Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just 5 Days -Jake Knapp

The last book I managed to read before the New year came from the three design partners at Google Ventures and offers guidance on how to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days.

Designer Jake Knapp created a five-day process at Google, where sprints were used on everything from Google Search to Google X. He joined Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky at Google Ventures, and together they have completed more than a hundred sprints with companies in mobile, e-commerce, healthcare, finance, and more.

What they achieved in Sprint is to weed out all the noise associated with buzzwords in the tech startup world around tools for collaboration and innovation — things like “hackathon” and “rapid prototyping” and “scrum” — and got down to practical, yet inspirational approaches for testing an idea.

Sprint is a ‘hands-on’ book on identifying a problem, creating a prototype and testing it within just 5 days. It achieves this by breaking down the detailed innovation process so you can easily re-create it yourself.

Jake Knapp also provides the details are reinforced by the right combination of metaphors, real-life stories and anecdotes.

Sprint takes you behind the scenes with some of America’s most fascinating startups as they sprint on difficult problems. You’ll meet a hotel robotics maker searching for the perfect robot personality, an innovative coffee roaster expanding to new markets, a company organising the world’s cancer data, and Slack, the fastest-growing business app in history

I found that this book would make an excellent read for business executives, digital product owners, as well as designers/developers (and I would rarely categorise one book as good for all of those demographics!).Overall, I think this books is for anyone with a big opportunity, problem, or idea who needs to get answers today.

In regards to teaching and learning, students would definitely benefit from the insights offered in the book when they work on their own group projects.

There is a wide range of resources available on the Sprint website such as checklists, supply shopping lists and starting card decks.