Review

I have a real soft spot for this book. I read it soon after it was published, just in time for it to inform some discovery work I was doing. It is refreshingly practical and amazing for those doing discovery work for the first time. While more experienced individuals may find the Sprint format a little rigid, each time I re-read this book, I discover something new.

Learning facilitation skills can be challenging, as failures can be both painful and subtle. This book provides many small facilitation tips that, when combined, are incredibly powerful. It would take you a few years to learn these tips on your own.

Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

• Don’t build a minimal product to validate an idea → first focus on getting real data from a realistic prototype (before making expensive commitments)
• A Sprint helps you assess what customer reaction to your final product will be like
  • Sprints are successful regard are successful the payoff can be high
  • But Sprints that fail provide huge value by quickly identifying critical flaws
• The Sprint Format:

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
Map out the problem	Sketch competing solutions	Decide on the best idea	Build a realistic prototype	Test with target customers
Choose a target to focus on		Create testable hypothesis

• Focus on the biggest question. Go after your most important problem. The bigger the challenge the better the Sprint. Make it high stakes. Not having enough time fosters creativity. No problem is too large for a Sprint.
• Solve the surface first. Focus on the customer interaction parts of the product. Get the human interaction right, and you can work out backstage systems and processes later
• Limit your team to 7 people or less. You need some builders and a blend of people who have different expertise. Bring the troublemaker. It’s better that they feel invested in the project. Pick a facilitator to keep things to schedule and organize everyone.
• Clear the entire week. Stay in the same place so you can decorate it. Don’t allow folks to check devices inside the room. Make sure you have lots of whiteboard space.

Monday

• Set a long-term goal: Why are we doing this project? Where do we want to be in 6 months, 1 year or even 5 years from now?
• Capture the difficult questions that must be answered? What assumptions need to be true for us to succeed? What are the reasons why our project might fail?
• Create a map of the experience from beginning to end. Steps to create the map: List the actors on the left, write the ending on the right, add words and arrows in between, keep it simple and ask your experts for help.
• Knowledge is distributed across your organization. Nobody knows everything. So interview a bunch of stakeholders about your problem space.
• Choose a target for your Sprint. Narrow things down to the most important customer and most critical moment. Clustering How Might We notes should make it clear what to focus on. Add the best HMWs to your map.

Tuesday

• Start with lightning demos for inspiration. Think inside and outside of your company and industry. Everything should contain something you can learn from. Get everyone to do demo their favorite in a lightning demo of 3 minutes or less. Capture big ideas a you go → create a whiteboard of ideas. Combine ideas with HMWs or the map from yesterday
• Start coming up with and sketching solutions. Sketching helps you explain what you mean to colleagues. It’s the fastest and easiest way to transform abstract ideas into concrete solutions and communicate them. Work alone together → you’ll generate more solutions, you can do more research, find inspiration and think about the problem.
  • Four-Step Sketching Technique:
    1. Gather key info in note form {review your inspiration} (20 mins)
    2. Doodle rough solutions (20 mins)
    3. Try rapid variations {using crazy eights = folding paper into 8) (8 mins)
    4. Figure out the details {sketch the solution} (30+ mins)
  • The best sketches are:
    • self explanatory
    • kept anonymous,
    • words are chosen carefully (copywriting)
    • have a catchy title

Wednesday

• Decide what sketches to prototype. Put the sketches on the wall, look at solutions in silence, use dot stickers to mark interesting parts. Quickly discuss highlights of each solution (3 mins), use sticky notes to capture big ideas. Get each person to choose one solution (by voting with a sticker). The decider(s) make the final decision (by voting with stickers).
  • More than one great idea? Either combine them, or build them both and pit them against each other
• Storyboard your winning ideas in more detail (15 frames). Choose an opening scene. Fill in all the detail. Make sure you can test it in 15 minutes.

Thursday

• Build a prototype that looks real enough to get a genuine reaction. The Goldilocks prototype quality is when you spend just enough time to make it real enough, and not too much time that you’re wasting time on polishing.
  • Focus on the facade, the bit the customer interacts with.
  • You should have everything you need to move fast from yesterday, Thursday is just about building. You should have basic components, copywriting and details
  • Make sure you use the right tools (keep it rough with Keynote)
  • Assigning different roles will help you move faster
    • Maker: creates individual components
    • Stitcher: collects components and combine them seamlessly
    • Writer: makes all the text realistic
    • Asset collector: grabs images, icons and sample content
    • Interviewer: writes the interview script
  • Stitch everything together at the end and make sure the story (numbers, dates, prices etc are consistent)

Friday

• 85% of problems will be exposed after just 5 people. Then you’re better off fixing the problems you find and testing again… it’s faster than testing with more people to find more
• Interviews give you a signal as to whether the product is effective or not. They also tell you why. They’re easy to do well, just be friendly, curious and open to having your assumptions proved wrong.
• The five act interview:
  1. A friendly welcome
  2. Some general open-ended context questions about the customer
  3. Introduce the prototype (make it clear you didn’t design it and want frank feedback)
  4. Tasks designed to get the customer to react to the prototype. Nudge: what’s this? what do you think that’s for? What do you expect that will do?
  5. A quick debrief (to capture customer’s overarching thoughts, impressions). How does it compare to what you do now? How would you describe the product to a friend? If you had 3 wishes to improve the product, what would you do?
     • If comparing prototypes… Ask which is best, pros and cons and how would you combine them.
• Early employees of AirBnB described their early interviews as agonizing and enlightening as they uncovered so many problems.
• Collect interview insights on a whiteboard grid. Columns are customers, rows are parts of your product or user experience. Get everyone to put up their sticky notes of quotes, observations or interpretations from the interviews. Color code the notes (green for positive, red for negative, black for neutral). Look for patterns across the whiteboard (the more customers react in the same way the stronger the signal). List them on another and label them as positive, negative or neutral.
• Review your long-term goal and sprint questions. Can you answer them now?

Every interview draws you and your team closer to the people you’re trying to help with your product or service

• Every sprint you run will close the gap to your vision