but the output isn't to your satisfaction. Or where you are in the situation that you don't have enough time, or resource but the outcome is excellent? Sprint is a methodology to enable you to build and test ideas fast. Born out of Google, Sprint is a framework enables accelerate project outcomes. The book provides you with all the roles and responsibilities, deliverables and hints and tips from it being used many times within Google and the startup world! If you are in a start-up or want to test an idea for both success and failure this is worth a read. It might save you some time!
5.0 out of 5 starsAmazing book which yielded great practical results
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 9, 2020
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I bought this book because I’d used it at work to run some team product sprints. It’s easy to follow and the actual process gave great results. I had to adapt it sometimes to a 3 day sprint as opposed to a 5 day sprint because of peoples availability but the principles still worked the same.
2.0 out of 5 starsDespite the title and rating, a disappoinment
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 10, 2019
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My main issue with this book it that despite the 5 day structure the underlying information is very unstructured. I also found that it was fluffed up with too many stories and examples. More clear step by step 'how to' guidance would have been beneficial.
I actually think Alberto Savoia's The Right It was more helpful.
![Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by [Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Braden Kowitz]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/512V+zNxQ9L._SY346_.jpg)
“Why are we doing this project? Where do we want to be six months, a year, or even five years from now?”2,909 Kindle readers highlighted this
