If you, at any point find yourself involved with developing products or services, profit or non-profit, the book “Sprint: how to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days” by Knapp, Zeratsky and Kowitz should be a rewarding read.
Sprint: in hard copy
Should those ideas have great potential rewards, but serious risks along the way to success, this book might be the best reading-investment you have made since you read Harry Potter to you children.
Sprint, is the 5 day method that has been developed, tried and tested over years at Google Ventures as a way to quickly evaluate ideas for products, services and more. By diligently following a well thought out schedule of activities, a focused group of seven persons will define, prototype and test the prototype on real customers and learning first hand the rewarding lessons.
No fancy high-tech needed
The book gives the reader a nice introduction as to why this is relevant to so many and then guides the reader through the whole process using real world examples of both good and less good practice. The authors provide detailed instructions for you to try this out in your own organisation. At the end of the book, checklists for preparations and doing the Sprint are provided. So, when you reach the end cover, you have no excuses for not accelerating your high-stakes big-potential ideas by doing a Sprint with your own team.
If you still find yourself a bit hesitant or even sceptic about the Sprint concept in particular or process-soft-stuff in general, know that the authors have written the book with a great sense of humor and self-distance that is different to most of these ”DIY”-books.
Still not convinced? If you are one of those really hard-core anti-process-soft-stuff persons, I respect that, but would like to challenge you to read only the few pages about brainstorming, and why shout-out-loud-do-not-criticize-brainstorming is NOT a part of the Sprint. If, after reading that part, you still think this is just soft-process-BS, just hope you competition think so too…