Sprint

How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days

By: Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Braden Kowitz

Narrated by: Dan Bittner

Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

From inside Google Ventures, a unique five-day process for solving tough problems, proven at thousands of companies in mobile, e-commerce, healthcare, finance, and more.

Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution?

Now there’s a surefire way to answer these important questions: the Design Sprint, created at Google by Jake Knapp. This method is like fast-forwarding into the future, so you can see how customers react before you invest all the time and expense of creating your new product, service, or campaign.

In a Design Sprint, you take a small team, clear your schedules for a week, and rapidly progress from problem, to prototype, to tested solution using the step-by-step five-day process in this book.

A practical guide to answering critical business questions, Sprint is a book for teams of any size, from small startups to Fortune 100s, from teachers to nonprofits. It can replace the old office defaults with a smarter, more respectful, and more effective way of solving problems that brings out the best contributions of everyone on the team—and helps you spend your time on work that really matters.

Download the accompanying reference guide.

©2016 Jake Knapp (P)2016 Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Great Advice, But It's All Old News

If your not already familiar with old concepts like, The Lean Startup, Agile Product, Development and User Testing, then this is going to be a great book for you.

But for many of us this book will provide No new information. It's a standard week long sprint ending in some user testing of your prototype, the same stuff that's been preached from the mountain tops for the last 5 years. The authors provide a lot of detail around how to run the sprints, which is nice, but for the most part I was anxious to wrap this book up and move on to something new.

To be clear, if you are Not super familiar with the concepts I mentioned above, then I would Highly recommend this book. The content is absolutely true and this book is a good, albeit basic, summary of the principles needed for rapid, low-cost product development.

You can use this book to solve big problems

As superlative as the title sounds, this book does show you how to solve big problems and test new ideas in five days. It explains who needs to be on the team and provides details on what to do on each of the five days. Through the author's own testing and observations, he found the ideal method to be this 5-day sprint. The Sprint Book website even lists software applications, supplies, and tools that are useful a sprint. It is apparent that the author carefully thought through the optimal structure and timeline for a sprint.

Much better than expected!

This book is much better than expected! It's practical, with plenty worksheets (on the Sprint book website) and contains clear, helpful directions based on Jake's experience working with this.

The sprints are like a mix of scrum and design thinking. Leaning more towards the latter.

Some have remarked the book is full of Google-talk. I didn't feel that way at all. They mention Google a few times, but it's never obnoxious or distracting at any level.

A Great Read

If you are not familiar with design management techniques, design thinking, design research, or anything about user experience this is the book for you. A lot of it does depend on the decider, and oftentimes in the real world this is not possible because of the amount of time required.

This is another self help book

This book like many doesn't have all that much to say but is required to say enough to fill all the chapters. Good work guys. You filled them with examples and reiterated your methodologies over and over. Thanks.

Kidding aside, I personally didn't benefit from this book and maybe disagree with the process philosophically. It is written well and the information might be helpful to people unfamiliar with their users or who just want to follow a five step process to business success.

I've worked with teams before that have probably followed this by the book and it all felt and like a schoolbook team that liked to play dress up. I'm sure you will be successful using this and or pieces of this process, it just feels less personal and more academic.

Must read for product teams!

This is a great description of how to come up with ideas, collaborate, sketch and test with real customers in one week.

We did something similar at our company a few weeks ago and we were blown away at what we were able to accomplish in one week. I look forward to incorporating some of these GV insights in our next sprint.

Great Book!

Practical lean startup method that any startup can execute in a week. I recommend buying both the audible and paperback book, because it will become your essential reference guide for getting traction with your ideas.

Great book

Tons of good practical steps to improve team productivity. I will be listening a few more times for sure, and will by the printed version as well.

A bit of repetition

They tend to repeat themselves alot, which lost my attention, but there was a lot of good information.

Fantastic process told in an interesting story

This was a great reading of the Sprint book and well worth your time if you are involved in building software or running your own startup.