John Zeratsky

Get that surface right, and you can work backward to figure out the underlying systems or technology. Focusing on the surface allows you to move fast and answer big questions before you commit to execution, which is why any challenge, no matter how large, can benefit from a sprint.

This book is a DIY guide for running your own sprint to answer your pressing business questions. On Monday, you’ll map out the problem and pick an important place to focus. On Tuesday, you’ll sketch competing solutions on paper. On Wednesday, you’ll make difficult decisions and turn your ideas into a testable hypothesis. On Thursday, you’ll hammer out a realistic prototype. And on Friday, you’ll test it with real live humans.

Unfortunately, we are not geniuses. Savioke’s sprint worked because of the real experts: the people who were on the team all along. We just gave them a process to get it done.

“What will make this project a success?” “What’s our unique advantage or opportunity?” “What’s the biggest risk?”

When it became obvious that Glitch wasn’t going to be a hit, the company did something strange. Instead of making a different game or closing down, they shifted their efforts to a side project: a messaging system they had originally built for their own use. The startup’s founder, Stewart Butterfield, had a hunch that this messaging system could be useful to other companies, too. So they launched it to the public, and named it

The lesson of Melitta Bentz is that great innovation is built on existing ideas, repurposed with vision.

When it became obvious that Glitch wasn’t going to be a hit, the company did something strange. Instead of making a different game or closing down, they shifted their efforts to a side project: a messaging system they had originally built for their own use. The startup’s founder, Stewart Butterfield, had a hunch that this messaging system could be useful to other companies, too. So they launched it to the public, and named it Slack.
Technology companies went bonkers for Slack. A year after launch, more than 500,000 people on more than 60,000 teams used Slack every single day. For workplace software, this kind of growth was unheard of. When Slack announced they were the fastest growing business app of all time, the press agreed.

Decisions take willpower, and you only have so much to spend each day. You can think of willpower like a battery that starts the morning charged but loses a sip with every decision (a phenomenon called “decision fatigue”).

So where should we spend our effort? With only five days in the sprint, you have to focus on a specific target.

All of a sudden I’d realize I was working toward a goal that no longer mattered to me. And living a “someday” life was demoralizing. In the words of author James Clear, I was essentially saying, “I’m not good enough yet, but I will be when I reach my goal.”