Everybody knows the story of Apollo 13, but just in case, it goes like this: Astronauts head to moon, explosion on spacecraft, nail-biting return to earth. In Ron Howard’s 1995 movie version, there’s a scene where the team at Mission Control gathers around a blackboard to form a plan.
Gene Kranz, the flight director, wears a white vest, a flattop haircut, and a grim expression. He grabs a piece of chalk and draws a simple diagram on the blackboard. It’s a map showing the damaged spacecraft’s path from outer space, around the moon, and (hopefully) back to the earth’s surface—a trip that will take more than two days. The goal is clear: To get the astronauts home safely, Mission Control has to keep them alive and on the right course for every minute of that journey.
Throughout the film, Kranz returns to that goal on the blackboard. In the chaos of Mission Control, the simple diagram helps keep the team focused on the right problems. First, they correct the ship’s course to ensure it won’t veer into deep space. Next, they replace a failing air filter so the astronauts can breathe. And only then do they turn their attention to a safe landing.
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When a big problem comes along, like the challenge you selected for your sprint, it’s natural to want to solve it right away. The clock is ticking, the team is amped up, and solutions start popping into everyone’s mind. But if you don’t first slow down, share what you know, and prioritize, you could end up wasting time and effort on the wrong part of the problem.
If Mission Control had worried about the air filter first, they would have missed their window to fix the trajectory, and the Apollo 13 spaceship might have careened off toward Pluto.I Instead, NASA got organized and sorted their priorities before they started on solutions. That’s smart. And that’s the same way your team will start your sprint. In fact (with the luxury of unlimited oxygen) you’ll devote the entire first day of your sprint to planning.
Monday begins with an exercise we call Start at the End: a look ahead—to the end of the sprint week and beyond. Like Gene Kranz and his diagram of the return to planet earth, you and your team will lay out the basics: your long-term goal and the difficult questions that must be answered.
Starting at the end is like being handed the keys to a time machine. If you could jump ahead to the end of your sprint, what questions would be answered? If you went six months or a year further into the future, what would have improved about your business as a result of this project? Even when the future seems obvious, it’s worth taking the time on Monday to make it specific, and write it down. You’ll start with the project’s long-term goal.
To start the conversation, ask your team this question:
“Why are we doing this project? Where do we want to be six months, a year, or even five years from now?”
The discussion could take anywhere from thirty seconds to thirty minutes. If your team doesn’t quite agree about the goal or there’s any lack of clarity, don’t be embarrassed. But do have a discussion and figure it out. Slowing down might be frustrating for a moment, but the satisfaction and confidence of a clear goal will last all week.
Sometimes, setting the long-term goal is easy. Blue Bottle Coffee knew where they were headed in the long term: Bring great coffee to new customers online. Of course, they could have simplified their goal to “sell more coffee online,” but they wanted to keep the quality of the experience high, and they wanted to challenge themselves to reach new customers, not just their existing fans. They wrote a long-term goal that reflected that ambition.
In some sprints, setting the long-term goal requires a short discussion. Savioke wanted to accomplish a lot with the Relay delivery robot. Was the goal about improving the efficiency of the front desk staff? Was it about getting as many robots in as many hotels as possible? Savioke wanted to focus on customers, and use the same goal as the hotels: better guest experience.
Your goal should reflect your team’s principles and aspirations. Don’t worry about overreaching. The sprint process will help you find a good place to start and make real progress toward even the biggest goal. Once you’ve settled on a long-term goal, write it at the top of the whiteboard. It’ll stay there throughout the sprint as a beacon to keep everyone moving in the same direction.
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Okay, time for an attitude adjustment. While writing your long-term goal, you were optimistic. You imagined a perfect future. Now it’s time to get pessimistic. Imagine you’ve gone forward in time one year, and your project was a disaster. What caused it to fail? How did your goal go wrong?
Lurking beneath every goal are dangerous assumptions. The longer those assumptions remain unexamined, the greater the risk. In your sprint, you have a golden opportunity to ferret out assumptions, turn them into questions, and find some answers.
Savioke assumed their Relay robot would create a better guest experience. But they were smart enough to imagine a future where they were wrong, and the robot was awkward or confusing. They had three big questions: Can we make a smooth delivery? (the answer was yes). Will guests find the robot awkward? (the answer was no, except for the sluggish touch screen). And the long shot: Will guests come to the hotel just for the robot? (surprisingly, some people said they would).
Just like the goal, these questions guide the solutions and decisions throughout the sprint. They provide a quasi-checklist that you can refer to throughout the week and evaluate after Friday’s test.
You’ll list out your sprint questions on a second whiteboard (if you have one). We have a few prompts for getting teams to think about assumptions and questions:
• What questions do we want to answer in this sprint?
• To meet our long-term goal, what has to be true?
• Imagine we travel into the future and our project failed. What might have caused that?
An important part of this exercise is rephrasing assumptions and obstacles into questions. Blue Bottle Coffee assumed they could find a way to convey their expertise through their website, but before the sprint, they weren’t sure how. It’s not difficult to find an assumption such as Blue Bottle’s and turn it into a question:
Q: To reach new customers, what has to be true?
A: They have to trust our expertise.
Q: How can we phrase that as a question?
A: Will customers trust our expertise?
This rephrasing conversation might feel a little weird. Normal people don’t have conversations like this one (unless they’re Jeopardy! contestants). But turning these potential problems into questions makes them easier to track—and easier to answer with sketches, prototypes, and tests. It also creates a subtle shift from uncertainty (which is uncomfortable) to curiosity (which is exciting).
You might end up with only one or two sprint questions. That’s fine. You might come up with a dozen or more. Also, just fine. If you do end up with a long list, don’t worry about deciding which questions are most important. You’ll do that at the end of the day on Monday, when you pick a target for the sprint.
By starting at the end with these questions, you’ll face your fears. Big questions and unknowns can be discomforting, but you’ll feel relieved to see them all listed in one place. You’ll know where you’re headed and what you’re up against.
I. Pluto, if you’re reading, we still believe you’re a planet.