I’ve just finished listening to the book Sprint by Jake Knapp, which revolves around a process that aims to validate ideas from the ideation phase to prototype to testing with potential customers in 5 days. It took me 3 days to finish listening to its +6 hours in 1.5x speed and here are the notes I took:

Key ideas:

• Ideally a sprint must be ran within 5 days.
• Key people in the company be involved in the process, ideally 7 of them.
• People left out can be consulted at the right time.
• Ideally a sprint must not start without the decider’s involvement. E.g.: The CEO.
• Start at the end: the planning process should start from what is considered the end, and work backwards so that things in the middle are carefully considered with end goal in mind.
• During the planning phase, Maps must be created foreseeing all the steps that the users must take from beginning to completion.
• Each map is a story with actors well defined.
• The map should start initially with an actor defined, and the end; Only then the middle is worked out.
• An alternative way to state a problem is by using the How Might We approach at the beginning. E.g.: How might we make an employee book absences from Slack?
• Sometimes looking at competitors’ products doesn’t provide any help at all when looking for inspiration because it may lead us to copying the same solution, let alone making the same mistakes.