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Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days Hardcover – Illustrated, March 8, 2016
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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 length288 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSimon & Schuster
- Publication dateMarch 8, 2016
- Dimensions5.5 x 1 x 8.38 inches
- ISBN-10150112174X
- ISBN-13978-1501121746
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Editorial Reviews
Review
—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
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.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Product details
- Publisher : Simon & Schuster; Illustrated edition (March 8, 2016)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 150112174X
- ISBN-13 : 978-1501121746
- Item Weight : 1.26 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 1 x 8.38 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #15,073 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #49 in Business Decision Making
- #78 in Decision-Making & Problem Solving
- #129 in Entrepreneurship (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors

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.

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.

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.
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In the preface, the author states he had his first child. When he returned to the office, he wanted his time on the job to be as meaningful as his time with his family. He took a hard look at his habits and saw that, "I wasn’t spending my effort on the most important work". He discussed how improving team processes became an obsession for him. Through his experience of working with teams to create new products at Google, and experimenting on improving the way teams work, he found that focusing on individual work, having time to prototype, and an inescapable deadline produced far better results.
Running the 5 day sprint described in the book enables a team to easily find out if they are on the right track before they commit to the risky business of building and launching their products. The sprint process however is just as applicable to teams launching internal products/solutions/services. This way of work is applicable to any company, not just startups.
The author shares how other Google Ventures team members added to the sprint process to make it better through the years. Braden Kowitz added story-centered design – which focuses on the whole customer experience instead of individual components or technologies. John Zeratsky helped to ensure that each sprint starts at the end, so the business's would be able to identify and answer their most important questions. Michael Margolis encouraged them to finish each sprint with a real world test. By putting your prototype in front of real customers/prospects, you didn't have to guess whether your solutions were good, at the end of the sprint you got answers.
Over the last 10 years, I have facilitated interactive workshops to help teams get a shared understanding of the business problem they are trying to solve, which is a precursor to a shared commitment to solve the problem. Having a solid understanding of the research behind collaborative approaches to work, and understanding the approach to use based on the problem domain you are in is critical to a successful outcome. Because of my background and real-world experience, I recognize how effective the sprint design is, and feel confident in using the process with any client I work with. The psychology behind the methods is real, the creativity of the design will engage all who participate, and you will build better products.
If you are passionate about helping teams work more effectively, if you care about making work a more engaging experience, if you have a burning desire to improve customers' lives, read this book and then USE this book to run sprints.
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!
That said, after stumbling over that initial terminology of 'same word-different meaning' and the somewhat-less-than-generous "I invented this!!" claim without a tip of the hat to all the great people who led the way, I did really enjoy the book. Jake has immense experience and has developed a beautifully structured design-build process that we can put immediately to use that is simpler to implement than a fully-featured scrum team. Thanks, Jake!
Top reviews from other countries
Un aspetto che ho molto apprezzato del libro è la presenza di illustrazioni, che aiutano a ricordare in modo più semplice concetti chiavi o a chiarire quanto viene descritto nel libro (seppur il libro stesso sia molto chiaro).
Ritengo che questo libro possa tornare utile non solo ad imprenditori e manager che cercano un modo diverso di affrontare problemi e/o progetti su cui non si hanno le idee chiare su come proseguire, ma anche a chiunque cerchi spunti su come poter migliorare le proprie skill su come approcciare sfide che risultano complesse o su metodologie per sviluppare nuove idee.
Reviewed in Italy on March 31, 2024
Un aspetto che ho molto apprezzato del libro è la presenza di illustrazioni, che aiutano a ricordare in modo più semplice concetti chiavi o a chiarire quanto viene descritto nel libro (seppur il libro stesso sia molto chiaro).
Ritengo che questo libro possa tornare utile non solo ad imprenditori e manager che cercano un modo diverso di affrontare problemi e/o progetti su cui non si hanno le idee chiare su come proseguire, ma anche a chiunque cerchi spunti su come poter migliorare le proprie skill su come approcciare sfide che risultano complesse o su metodologie per sviluppare nuove idee.
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.”
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 10, 2023
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.”














