Sprint

When you have an ambitious idea for a product or project, how can you find out quickly if it will work—before you invest months or millions? In Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days, Jake Knapp, along with John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz of Google Ventures, offers a practical and engaging answer. They argue that innovation doesn’t have to be chaotic or slow; with the right process and focus, teams can solve pressing problems and validate ideas in just five days.

Knapp draws from his work at Google and Google Ventures, where he and his colleagues refined a compressed version of design thinking called the sprint. It’s not about running faster—it’s about concentrating the best of creative, analytical, and user-centered processes into one disciplined week. The authors combine the wisdom of business strategy, behavioral science, and design methodology into a step-by-step framework that any team can follow, regardless of industry.

Why Sprints Matter

The modern workplace, Knapp observes, is full of distractions: emails, meetings, and never-ending projects that dilute energy and focus. Many teams suffer from endless debates and slow execution. The sprint provides a countermeasure—a structured escape from the daily grind. By clearing one week on the calendar and gathering the right people, a team can tackle a single big challenge, prototype ideas, and test them with real customers.

This method gives teams a way to fast-forward into the future—to visualize how their ideas will perform before investing in development. It allows startups and corporations alike to sidestep bureaucratic delays and make data-driven decisions swiftly. The authors contend that the sprint is not just a design method but a mindset shift toward learning efficiently, failing safely, and deciding confidently.

How the Sprint Works

Each sprint lasts five days, Monday through Friday. On Monday, teams map the problem and select a target. Tuesday is for sketching solutions individually; Wednesday for deciding and combining the best ideas; Thursday for creating a realistic prototype; and Friday for testing that prototype with five real users. By the end of the week, the team has tangible evidence of what works and what doesn’t—weeks or months of progress condensed into a single burst of focused effort.

Knapp and his coauthors emphasize that this structure balances creativity with practicality. It prevents the noisy chaos of group brainstorming and replaces it with independent thinking followed by structured, silent voting. The week carefully alternates between expanding options and narrowing choices, culminating in evidence from customers. It’s designed for flexibility: teams have applied it not just to software projects but to hardware design, marketing campaigns, organizational decisions, and even naming companies.

Stories That Bring It to Life

Throughout the book, Knapp brings the method to life with vivid case studies. Savioke used a sprint to design the personality of its hotel robot, testing whether guests would find it friendly or creepy. Blue Bottle Coffee used it to prototype its online store, discovering that customers preferred products categorized by brewing method, not region. Slack used sprints to clarify how best to explain its communication software to new audiences. Even medical and industrial companies like Foundation Medicine and Graco have leveraged sprints to prototype reports and physical devices.

These stories demonstrate the sprint’s universality: it helps teams test risky ideas safely and learn fast. Whether the outcome is success or failure, both are valuable. A good sprint doesn’t guarantee a winning product—it guarantees learning.

The Human Side of Innovation

Knapp reminds readers that the sprint is ultimately about people—how they think, collaborate, and make decisions. It creates a temporary oasis of focus where email and multitasking are banned, everyone works together in one room, and visual thinking through whiteboards reigns supreme. Decisions are made quickly by a designated Decider, not through endless consensus. Each person’s expertise contributes to one shared prototype and one shared understanding.

Above all, the sprint turns curiosity into action. By investigating questions early and directly with customers, teams discover what truly matters and avoid making costly assumptions. The sprint model embodies the philosophy of starting slow so you can go fast—prioritizing careful thought and collaboration upfront to accelerate outcomes later.

In essence, Sprint is a handbook for designing smarter work. It teaches you how to bring ideas to life quickly, learn from failure safely, and involve your team meaningfully in solving complex problems. Whether you’re building a startup, improving a product, or rethinking your own workflow, Knapp’s sprint method offers a path to clarity and results in a week—a refreshing antidote to the paralysis of endless planning.

Knapp insists that effective innovation begins with tackling the right problem. Before sprinting, you have to know where you’re headed. The authors show how teams like Blue Bottle Coffee and Savioke focused on high-stakes questions rather than small optimizations. That focus transformed abstract ambitions into solvable problems.

Choosing the High Stakes

The sprint works best when the challenge is big enough to matter but narrow enough to act on. For Blue Bottle Coffee, the question wasn’t simply how to sell more beans online—it was how to recreate the hospitality and expertise of a barista on a website. Savioke faced the question of how a robotic delivery assistant should behave around humans. These weren’t trivial issues; they were existential tests for the business.

Knapp compares choosing a challenge to plotting a course before setting sail (echoing the decision theory in Peter Drucker’s management philosophy). Teams often waste energy on low-impact work because big problems feel intimidating. The sprint offers confidence—a fixed timeline and clear structure—to face those intimidating problems head-on.

Solving the Surface First

One of Knapp’s most practical insights is to begin with the surface—the visible layer where customers interact with your product. He calls this “solving the surface first.” In both software and physical products, failures often occur because companies misjudge how customers will perceive the product. By building prototypes that look real, teams can quickly understand whether users grasp and value the idea.

This “surface-first” logic runs through all case studies. Graco, an industrial manufacturer, used brochures and mock sales visits to test market interest before investing millions in machinery. The sprint makes the intangible visible and testable, turning uncertainty into insight.

Ultimately, focusing on the right challenge means identifying the question whose answer will drive the biggest change. With five days of concentrated work, clarity replaces confusion, and the path forward becomes visible—just like the moment Savioke realized its robot’s personality could delight guests instead of unsettling them.

A sprint’s success hinges on people. Knapp likens assembling a sprint team to George Clooney’s crew in Ocean’s Eleven: diverse experts with complementary talents united by one mission. The mix of roles—leader, specialists, and contrarians—creates the intellectual friction that drives innovation.

The Decider and Facilitator

Every sprint requires a clear decision-maker called the Decider. This person—often a CEO or product manager—has the authority to make final calls. Knapp recounts the painful lesson from SquidCo, where the chief product officer wasn’t present. The team produced great ideas, but when she returned, she canceled the project. Without the Decider in the room, decisions don’t stick.

Complementing the Decider is the Facilitator, akin to Rusty Ryan in Ocean’s Eleven. This person manages the process and time, ensuring momentum and neutrality. The facilitator asks naive questions, keeps whiteboards organized, and tells people when to move on—a critical safeguard against debate overload.

Seven Is the Magic Number

Knapp discovered that seven participants or fewer create the best dynamics. More than that, and conversation drags. The ideal mix includes designers, engineers, finance and marketing experts, and one or two “troublemakers”—those who challenge assumptions constructively. Diversity brings fresh viewpoints, while small size keeps the team nimble.

Inviting troublemakers ensures critical thinking. As Knapp notes, disagreement fuels creativity. Even dissenting views, when processed through structured activities, become assets rather than conflicts.

Shared Focus

During the sprint, all participants work in one room with devices off and calendars cleared. This enforced focus combats the fragmentation that kills productivity. A facilitator uses tools like the Time Timer—a clock with a visible red disk—to make time tangible and urgency clear (Knapp credits preschool classrooms for inspiring this trick).

Together, these roles and rules create a high-energy micro-environment where ideas can flourish. The sprint transforms a random group of professionals into a temporary dream team capable of breakthroughs that traditional meetings rarely achieve.

Knapp’s mantra Start at the End ensures teams never lose sight of what really matters. Drawing inspiration from Mission Control during Apollo 13, he shows how beginning with a clear goal and anticipating potential failures aligns everyone from the start.

Setting the Long-Term Goal

On Monday of the sprint, teams articulate their aspiration—what success looks like in six months to five years. The Blue Bottle Coffee team wrote: “Bring great coffee to new customers online.” For Savioke, it was “Create a better guest experience.” These long-term goals aren’t mere metrics; they express the company’s values. Unrealistic goals are welcomed—they fuel ambition and imagination.

Flip the Script: From Assumption to Question

Once optimism is on the board, the team flips to pessimism. They imagine the future gone wrong: What could fail? What assumptions are dangerous? Knapp introduces the idea of converting fears into questions—the “sprint questions.” Blue Bottle asked, “Will customers trust our expertise?” Savioke asked, “Will guests find the robot awkward?” These questions become the backbone of the sprint, guiding every decision until Friday’s test.

Turning assumptions into questions shifts the emotional climate from anxiety to curiosity, from uncertainty to exploration. It reorients teams toward learning rather than defending ideas (a concept similar to Carol Dweck’s growth mindset).

Mapping the Journey

With goals and questions set, teams create a map—a visual storyline of how users experience the product. Flatiron Health mapped its process of enrolling cancer patients in clinical trials, reducing immense complexity to a simple flow from diagnosis to treatment. Maps anchor discussions; they make the problem tangible and navigable.

Beginning with the end reframes work as a guided expedition instead of a blind scramble. It fuels both focus and optimism—the kind that helped Apollo 13’s team save lives with clarity under pressure.

On Monday afternoon, the sprint turns into a detective session called Ask the Experts. Knapp learned the necessity of this step after a failed sprint where executives claimed they knew everything. Real insight, he discovered, lies distributed across the organization—in sales, engineering, and customer support, not only in leadership.

Gathering Diverse Knowledge

Teams interview insiders one by one to collect perspectives on strategy, customer behavior, and past experiments. When WalrusCo’s sales lead critiqued a diagram with on-the-ground insights about customer trust, it transformed the entire map. This principle mirrors IDEO’s ethnographic approach: getting close to real users and practitioners.

From Problems to Opportunities

Knapp borrows IDEO’s “How Might We” method to turn problems into possibility statements. Each participant writes insights on sticky notes, starting with “How might we...?” For example, Blue Bottle wrote “How might we recreate the café experience?” This framing generates curiosity and optimism—it invites solutions instead of complaints.

Participants vote on the most valuable questions with dot stickers, condensing hundreds of notes into a handful of strategic prompts. Those prompts are attached to the customer map, literally connecting insights to the journey.

Selecting a Target

At day’s end, the Decider chooses one critical target: the customer and moment that matter most. Flatiron Health picked the research coordinator searching for trial matches—a bottleneck that defined success. Focusing effort here ensures impact and manageability. (This parallels the “critical path” concept in project management: fix the bottleneck, and the whole system improves.)

By reframing and gathering wisdom early, the sprint transforms scattered expertise into a unified vision. It builds confidence and cuts through guesswork—the perfect preparation for the creative explosion of Tuesday.

Tuesday flips the sprint from exploration to creation. But instead of noisy brainstorming, Knapp prescribes solitary work. Teams create individual solution sketches: detailed storyboards showing how their ideas would look to a customer. This method balances autonomy with collective intelligence.

Remix and Improve

Knapp encourages inspiration over invention. Lightning Demos allow every participant to share examples from other domains—a chocolate-bar flavor wheel inspired Blue Bottle’s coffee descriptions, while Savioke borrowed the calm eyes of Totoro for its robot. The act of remixing counters the myth of originality and speeds innovation. (Melitta Bentz’s coffee filter story perfectly illustrates this idea—innovation as intelligent borrowing.)

The Four-Step Sketch

Knapp introduces a structured progression: Notes, Ideas, Crazy 8s, and Solution Sketch. Participants first re-read all insights, jot early ideas, riff fast through eight mini-sketches, then create one detailed storyboard. Working on paper ensures equality—no fancy tools, just boxes and words. Even self-proclaimed non-artists succeed (as in Blue Bottle’s Byard Duncan, who feared drawing yet designed the winning “Mind Reader” concept).

Independent Creativity, Collective Wisdom

Knapp references psychological research from Yale and others showing individuals outperform groups in generating solutions. By sketching alone and sharing later, teams avoid groupthink but still benefit from variety. The result: a wall of anonymous sketches, each expressing a distinct solution ready for objective evaluation.

Tuesday’s solitude makes Wednesday’s collaboration powerful. Instead of opinions, teams discuss tangible ideas. As Knapp puts it, “Ugly is okay—clarity is everything.” Ideas become visible, concrete, and comparable—the raw material for decisive progress.

Wednesday is decision day. Knapp’s structured technique for choosing the best solution—nicknamed the Sticky Decision—turns what might be a dreaded group meeting into a science of efficient consensus. Silence, stickers, and structure replace endless debate.

The Sticky Decision Process

Five steps guide teams through evaluating all sketches: the Art Museum (displaying all ideas on walls), Heat Map (silent voting on interesting parts), Speed Critique (quick group discussion), Straw Poll (individual preferences), and Supervote (Decider’s final choice). This rhythm ensures balanced input without chaos.

In the Slack sprint, dozens of marketing concepts were evaluated this way. The Decider, CEO Stewart Butterfield, voted for “Bot Team,” whereas product manager Merci Grace chose “Tenacious Tour.” Their conflicting votes led to a Rumble—a controlled experiment between two prototypes. This structured confrontation avoided ego-driven debate and yielded factual results.

Make Honest Decisions

Knapp warns against false democracy. At OstrichCo, a CEO let his team decide collectively but later reverted to his own preference. Decisions made by committee don’t hold; leadership alignment is vital. The sprint balances team input with leadership authority, allowing quick and durable choices.

From Conflict to Clarity

When multiple winning sketches can’t coexist, a Rumble resolves the tension. Teams build both and let evidence, not argument, decide. Creating fake brand identities like “Gather” next to Slack prevents confusion and turns the test into a clean A/B experiment. Note-and-Vote, a rapid brainstorm substitute, helps the group generate names or other details in minutes.

By compressing decision-making into a logical series of visual steps, the sprint replaces politics with process. Teams leave Wednesday energized, certain about what to build next—a rare feeling in the corporate world.

Thursday’s task—building a prototype—embodies one of Knapp’s most liberating ideas: Fake It. Instead of perfection, aim for appearance. Like a Hollywood movie set with convincing facades, the prototype need only seem real for customers to react authentically. “Goldilocks quality,” Knapp calls it—not too refined, not too rough, just believable.

The Prototype Mindset

Knapp outlines four guiding principles: you can prototype anything; prototypes are disposable; build just enough to learn; and it must appear real. Teams resist the urge to perfect details—they’re building learning tools, not finished products. This echoes Lean Startup’s principle of the Minimum Viable Product but applies to ideas beyond tech.

The FitStar team couldn’t rebuild its fitness app in a day, so they simulated it using Keynote slides and filmed stand-in videos. Foundation Medicine created paper reports that looked authentic to oncologists. Savioke used remote-controlled robots and an iPad screen to mimic behavior. The result? Actionable insights—months of engineering skipped.

Divide and Conquer

Roles keep Thursday efficient: Makers build pieces; a Stitcher ensures coherence; a Writer creates realistic copy; Asset Collectors gather visuals; and the Interviewer prepares for Friday’s customer interactions. The Stitcher checks continuity—names, dates, and tone—to preserve the illusion. A trial run around 3 p.m. catches any gaps.

Knapp’s favorite tool for digital prototypes is Keynote. Its slides act like screens, linking visual frames seamlessly. For physical products, teams use modified existing objects or prototypes of marketing materials. The point isn’t fidelity—it’s persuasion.

Thursday ends with a working illusion, proof that progress doesn’t require months of coding or funding. The sprint challenges perfectionism, reminding teams that learning beats building.

Friday is judgment day—when ideas meet reality. Instead of managers guessing, teams learn directly from customers through carefully structured interviews. Knapp calls this “Small Data”: deep insights from five real conversations that reveal the why behind success or failure.

Five Is the Magic Number

Drawing from Jakob Nielsen’s usability research, Knapp explains that five interviews uncover about 85% of usability problems. More interviews yield diminishing returns. Watching five people interact with your prototype reveals patterns faster than any spreadsheet.

The Interviewer—often a trained moderator—conducts the Five-Act Interview: a friendly welcome, context questions, prototype introduction, task-based exploration, and debrief. Participants think aloud as they interact, revealing their reasoning. In FitStar’s test, customers quickly grasped the concept of an automated trainer without explanation—proof that the prototype conveyed its value.

Watch Together, Learn Together

The sprint team observes all interviews live, taking color-coded notes on a shared grid. This approach eliminates lag and interpretation errors. By 5 p.m., patterns become obvious: Slack learned that “Tenacious Tour” worked and “Bot Team” confused users. Foundation Medicine discovered which report layout doctors preferred. Savioke’s guests smiled and took selfies with the robot—a direct measure of delight.

Whether results show flawed success or efficient failure, both are wins. Teams can refine or pivot immediately. Testing real people transforms speculation into confidence, turning learning into the sprint’s ultimate reward.

In the final chapter, Knapp compares sprints to the Wright brothers’ iterative experiments that led to the first flight. Continuous cycles of building, testing, and learning propel innovation. After one sprint, teams often adopt the mindset permanently—solving problems with speed and clarity becomes the new normal.

From One Sprint to Culture Change

Successful teams integrate sprint principles into everyday work: starting slow to go fast, prototyping before building, and testing with real users regularly. Schools, agencies, and global companies—from Columbia University to McKinsey and Facebook—now apply sprints for education, policy design, and product innovation.

Knapp’s vision expands beyond startups. The sprint philosophy helps anyone—teachers, engineers, entrepreneurs—escape indecision and discover focus. It redefines productivity from doing more to learning faster. The process becomes not just a tool but a discipline of curiosity and efficiency.

Faith in Ideas

Quoting John T. Daniels on the Wright brothers, Knapp concludes: “It wasn’t luck that made them fly; it was hard work and common sense.” Likewise, the sprint balances creative faith with practical execution. When people commit wholeheartedly for five days, they achieve clarity that months of meetings rarely produce.

The liftoff is both metaphorical and literal: by fostering quick experiments and shared learning, teams rise above routine. Each sprint becomes a miniature launch toward bigger visions—a disciplined leap fueled by curiosity, teamwork, and structured creativity.