Sprint

It was the most expensive chair in the history of office furniture. A team of designers, engineers, and researchers had spent years perfecting it. They conducted ethnographic studies, built hundreds of prototypes, and consulted with ergonomic experts. On paper, it was flawless—a marvel of responsive lumbar support and breathable mesh, designed to solve the problem of sitting. But when it launched, a critical flaw emerged. People hated it. They couldn't figure out the dozen-plus adjustment levers. It was a perfect solution to a problem nobody quite had, born from a long, meandering, and costly process. This story plays out every day inside big companies and small startups alike. A promising idea gets trapped in a cycle of endless meetings, conflicting opinions, and slow-moving development, only to arrive, too late and too complicated, in a world that has already moved on.

At Google, Jake Knapp saw this pattern constantly. As a designer, he’d been part of projects that succeeded spectacularly and others that burned millions before quietly disappearing. He became obsessed with a single question: how do you get to the important part—the moment of truth when you see your idea interact with a real customer—without wasting months or years? He started experimenting, borrowing ideas from design thinking, business strategy, and even his own team meetings. He was creating a focused, five-day process to cut through the noise. When he moved to Google Ventures, he partnered with John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz to refine this method with over a hundred startups. They were running these intense, week-long 'sprints' on everything from coffee robots to cancer research, compressing months of work into a single, high-stakes week. "Sprint" is the result of that relentless experimentation, a guide to solving big problems and testing new ideas in just five days.

Module 1: Setting the Stage for Speed

The first day of a sprint is all about alignment and focus. It’s where you stop the endless churn of daily work. You dedicate one week to one massive problem. The entire process hinges on getting this foundation right. It starts with a simple but powerful idea. Begin with the end in mind by setting a long-term goal. Where do you want to be in six months or a year? This is a concrete, optimistic target that everyone on the team agrees on. For Blue Bottle Coffee, their goal was to bring their unique café experience to new customers online. This North Star guides every decision for the rest of the week.

So, with that goal set, you have to confront reality. What could stop you from getting there? This brings us to the next step. Translate your assumptions and risks into a few key Sprint Questions. These questions turn fear and uncertainty into focused curiosity. Savioke, the robotics company, assumed their delivery robot would create a great hotel guest experience. They turned this into a question: "Will guests find the robot awkward?" This is a question they could answer by Friday. It's testable. It's specific.

Now, let's turn to the map. To solve a complex problem, you need to simplify it. Create a simple, visual map of the customer's journey. This is a short story with a customer as the main character. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Think five to fifteen steps, max. For Flatiron Health, a company tackling cancer research, the map showed a patient moving from diagnosis to clinical trial enrollment. This simple visual organizes the chaos. It gives the team a shared understanding of the problem space.

And here's the thing. No one person knows everything. The CEO doesn't have all the answers. Neither does the lead engineer. Leverage your team's collective knowledge by interviewing experts. On Monday afternoon, you bring in people from across the company. You talk to the finance expert. The marketing expert. The customer support lead who talks to users every single day. These short, structured interviews fill in crucial gaps in the map. They reveal hidden complexities and opportunities.

Finally, Monday ends with a critical decision. You can't solve the entire problem at once. You must choose one target customer and one target event on your map. This is where the Decider, a person with final say, makes a call. Savioke chose to target the hotel guest at the moment of delivery. It was the riskiest, most important interaction. By focusing the entire week on this single moment, they could get a clear result. This ruthless focus is the secret to moving fast.