Ocean’s Eleven, starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt,I is one of the all-time great caper movies. In the film, Danny Ocean, an ex-con played by Clooney, organizes a band of career criminals for a once-in-a-lifetime heist. Their target: a Las Vegas casino on the night of a big prizefight, when $150 million will be in the vault. The odds are against them, the clock is ticking, and it takes an intricate strategy and every special skill the team possesses to pull it off. There’s a pickpocket, an explosives guy, even an acrobat. It’s excellent cinema.
A sprint resembles that perfectly orchestrated heist. You and your team put your talents, time, and energy to their best use, taking on an overwhelming challenge and using your wits (and a little trickery) to overcome every obstacle that crosses your path. To pull it off, you need the right team. You shouldn’t need a pickpocket, but you will need a leader and a set of diverse skills.
To build the perfect sprint team, first you’re going to need a Danny Ocean: someone with authority to make decisions. That person is the Decider, a role so important we went ahead and capitalized it. The Decider is the official decision-maker for the project. At many startups we work with, it’s a founder or CEO. At bigger companies, it might be a VP, a product manager, or another team leader. These Deciders generally understand the problem in depth, and they often have strong opinions and criteria to help find the right solution.
Take Blue Bottle Coffee’s sprint. Having CEO James Freeman in the room was critical. He was there to talk about Blue Bottle’s core values and share his vision for an online store that matched their standards of hospitality. He chose the sketches that best aligned with that vision. And he knew how the baristas were trained, a detail that unlocked a surprising solution.
But it isn’t just expertise and vision that makes decision-makers so crucial. There’s another important reason you need them involved in your sprint, and we learned about it the hard way. See, one of the early sprints we tried was a big flop. To protect the innocent, let’s call the company SquidCo.II We’ll tell you who wasn’t innocent: Jake, John, and Braden. We screwed up.
We’d carefully invited everyone from SquidCo’s team who worked on the project. Everyone, that is, except for one person: Sam, SquidCo’s chief product officer. Sam was going to be traveling, but the week worked for everybody else. So we helped SquidCo run a sprint. They made a prototype and tested it. The prototype did well with their customers, and the team was ready to start building.
But when Sam returned, the project ended. What happened? The solution had tested well—but Sam didn’t think we had picked the right problem to solve in the first place. There were other, more important priorities for the team.
The SquidCo sprint failure was our fault. We’d tried to guess what Sam would say, and we’d failed. The Decider should have been in the room.
The Decider must be involved in the sprint. If you, dear reader, are the Decider, clear your schedule and get in the room. If you’re not, you must convince the Decider to join. You might feel nervous; after all, it’s a big time commitment for a new process. If your Decider is reluctant, try one or more of these arguments:
Rapid Progress
Emphasize the amount of progress you’ll make in your sprint: In just one week, you’ll have a realistic prototype. Some Deciders are not excited about customer tests (at least, until they see one firsthand), but almost everyone loves fast results.
It’s an Experiment
Consider your first sprint an experiment. When it’s over, the Decider can help evaluate how effective it was. We’ve found that many people who are hesitant to change the way they work are open to a onetime experiment.
Explain the Tradeoffs
Show the Decider a list of big meetings and work items you and your team will miss during the sprint week. Tell her which items you will skip and which you will postpone, and why.
Be honest about your motivations. If the quality of your work is suffering because your team’s regular work schedule is too scattered, say so. Tell the Decider that instead of doing an okay job on everything, you’ll do an excellent job on one thing.
If the Decider agrees to the sprint but can’t spare a full week, invite her to join you at a few key points. On Monday, she can share her perspective on the problem. On Wednesday, she can help choose the right idea to test. And on Friday, she should stop by to see how customers react to the prototype.
If she’s only going to make cameo appearances, your Decider needs to have an official delegate in the room. In many of our sprints with startups, the CEO appoints one or two people from the sprint team to act as Deciders when she’s not there. In one sprint, the CEO sent the design director an email that read, “I hereby grant you all decision-making authority for this project.” Absurd? Yes. Effective? Absolutely. This official power transfer added tremendous clarity, the kind of clarity we wish we’d had with SquidCo.
And if your Decider doesn’t believe the sprint to be worthwhile? If she won’t even stop by for a cameo? Hold up! That’s a giant red flag. You might have the wrong project. Take your time, talk with the Decider, and figure out which big challenge would be better.III
Once you’ve got a Decider (or two) committed to the sprint, it’s time to assemble your sprint team. These are the people who will be in the room with you, all day, every day during the sprint. On Monday, they’ll work with you to understand the problem and choose which part to focus on. Throughout the week, they’ll be the ones sketching solutions, critiquing ideas, building the prototype, and watching the customer interviews.
We’ve found the ideal size for a sprint to be seven people or fewer. With eight people, or nine, or more, the sprint moves more slowly, and you’ll have to work harder to keep everyone focused and productive. With seven or fewer, everything is easier. (Yes, yes—we know there were eleven people in Ocean’s Eleven. It was just a movie!)
So who should you include? Of course you’ll want some of the folks who build the product or run the service—the engineers, designers, product managers, and so on. After all, they know how your company’s products and services work and they might already have ideas about the problem at hand.
But you shouldn’t limit your sprint team to just those who normally work together. Sprints are most successful with a mix of people: the core people who work on execution along with a few extra experts with specialized knowledge.
In Savioke’s sprint, we got great ideas from the people you’d expect, like the roboticists and the head of design. But one of the most important contributors turned out to be Izumi Yaskawa. Izumi wasn’t part of the team that built the robot, but as Savioke’s head of business development, she knew more than anyone about how hotels operated and what they wanted from the robot.
For Blue Bottle Coffee, important insights came from the customer service manager and the CFO, people who normally wouldn’t have been involved in building the website. In other sprints, we’ve had winning solutions come from cardiologists, mathematicians, and farming consultants. The common traits they all shared? They had deep expertise and they were excited about the challenge. Those are people you want in your sprint.
Choosing whom to include isn’t always easy, so we’ve created a cheat sheet. You don’t have to include each and every role listed here. And for some roles, you might choose two or three. Just remember that a mix is good.
Decider
Who makes decisions for your team? Perhaps it’s the CEO, or maybe it’s just the “CEO” of this particular project. If she can’t join for the whole time, make sure she makes a couple of appearances and delegates a Decider (or two) who can be in the room at all times.
Examples: CEO, founder, product manager, head of design
Finance expert
Who can explain where the money comes from (and where it goes)?
Examples: CEO, CFO, business development manager
Marketing expert
Who crafts your company’s messages?
Examples: CMO, marketer, PR, community manager
Customer expert
Who regularly talks to your customers one-on-one?
Examples: researcher, sales, customer support
Tech/logistics expert
Who best understands what your company can build and deliver?
Examples: CTO, engineer
Who designs the products your company makes?
Examples: designer, product manager
The word “team” is pretty cheap, but in a sprint, a team is really a team. You’ll be working side by side for five days. By Friday, you’ll be a problem-solving machine, and you’ll share a deep understanding of the challenge and the possible solutions. This collaborative atmosphere makes the sprint a great time to include people who don’t necessarily agree with you.
Before every sprint, we ask: Who might cause trouble if he or she isn’t included? We don’t mean people who argue just for the sake of arguing. We mean that smart person who has strong, contrary opinions, and whom you might be slightly uncomfortable with including in your sprint.
This advice is partially defensive. If the troublemaker is in the room, even just for a guest appearance, he or she will feel included and invested in the project. But there’s a more important reason. Troublemakers see problems differently from everyone else. Their crazy idea about solving the problem might just be right. And even if it’s wrong, the presence of a dissenting view will push everyone else to do better work.
There’s a fine line between a rebel and a jerk, of course, but don’t avoid people just because they disagree with you. As you’ll see throughout the book, the sprint process turns competing ideas into an asset.
Often, when we list out all of the people we want in a sprint, we have more than seven. That’s okay. It’s a sign of a strong team! But you’ll have to make tough decisions. We can’t tell you which seven people to include, but we can make it easier by telling you what to do with the rest.
If you have more than seven people you think should participate in your sprint, schedule the extras to come in as “experts” for a short visit on Monday afternoon. During their visit, they can tell the rest of the team what they know and share their opinions. (We’ll tell you all about the Ask the Experts process starting on page 68.) A half an hour should be plenty of time for each expert. It’s an efficient way to boost the diversity of perspectives while keeping your team small and nimble.
Now you’ve got your Decider, your sprinters, and some extra experts coming in for visits. Your team is all set. Except . . . oh yeah. Somebody’s got to run the sprint.
Brad Pitt’s character in Ocean’s Eleven, Rusty Ryan, is the logistics guy. He keeps the heist running. You need someone to be the Rusty Ryan of your sprint. This person is the Facilitator, and she’s responsible for managing time, conversations, and the overall process. She needs to be confident leading a meeting, including summarizing discussions and telling people it’s time to stop talking and move on. It’s an important job. And since you’re the one reading this book, you might be a good candidate.
The Facilitator needs to remain unbiased about decisions, so it’s not a good idea to combine the Decider and Facilitator roles in one person. It often works well to bring in an outsider who doesn’t normally work with your team to be the Facilitator, but it’s not a requirement.
This book is written to be equally handy to the Facilitator and to anyone else who’s interested in sprints. If you’re going to be the Facilitator, you’ll find that the text speaks directly to you and the activities through which you’ll lead your team, from Monday morning through Friday afternoon. But even if you’re not the Facilitator, it’ll all make sense to you, too.
One of the great delights of watching Ocean’s Eleven unfold is seeing how each member of the team utilizes his unique skill to help pull off the heist. You know all the characters are in the script for a reason, but you don’t know exactly what they’re going to do until they do it.
Sprints are the same way. Each expert in the room will provide a key contribution—whether it’s background information, a fresh idea, or even a shrewd observation of your customers. Exactly what they’ll say and do is impossible to predict. But with the right team in place, unexpected solutions will appear.
I. Or Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, if you prefer the original.
II. We’ve included several stories in this book of sprints that went awry. After a lot of deliberation, we decided to use fake names for the companies and people involved. The anonymity allows us to be honest about what went wrong, without embarrassing our friends. We hope you understand.
III. Exception to the rule: There are times when a team willfully goes against management because they’re convinced that a prototype and real data will prove their case. If your team has decided to run a sprint without the official Decider in the room, proceed with care. We applaud your courage, but remember: Deciders are well known for squashing results when they’re not in the sprint.