Sprint: How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days

Written by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz

Narrated by Dan Bittner

Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day. How should you be focusing your efforts? What will your idea look like in real life? How do you start? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you've got the right solution? Now there's a sure-fire way to answer these important questions: the sprint.

Created by three partners at Google Ventures, the sprint is a unique five-day process aimed at helping businesses to answer crucial questions and deliver the best results in the least time, allowing the business to move on to the next level. It's a 'greatest hits' of business strategy, innovation, behaviour science and design thinking - packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use. Jake Knapp created the five-day process at Google, where sprints were used on everything from Google Search to Chrome to Google X. With John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz at Google Ventures, the team has run more than one hundred sprints with startups across all kinds of business, including mobile, e-commerce, healthcare and finance.

Sprint is about arming your business with a process to get problems solved by short-circuiting the endless debate cycle, avoiding groupthink and utilising the people, knowledge and tools that every team already has. It's for companies or groups of any size, from small startups to Fortune 100s, from teachers to non-profits - anyone who has a big opportunity, problem, or idea, and who needs to get started.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House UK Audio
• Release date: Mar 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781473540927

Jake Knapp

Jake Knapp created the Design Sprint at Google, where he also helped build Gmail, cofounded Google Meet, and was a design partner at GV. He has since coached hundreds of teams on product strategy at places like Miro, Slack, Nike, LEGO, IDEO, the Wall Street Journal, and the Harvard Business School. Today, Jake is a cofounder at Character, where he helps startups find product-market fit with Design Sprints.

Reviews for Sprint

[donbarger · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Revolutionalize how you make decisions and how your team works together. Solve your problems creatively. This book is great!

[berezovskyi-563367 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

For now, I will rate it 5 stars until I do a few sprint rounds myself.

First, the book is very interesting as it touches on different aspects of product design, including false signals (like users' reaction vs just their feedback). Second, every step of it feels well-tested and makes perfect sense.

The only reservation I have is about devoting full week to it and requiring 5 unbiased users for the test, but that is probably the price you need to pay for a great sprint!