Three weeks later, the robot went into full-time service at the hotel. And the Relay was a hit. Stories about the charming robot appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and Savioke racked up more than 1 billion media impressions in the first month. But, most important, guests loved it. By the end of the summer, Savioke had so many orders for new robots that they could hardly keep up with production.
Savioke gambled by giving their robot a personality. But they were only confident in that gamble because the sprint let them test risky ideas quickly.
Good ideas are hard to find. And even the best ideas face an uncertain path to real-world success. That’s true whether you’re running a startup, teaching a class, or working inside a large organization.
Execution can be difficult. What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? Should you assign one smart person to figure it out or have the whole team brainstorm? And how do you know when you’ve got the right solution? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure? And, once it’s done, will anybody care?
As partners at GV, it’s our mission to help our startups answer these giant questions. We’re not consultants paid by the hour. We’re investors, and we succeed when our companies succeed. To help them solve problems quickly and be self-sufficient, we’ve optimized our sprint process to deliver the best results in the least time. Best of all, the process relies on the people, knowledge, and tools that every team already has.
Working together with our startups in a sprint, we shortcut the endless-debate cycle and compress months of time into a single week. Instead of waiting to launch a minimal product to understand if an idea is any good, our companies get clear data from a realistic prototype.
The sprint gives our startups a superpower: They can fast-forward into the future to see their finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitments. When a risky idea succeeds in a sprint, the payoff is fantastic. But it’s the failures that, while painful, provide the greatest return on investment. Identifying critical flaws after just five days of work is the height of efficiency. It’s learning the hard way, without the “hard way.”
At GV, we’ve run sprints with companies like Foundation Medicine (makers of advanced cancer diagnostics), Nest (makers of smart home appliances), and Blue Bottle Coffee (makers of, well, coffee). We’ve used sprints to assess the viability of new businesses, to make the first version of new mobile apps, to improve products with millions of users, to define marketing strategies, and to design reports for medical tests. Sprints have been run by investment bankers looking for their next strategy, by the team at Google building the self-driving car, and by high school students working on a big math assignment.
This book is a DIY guide for running your own sprint to answer your pressing business questions. On Monday, you’ll map out the problem and pick an important place to focus. On Tuesday, you’ll sketch competing solutions on paper. On Wednesday, you’ll make difficult decisions and turn your ideas into a testable hypothesis. On Thursday, you’ll hammer out a realistic prototype. And on Friday, you’ll test it with real live humans.
Instead of giving high-level advice, we dig into the details. We’ll help you assemble the perfect sprint team from the people with whom you already work. You’ll learn big stuff (like how to get the most out of your team’s diverse opinions and one leader’s vision), medium stuff (like why your team should spend three straight days with your phones and computers off), and nitty-gritty stuff (like why you should eat lunch at 1 p.m.). You won’t finish with a complete, detailed, ready-to-ship product. But you will make rapid progress, and know for sure if you’re headed in the right direction.
You’ll see some methods that look familiar and others that are new. If you’re familiar with lean development or design thinking, you’ll find the sprint is a practical way to apply those philosophies. If your team uses “agile” processes, you’ll find that our definition of “sprint” is different, but complementary. And if you haven’t heard of any of these methods, don’t worry—you’ll be fine. This is a book for experts and beginners alike, for anyone who has a big opportunity, problem, or idea and needs to get started. Every step has been tried, tweaked, tested, and measured over the course of our 100+ sprints and refined with the input we’ve gathered from the growing sprint community. If it doesn’t work, it’s not in the book.
At the end, you’ll find a set of checklists, including a shopping list and day-by-day guides. You don’t have to memorize everything now—the checklists await you once you’re ready to run your own sprint. But before you start that sprint, you’ll need to plan carefully to make it a success. In the next chapters, we’ll show you how to set the stage.