The Design Sprint — GV
The Sprint is a five-day process for tackling critical business challenges by rapidly designing, prototyping, and testing solutions with real customers. Developed at GV, the Sprint is a structured framework that combines best practices from various fields, including business strategy, innovation, behavior science, and design thinking. This method allows teams to bypass lengthy debate cycles and compress months of work into a single week. Instead of waiting to launch a product, a Sprint utilizes realistic prototypes to gather valuable customer feedback, providing actionable insights before committing to costly investments.
This guide outlines the Sprint process, starting with Monday’s focus on defining the problem and setting a specific target. Tuesday dives into solutions, exploring existing ideas and brainstorming new ones through individual sketching sessions. Wednesday involves critical evaluation of the solutions, narrowing down to the most promising options and developing a storyboard for the prototype. Thursday dedicates itself to prototyping, turning the storyboard into a realistic, customer-facing representation. Finally, Friday involves testing the prototype with real users, generating valuable feedback for further development and decision-making.
The sprint gives teams a shortcut to learning without building and launching.
The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. Developed at GV, it’s a “greatest hits” of business strategy, innovation, behavior science, design thinking, and more—packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use.
Working together in a sprint, you can shortcut the endless-debate cycle and compress months of time into a single week. Instead of waiting to launch a minimal product to understand if an idea is any good, you’ll get clear data from a realistic prototype. The sprint gives you a superpower: You can fast-forward into the future to see your finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitments.
This page is a DIY guide for running your own sprint. On Monday, you’ll map out the problem and pick an important place to focus. On Tuesday, you’ll sketch competing solutions on paper. On Wednesday, you’ll make difficult decisions and turn your ideas into a testable hypothesis. On Thursday, you’ll hammer out a high-fidelity prototype. And on Friday, you’ll test it with real live humans.
Basic sprint resources
The book is a complete hour-by-hour guide to running your sprint. Below we’ve assembled a basic DIY guide, including daily checklists, videos, and other resources.
Monday
Monday’s structured discussions create a path for the sprint week. In the morning, you’ll start at the end and agree to a long-term goal. Next, you’ll make a map of the challenge. In the afternoon, you’ll ask the experts at your company to share what they know. Finally, you’ll pick a target: an ambitious but manageable piece of the problem that you can solve in one week.
- Monday video with Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky YouTube
- Checklist for Monday GV Library
Tuesday
After a full day of understanding the problem and choosing a target for your sprint, on Tuesday, you get to focus on solutions. The day starts with inspiration: a review of existing ideas to remix and improve. Then, in the afternoon, each person will sketch, following a four-step process that emphasizes critical thinking over artistry. You’ll also begin planning Friday’s customer test by recruiting customers that fit your target profile.
- Tuesday video with Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky YouTube
- Checklist for Tuesday GV Library
- Start recruiting customers for test GV Library
Wednesday
By Wednesday morning, you and your team will have a stack of solutions. That’s great, but it’s also a problem. You can’t prototype and test them all—you need one solid plan. In the morning, you’ll critique each solution, and decide which ones have the best chance of achieving your long-term goal. Then, in the afternoon, you’ll take the winning scenes from your sketches and weave them into a storyboard: a step-by-step plan for your prototype.
- Wednesday video with Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky YouTube
- Checklist for Wednesday GV Library
- Schedule customers and draft interview guide GV Library
Thursday
On Wednesday, you and your team created a storyboard. On Thursday, you’ll adopt a “fake it” philosophy to turn that storyboard into a prototype. A realistic façade is all you need to test with customers, and here’s the best part: by focusing on the customer-facing surface of your product or service, you can finish your prototype in just one day. On Thursday, you’ll also make sure everything is ready for Friday’s test by confirming the schedule, reviewing the prototype, and writing an interview script.
- Thursday video with Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky YouTube
- Checklist for Thursday GV Library
- Finalize test schedule and complete interview guide GV Library
The Sprint book
“Read this book and do what it says if you want to build better products faster.” —Ev Williams, founder of Medium and Twitter
New York Times best seller Sprint takes you behind the scenes with some of America’s most fascinating startups. You’ll meet a robotics maker searching for the perfect robot personality, a coffee roaster expanding to new markets, a company organizing the world’s cancer data, and Slack, the fastest-growing business app in history.
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’s for anyone with a big opportunity, problem, or idea who needs to get answers now.