Print List Price:	$30.00
Kindle Price:	$14.99 Save $15.01 (50%)
Sold by:	Simon and Schuster Digital Sales LLC Price set by seller.

Promotions apply when you purchase

Add an

audiobook with Audible narration for $11.99

Read with our free app

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.

Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

There was an error. We were unable to process your subscription due to an error. Please refresh and try again.

By implementing Sprints, you'll get better answers in a day than most companies get in a year.Cary Decker

Image Unavailable

Image not available for
Color:

To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the authors

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

by Jake Knapp (Author), John Zeratsky (Author), Braden Kowitz (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.6 4,445 ratings

See all formats and editions

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.

Print length

290 pages
Language

English
Sticky notes

On Kindle Scribe
Publisher

Simon & Schuster
Publication date

March 8, 2016
File size

34994 KB
Page Flip

Enabled
Word Wise

Enabled
Enhanced typesetting

Enabled
See all details

Due to its large file size, this book may take longer to download

Marty Cagan
5,384
Kindle Edition
in Business Education
1 offer from $18.00
George H. Pink
9
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $58.99
Jeff Patton
1,550
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $24.99
Jeff Stibel
347
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $13.17
Melissa Perri
1,518
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $14.70
Teresa Torres
2,002
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $8.99

Popular Highlights in this book

What are popular highlights?

“Why are we doing this project? Where do we want to be six months, a year, or even five years from now?”
Highlighted by 3,573 Kindle readers
An important part of this exercise is rephrasing assumptions and obstacles into questions.
Highlighted by 3,142 Kindle readers
We’ve found the ideal size for a sprint to be seven people or fewer.
Highlighted by 3,075 Kindle readers

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Every business leader I know worries about the same thing: Are we moving fast enough? The genius of Jake Knapp’s Sprint is its step-by-step breakdown of what it takes to solve big problems and do work that matters with speed and urgency. A sprint is a cure for what ails companies in an ever faster world.”
—Beth Comstock, vice chair of GE

"The key to success, often, is building the right habits. But which habits work best? Sprint offers powerful methods for hatching ideas, solving problems, testing solutions—and finding those small, correct habits that make all the right behaviors fall in place."
– Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit

"To quote one of my colleagues, “don’t get ready, get started”. Through hard won experience Jake Knapp and the team at Google Ventures have refined an efficient, hands-on approach to solving your product, service and experience design challenges. Try the book and try a Sprint."
– Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO and author of Change By Design

"Read this book and do what it says if you want to build better products faster."
– Ev Williams, founder of Medium, Blogger, and Twitter

"Sprint teaches you a novel process for solving really thorny problems in just 5 days. It's full of helpful, entertaining stories that will make it easier for you to succeed. What more, exactly, would you demand from a book? I wish all business books were this useful."
– Dan Heath, co-author of Made to Stick, Switch, and Decisive

About the Author

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.

John Zeratsky supports startups with capital and sprints. As an investor and designer, he has worked with Slack, One Medical Group, Blue Bottle Coffee, Flatiron Health, Gusto, and hundreds of other successful startups. John is cofounder and general partner at venture capital firm Character. Previously, he was design partner at GV and a design leader at YouTube, Google Ads, and FeedBurner, which was acquired by Google in 2007.

Braden Kowitz founded the Google Ventures design team in 2009 and pioneered the role of “design partner” at a venture capital firm. He has advised close to two hundred startups on product design, hiring, and team culture. Before joining Google Ventures, Braden led design for several Google products, including Gmail, Google Apps for Business, Google Spreadsheets, and Google Trends.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B010MH1DAQ
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; 1st edition (March 8, 2016)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 8, 2016
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 34994 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 290 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #80,348 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #15 in Organizational Learning
- #65 in Entrepreneurship (Kindle Store)
- #67 in Business Decision-Making

Customer Reviews:
4.6 4,445 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

About the authors

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Jake Knapp
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.
Jake Knapp is the author of "Make Time" and the New York Times bestseller "Sprint".
Jake spent ten years at Google and Google Ventures, where he created the design sprint. He has coached over 150 companies on the process, including teams at Slack, Uber, the New York Times, and LEGO. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and sons.
See more on the author's page
Braden Kowitz
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.
Braden Kowitz founded the Google Ventures design team in 2009 and pioneered the role of “design partner” at a venture capital firm. He has advised close to two hundred startups on product design, hiring, and team culture. Before joining Google Ventures, Braden led design for several Google products, including Gmail, Google Enterprise, Google Spreadsheets, and Google Trends.
See more on the author's page
John Zeratsky
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.
John Zeratsky is the bestselling author of Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days and Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day.
John’s writing has been published by The Wall Street Journal, TIME, Harvard Business Review, Wired, Fast Company, and many other publications. He has appeared on stage nearly 200 times, including at Netflix, IDEO, McKinsey, the Code Conference, and The London School of Economics.
For nearly 15 years, John was a designer for technology companies. At Google Ventures (GV), he helped develop the design sprint process and worked with close to 200 startups, including Uber, Slack, 23andMe, Flatiron Health, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Nest. He was also GV’s in-house copywriter, editor, and content strategist; he created and edited the GV Library, which has reached millions of readers since 2012. Previously, John was a designer at YouTube and Google, and an early employee at FeedBurner, which Google acquired in 2007.
John studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from the UW School of Human Ecology, where he’s now an advisor to the Dean and faculty.
Originally from small-town Wisconsin, John and his wife Michelle have lived in Chicago and San Francisco. They spent 18 months traveling in Central America aboard their sailboat Pineapple before moving to Milwaukee in 2019.
See more on the author's page

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5

4,445 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Reviews with images

See all photos

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Mark Smith

Smart, Tested and Practical

Reviewed in the United States on January 12, 2024

Verified Purchase

This is an outstanding “How-to” based on many, many, many real-world experiences. I love it. Time to setup my studio with two whiteboards.

Helpful

Sameh Z

Design Thinking Time-boxed

Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2017

Verified Purchase

Sprint book review

The Sprint book is easy read and could be dealt with as a story. The format of Sprint moving through the working week creates atmosphere that I was hearing Jake(the main author) telling me a story. Watching some videos on YouTube for Jake helped me better understand the book. As they say, our writing is kind of reflection of who we are beyond the subject of the book.

While it is simple read, the underlying concepts have roots in Human Centered Design, Anthropology, Prototyping, UX, Innovation, App Design, Software Development, Agile Management, ….. The book stitches these concepts in a simple 5 days intuitive road-map for any organization that wants to solve big challenge in 5 days. No bluff, no extended plans, not procrastination, no top-down solutions, and no naysayers. By solving a challenge, I mean ‘learning’ what to do about it.

Design Sprint is about learning what we need to do about the challenge. The bigger the challenge the higher the applicability of Design Sprint and the bigger the reward can be.

I am familiar with Human Centered Design from IDEO. For me Design Sprint cuts to the chase if we want to apply the whole Design Thinking process in a week. There could be follow-up after the Sprint to iterate on the feedback from users on Friday, but that followup will be shorter. In days , it is like 5+3+2; 5 days for the first Sprint. And every segment has definitive outcomes that provides concrete learning to the organization.

Having key stakeholders in the Design Sprint team, would help having timely feedback and decisions on the progress of the Sprint. Meaning, those stakeholders will bring us to the reality about the aspects of the business applicability of the solution. For me this reduces the risk of implementing a solution which despite of being desirable by users, is non-implementable due technical feasibility or business sustainability.

The book includes examples of companies from diverse industries including healthcare, software development, hotels, coffee-shops, and fitness. I am more comfortable applying Sprint process to design services that primarily utilize digital solutions. However, the author mentioned he implemented the same process for designing non-digital solutions. Again, this is a Design Thinking mentality where we start from complete uncertainty about what we need to do and go through a discovery process for learning about the context and what probably can work. What probably works is based on user testing of a facade solution (prototype).

Sprint book is complete and can be the main source for anyone who wants to facilitate Design Sprint, like me:) Like any other process, learning can happen only through practicing using the right process. and mindset. Based on the lessons learned from tens of Sprints the author facilitated, I believe this book can be valuable for team facilitators.

It is about time for organizations to be transparent about their challenges and empower their employees to help ‘learning’ about what to do regarding them. Historically, organizations provide top-down solutions without engaging the right people who understand the complexity of the existing situation. Meaningful learning can be done in 5 days using the Sprint process detailed in this book and with the right skill-mix of team members. Design Sprint can be incorporated as habitual process for ‘learning’ about challenges and designing solutions/services using Design Thinking mentality. It is all in one week!

Similar to Design Thinking and Learn Startup which focus on learning, Design Sprint aims to reduce the risk of having wrong a product/ solution. Although customer usage of solutions is the final judge, Design Sprint can reduce the risk of developing the wrong feature in the first place. In Agile language, before adding a feature into the product backlog, we need to ensure first that it was tested earlier with the target audience using tangible prototype rather than words. Design Sprint can enable that!

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Deogratias Rweyemamu

A treasure trove of unconventional, ingenious solutions to business questions.

Reviewed in the United States on September 7, 2016

Verified Purchase

What Jake and his co-authors prescribe in the book sounds rather too good to be true and unconventional, but it has made a world of sense to me.

What usually takes months and months of hopeless meetings, emails and expenditure has been narrowed down to just 5 days of intensive work by all the KEY parties. Emphasis has been put on 'key' parties as most often businesses approach to answer their biggest questions with just 2 or 3 people from the top management involved.

I like how they advise startups to focus on most pressing questions. I can see how many founders and deciders can get lost in a web of questions during startup. They recommend an ideal size of the sprint to be seven people or less, I couldn't have agreed more. And this is only one of the many ingenious tips I liked. Another one is the 'no device rule'.

I've always been a fan of whiteboards but these guys have taken the idea to another level. I quote: " the simultaneous visibility of project material helps us identify patterns and encourages creative synthesis to occur more readily than when these resources are hidden away in file folders, notebooks, or PowerPoint decks."

Another key insight I got from the book is the reminder that 'nobody knows everything'. I can imagine many CEOs thinking this way due to hubris. I quote: "..the information is distributed asymmetrically across the team and across the company. In the sprint, you've got to gather it and make sense of it, and asking experts is the best and fastest way to do that."

The 'How might we' method was also a great light-bulb. Rephrasing business obstacles into helpful questions. Another helpful method is the 'lightning demos which involves finding inspirational ideas from both within your company and even outside your industry. I could imagine limiting myself to my competitors only, but stretching as far as other businesses who do nothing remotely similar is a revelation.

Another ingenious solution suggested by the authors is the 'mind reader' - a sketch of complex ideas as a simple drawing of boxes and text. This then forms a basis for a prototype.They emphasize on the quality of the solution as opposed to the artistry of the drawings - they really do give hope to people like us who wouldn't know what do with a brush :) They further elaborate on the usefulness of sketching, I quote, "once your ideas become concrete, they can be critically and fairly evaluated by the rest of the team - without any sales pitch. And perhaps, most important of all, sketching allows every person to develop those concrete ideas while working alone."

Crazy 8s is another brilliant idea introduced by the team. An 8 minute exercise of sketching 8 variations of your strongest ideas. I found it quite unconventional, and hence my belief that it will work. Basically the exercise helps you consider alternatives and also serves as an excellent warm up for the main event.

I found the 'prototype mindset' to be the best idea in the whole book. The authors suggest building a facade and testing it, this initially sounded uncomfortable to me, but I later saw the genius in it. I quote, "To prototype your solution, you'll need a temporary change of philosophy: from perfect to just enough, from long-term quality to temporary simulation." I can see how this idea can save a huge amount of time and money for a company down the line.

In the end the authors emphasize the best part about the sprint, which is the chance to learn whether you are on the right track with your ideas in just 5 days. "You can have efficient failures that are good news, flawed successes that need more work, and many other outcomes." I couldn't agree more.

The choice of examples used in the book was also great, not exactly Malcolm Gladwell level, but still inspiring nonetheless.

I recommend the book to Startup founders, top company management or any one looking for unconventional methods to improve productivity on any sphere of their lives.

20 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English

Jim S.

Awesome approach in this book

Reviewed in Canada on May 8, 2021

Verified Purchase

I got a lot out of this book with it’s matter of fact approach and detailed steps to follow in running discovery sprints!

Harry

Indeed a Sprint to successfull Projects

Reviewed in India on November 1, 2023

Verified Purchase

A gem of a book when it comes to finding awesome solutions to some big problems in this fast paced innovative world

Gavin Deadman

Practical guide on everything you need to know to get going with using the Design Sprint process

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 10, 2023

Verified Purchase

Since the book publication in 2016, the Design Sprint process has become a familiar approach to efficiently solving big business problems/validating hypothesis that involve high amounts of complexity/uncertainty/risk, and Jake gives the background as to how Design Sprints originated along with an in-depth account of how they went through the process to test some ideas at Google Ventures.

Covering a variety of different experiments which they ran/problems they addressed made it a good read, including Slack (finding the best way to explain Slack to non-tech customers), Savioke Hotels (how hotel guests would react to a robot with personality, by experimenting through a robot delivering a toothbrush to a guests room), Flatiron Health (dealing with the complexities of getting cancer patients into clinical trials), and Blue Bottle Coffee (getting their value proposition clear on a new digital experience).

The book is practical, so if you’re new to Design Sprints, you’ll find it easy to create a plan which you can apply across your product as well as understand the key ingredients needed, so whilst tools have evolved to make it easier more than ever to validate a hypothesis in a remote world for digital products using the likes of Figma, Miro, UserTesting… the fundamentals haven’t changed in that you need to:

1. Collaborate with people throughout the sprint
2. Have a decision maker (normally Product Manager)
3. Identify a high priority problem to solve
4. Ideate and create prototype/s
5. Get feedback from potential customers

“When you get into a regular rhythm of listening to customers, it can remind you why you’re working so hard in the first place.”

2 people found this helpful

K.

Gendering is NOT a problem in this book.

Reviewed in Germany on March 10, 2023

Verified Purchase

The book is good, it's short, to the point and well-structured. There are illustrations. By all accounts, it's good.

The book is written adressing the user. However the top reviewer for this book rants about feminist propaganda. There are four instances where a character in an anecdote is adressed as "she". This is enough to send that reviewer into a 2000 word rant. People not knowing better upvote that review thinking it is awful.

If you are not able to read a book where a woman appears, this book is not for you.
If this is the case, no book is for you. Working is not for you. The world is not for you.

Buy for others

Buying and sending eBooks to others

Image Unavailable

Follow the authors

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

Customers who bought this item also bought