Book SummarySprint, by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Sprint

Do you have an idea for a product, but you’re not sure how to turn it into a testable prototype? Maybe you’re not even sure it’s worth pursuing at all. Well, using Jake Knapp’s Design Sprint process, you can build and test prototype products within a five-day work week, helping you determine your idea’s viability quickly and cheaply.

Jake Knapp invented the Design Sprint process while working for Google. After moving to Google Ventures (GV), he facilitated sprints with over a hundred companies, including Slack, Airbnb, and Spotify. Designers John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz collaborated with Knapp at GV to refine the process, and Zeratsky and Knapp later co-authored a book on time management, Make Time. All three are experts in efficiency, productivity, and team improvement strategies.

(Shortform note: At its most basic level, a Design Sprint is a set amount of time in which a team works on a set of tasks to create a testable version of a product. Sprints gained their name due to their short duration and the high intensity of the work involved.)

In this guide, we’ll show you what to do on each day of your sprint in a step-by-step format. In our commentary, we’ll teach you about the underlying principles behind the Design Sprint and provide examples of a sprint in practice.

(Shortform note: The authors organize their information about sprints into a day-by-day guide. This is arguably the most...

Sprint Summary Before Your Sprint

According to Knapp, Zeratsky, and Kowitz, the success of your sprint will depend on your preparation of four elements: deciding which idea you want to test, getting the timing right, having the right people in the room, and creating an optimal space for your sprint.

Element #1: Choosing Your Idea

To get started, the authors suggest figuring out which idea you want to develop and the problems you need to solve in your sprint. For clarity’s sake, when we refer to an “idea” in this guide, we mean the idea that will eventually become the prototype product you test at the end of the week. When we refer to “problems,” we mean the problems you need to solve to develop your idea into a workable design. The authors argue that you can test practically any idea or problem in a sprint.

For example, say you work for a restaurant that wants to test out a new order kiosk. Your ideas would be the elements of the kiosk itself, like the design of the menu or the shape and size of the screen. The problems you face might be how to make the kiosk user-friendly, or how to entice customers to use it in the first place. You’d need to figure out how to make your order kiosk accessible...

Sprint Summary Day 1: Planning the Sprint and the Customer Experience

Now that you’ve prepared for your sprint, on Monday, Knapp, Zeratsky, and Kowitz suggest identifying a goal for your project and the questions you want your sprint to answer. You’ll also plan a customer’s experience with your product, from their first encounter with it through the full process of using it.

Step 1: Identify Goals and Questions

The authors say to start off Monday by deciding on a goal with your team. It can be as broad and lofty as you want. When choosing your goal, think about the purpose of your project and what you hope it will achieve in the near and distant future. The information you learn from your sprint will help you progress toward this long-term aspiration.

For example, say there’s a team from a bookstore who are using their sprint to develop a prototype for a personalized book recommendation feature on their website. Their broader, long-term goal is to create a personalized online retail experience for their customers. Creating a successful recommendation tool would be one step toward reaching that goal.

(Shortform note: Other authors also advise starting the development process with clear goals for your product’s future. Marty Cagan...

Sprint Summary Day 2: Creating a Design

On Monday, you narrowed down your priorities. Now you know where you’ll focus your attention during your sprint. On Tuesday, Knapp, Zeratsky, and Kowitz suggest you gather inspiration for your idea, create a drawing of your best design idea, and begin recruiting customers for Friday’s interviews.

Step 1: Gather Inspiration

The authors argue that every good idea builds off of what came before, so you’ll start on Tuesday morning by gathering inspiration from other products and services. Every team member should make a list of products, either from your company or from another, that have features you can emulate in your own product. In short presentations, each person will explain the contents of their lists. As people present, record every product mentioned with a little sketch and blurb explaining what inspiration it has to offer.

(Shortform note: Drawing from other people’s products to create your design may feel strange. It may even feel like stealing. To get better as a designer, however, you have to study the products you admire to understand what makes them so successful. If you synthesize...

Sprint Summary Day 3: Making Decisions

After spending Tuesday producing design ideas for your product, you’ll spend Wednesday deciding which one to pursue. In this section, we’ll discuss the authors’ methods for critiquing the final drawings. Once your team leader selects the one you’ll use to inform your next steps, you’ll create a storyboard to plan for Thursday’s prototype.

Step 1: Select a Design

Knapp, Zeratsky, and Kowitz suggest you start by putting everyone’s final drawings from Tuesday in a row on the wall. These should be anonymous. Give everyone some dot stickers and review the drawings silently. When you see something you like in a design, place a dot next to it. Write any concerns you have on sticky notes and place them below the drawing.

After the review period, the authors recommend critiquing each design for three minutes. The sprint coordinator should speak first, describing the ideas that people have marked with dots. These “ideas” might be someone’s whole design, or they might be certain aspects of a design. If necessary, the team can point out any promising piece of a design that the coordinator didn’t mention.

A person who is not the coordinator will write the team’s observations on...

Sprint Summary Day 4: Creating the Prototype

Wednesday was decision day—now, it’s time to use the storyboard you created to build your prototype.

Step 1: Understand the Prototype’s Purpose

Use the storyboard as a reminder of the prototype’s components, a guide for its visual design, and a reference for how it’s supposed to function when you test it later in the day. According to Knapp, Zeratsky, and Kowitz, your prototype should be sophisticated enough to create the illusion of a complete product, but not so complicated that you can’t finish it. You can go back and add missing pieces later. For Friday’s testing, all you have to do is create the features that will give you the information you need from the customers.

For example, instead of trying to build a recommendation tool that features every book in their inventory, the bookstore could create a tool that pulls recommendations from a list that has one or two books per genre. The customer would still receive a recommendation based on their choices, but the team wouldn’t have to waste time inputting every title they have in stock.

Marty Cagan’s Four Kinds of Prototypes

Other creators of product development processes agree that [you shouldn’t...

Sprint Summary Day 5: Testing the Prototype

By Friday, you’ve reached the last day of your sprint. This section will show you how to conduct one-on-one interviews with five customers, giving you enough feedback to understand where to take your product next.

Step 1: Set the Stage

According to the authors, you can identify the majority of problems with a product through just five customer interviews. This means they can all be done on the same day. You’ll start at 9:00 am on Friday, and each interview will be an hour long with a half-hour break in between. The person acting as the interviewer will be in one room with the customers and the prototype.

(Shortform note: It may be tempting to jump from one interview to another without taking the full half-hour break in between, but you should use that time to your advantage. Planning breaks in your schedule gives you some padding in case an interview goes over time or the next customer is late. It also gives you some much-needed time to rest and reflect on what you’ve just learned. You can write down a few takeaways if you have key...

Shortform Exercise: Get Started With Your Sprint

You now have all the tools you need to run sprints. Consider how you can use sprints to expedite your current projects.

Think about the projects you’re working on right now. Describe the most important or pressing one here. (An example of a project could be working on a new software update for a planner app, or designing an educational toy for young children.)