Braden Kowitz

Jake Knapp

John Zeratsky

From three design partners at Google Ventures, a unique five-day process--called the sprint--for solving tough problems using design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers.

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

Sprint

If you could jump ahead to the end of your sprint, what questions would be answered? If you went six months or a year further into the future, what would have improved about your business as a result of this project?

„Why are we doing this project? Where do we want to be six months, a year, or even five years from now?“

3. Build Just Enough to Learn, but Not More

Take a favorite piece from your ideas sheet and ask yourself, “What would be another good way to do this?” Keep going until you can’t think of any more variations, then look back at your ideas sheet, choose a new idea, and start riffing on it instead.

I read this honestly just to get through a bunch of old books I have but I absolutely loved this book. It breaks down such a great framework for tackling problems 

Danielle Rose

Lewis Ngugi

This book opened doors for me later in my career. And up to this date, I use some techniques to solve problems. Worth every letter.

Sarah Schumacher

If you’re considering a sprint for a business product or venture, just buy this book already. It’s a fun read, practical, actionable, with lots of examples. Highly recommended.

Unternehmer, Gründer und Teams stehen täglich vor der Herausforderung: Womit soll man zuerst anfangen, worauf sich am meisten fokussieren? Und wie viele Diskussionen und Meetings sind nötig, bevor man ganz sicher die garantiert richtige Lösung hat? Die Folge ist, dass allzu oft das Projekt auf der Stelle tritt und man überhaupt nicht vorwärtskommt. Dafür gibt es eine geniale Lösung: Sprint. Die ist ein einzigartiger, innovativer und narrensicherer Prozess, mit dem sich die härtesten Probleme in nur fünf Tagen lösen lassen – von Montag bis Freitag. Der Entwickler Jake Knapp entwarf diesen Prozess bei und für Google, wo er seither in allen Bereichen genutzt wird. Zusammen mit John Zeratsky und Braden Kowitz hat er darüber hinaus bereits mehr als 100 Sprints in Firmen aus unterschiedlichen Bereichen durchgeführt. Der Sprint-Prozess bietet praktische Hilfe für Unternehmen aller Größen, vom kleinen Start-up bis hin zum Fortune-100-Unternehmen. Die Methode ist auch für alle anderen bewährt, die vor einem großen Problem stehen, schnell eine Idee testen oder einfach eine Möglichkeit schnell ergreifen wollen.

Wie man in nur fünf Tagen neue Ideen testet und Probleme löst

Phu Le Ngo

General concepts and a concise checklist of the Google Sprint are covered with practical execution examples of Sprint's facilitators. Thus, it's better to be used it as a cheat sheet for later referencing as well. However, many long and "hilarious-like" stories made readers really uninterested to read with rarely detail to highlight or notes for later use.

Nick Gracilla

Wrap the best features of usability testing, iterative improvement, user-centric thinking, prototyping, perhaps a bit of Jobs to Be Done, and collaborative teamwork: set the sprint length to a week, and test with five real customers. Dramatically improve software systems, workflows, hardware devices, and more—here, "design" is meant in the full sense. Sprint is an essential guide, although occasional hokey “dialogue” (endemic to business books of this type) distracts from an otherwise great read and useful reference. I recommend it.

Arturo Hernández

This book functions like a quick introduction to the sprint methodology (reminiscent to the design thinking process). It shows how to go from ideation, definition and prototyping to testing in a matter of 5 days time. It defines the general method and mentions diverse tools, requirements and tips. It has an interesting part regarding group brainstorming and user interviews. Overall, it feels like chapter 1 of something bigger. Could be useful if it’s the first time you read about these topics, though.

Sierra Nguyen

A very useful, practical book to help you and your team tackle product problems, find solutions, and test new ideas with real users, all in just five focused days. The book breaks the task down to five days, Monday-Friday, and each day has a focus and a goal to achieve that helps lead to the meetings with customers on Friday where you will be able to know if your solutions actually work.

I really love how easy to follow this book is. There are a lot of tips for sprint facilitators and everyone else in the team to work together effectively and achieve the best results in a short amount of time without feeling burnt out. From deciding what problem to focus on, to sketching possible solutions, to actually building prototypes and then finally talking to testers to get feedback, the process was laid out clearly with actionable steps and real-life examples from actual sprints at companies like Slack, FitStar, and Foundation Medicine. The checklist at the end of the book is also very helpful as a quick reference when running an actual sprint yourself.

Highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to lead teams to solve a problem in a short amount of time. Spending more time solving a problem and deciding between options isn't always the best use of everyone's time. This book shows how to do otherwise.

Loads of helpful stuff, genuinely actionable. Even outside of the 5 day sprint model.

Dave Perkins

John Elbing

Remarkable. 
After reading this, all you want to do is go out and facilitate a sprint!
Often, how-to books bore you with detail that you promise yourself you will come back to later (and never do). Here, the details are reinforced by the right combination of metaphors, real-life stories and anecdotes. All this helps you learn by understanding the why. 
The writing style is upbeat and fluid. 
Strongly recommended.

ouleo

Pranav Mutatkar

Good summary. Lots of stuff we already know, but organized in a great way.

Kato

loved the concept; didn't like the reading experience. 
I felt like it was too puffed up with anecdotes and fragments of case studies. 

I'd have preferred if the book was split into two parts:
(1) no fluff tutorial on how to plan and do a sprint.
(2) case studies of successful sprints - as a whole, not as fragments through the whole book. 

Daryl Houston

A book for work, so not one I'll wax especially eloquent on, but it was a neat read about a neat process that I may wind up trying some variant on.

Doug Belshaw

Fantastic. Really practical and focused - have used the approach in this book successfully with clients.

Anyaconda

Listened to the audiobook 🎧
Great ideas and stories 🙂
Important read for anyone who's working in tech, design or agile environment.

Adam

Having recently moved from a developer position to a product manager position this book gave some immediate suggestions on how to lead a team to create a new product or feature from scratch. Having been used on a number of products at Google including Gmail, it's great to know that it's working already.

What was most useful for me was seeing the breakdown of what was done each day of the 5 day product sprint -- as well as what each person in the sprint would do. Some of the recommendations were key - like the need for a decision maker to be a part of the process to ensure that takeaways from the sprint are actionable. I look forward to trying out some of these concepts eventually!

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

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