Sprint
How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
Book
Hardback
288 pages
978-0-593-07722-1 (ISBN)
Description
Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day. How should you be focusing your efforts? What will your idea look like in real life? How do you start? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you've got the right solution? Now there's a sure-fire way to answer these important questions: the sprint. Created by three partners at Google Ventures, the sprint is a unique five-day process aimed at helping businesses to answer crucial questions and deliver the best results in the least time, allowing the business to move on to the next level. It's a 'greatest hits' of business strategy, innovation, behaviour science and design thinking - packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use. Jake Knapp created the five-day process at Google, where sprints were used on everything from Google Search to Chrome to Google X. With John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz at Google Ventures, the team has run more than one hundred sprints with startups across all kinds of business, including mobile, e-commerce, healthcare and finance.
Sprint is about arming your business with a process to get problems solved by short-circuiting the endless debate cycle, avoiding group think and utilising the people, knowledge and tools that every team already has. It's for companies or groups of any size, from small start-ups to Fortune 100s, from teachers to non-profits - anyone who has a big opportunity, problem, or idea, and who needs to get started.
Sprint is about arming your business with a process to get problems solved by short-circuiting the endless debate cycle, avoiding group think and utilising the people, knowledge and tools that every team already has. It's for companies or groups of any size, from small start-ups to Fortune 100s, from teachers to non-profits - anyone who has a big opportunity, problem, or idea, and who needs to get started.
Reviews / Votes
"Sprint offers a transformative formula for testing ideas that works whther you're at a startup or a large organization. Within five days, you'll move from idea to prototype to decision, saving you and your team countless hours and countless dollars. A must read for entrepreneurs of all stripes." Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup "Read this book and do what it says if you want to build better products faster." Ev Williams, founder of Medium, Twitter and Blogger "Sprint offers powerful methods for hatching ideas, solving problems, testing solutions - and finding the habits that make all the right behaviours fall in to place." Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit "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 "Jake Knapp and the team at Google Ventures have refined an efficient, hands-on approach to solving your product, service and user experience design challenges. Try the book and try a sprint." Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO and author of Change by DesignMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Transworld Publishers Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
70 illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 156 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-593-07722-1 (9780593077221)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Jake Knapp (Author) Jake is a designer and facilitator. He created Google Ventures' sprint process and has run over 100 sprints with startups like Medium, Nest, AngelList and Flatiron Health. He's presented his process to business students at Stanford, UC-Berkeley and Columbia University. Previously, Jake was a design vigilante at Google, leading sprints for everything from Gmail to Google X to Chrome. Jake also started a '20% project' that became Google Hangouts. Long ago, Jake grew up on a rural island in Washington State, began his design career at Oakley and led product design on Microsoft Encarta. He is currently one of the world's tallest designers. John Zeratsky (Author) John is a designer and writer who has worked on consumer, enterprise and medical software products. He worked on the YouTube redesign in 2011 and helped create FeedBurner, which Google acquired in 2007. At Google Ventures, John has spent the last four years mastering how startups use design successfully. He's personally worked with more than 50 companies, including Pocket, Blue Bottle Coffee, RetailMeNot and Foundation Medicine. His focus is on using design to validate business assumptions like market opportunity, value proposition, marketing strategy and new product adoption. Previously, John ran a small design agency, designed a daily newspaper, and taught sailing. He studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin. He lives in San Francisco with his wife. Braden Kowitz (Author) Braden is a designer, prototyper and storyteller. He founded Google Ventures' design team in 2009 and pioneered the role of 'design partner' at a VC firm. He has worked with close to 200 startups, providing hands-on design support from interaction design, to hiring, to team culture. Before joining Google Ventures, Braden led design for several Google products, including Gmail, Google Apps for Business, Google Spreadsheets and Google Trends. Braden started his career building virtual reality simulators at the Beckman Institute and interactive visualisations at Lucent Technologies. Braden studied Computer Science at the University of Illinois and Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon.