jake knapp: thank you guysfor coming to our talk. i know there's a lot ofother amazing talks going on at this moment rightnow at i/o. we almost didn't come to this talk becausethere's so many good ones. so super appreciate it. we're going to talk to you guystoday about design sprints. and you actually totallyscored by coming to this talk because it's not just onetalk, but two, two in one. and first we're going totalk about design sprints
at google ventureswith startups, and then we're goingto hear about designs sprints at big google. so first of alldaniel and i are going to talk to you about whatwe do at google ventures. so daniel and i are designpartners at google ventures. and we're going to tell youhow to prototype and test pretty much any productin just five days. so daniel take it away.
daniel burka:well, before i even get started i wantto talk to you guys about a problem i've got. unfortunately it's areally big problem. in fact, it's a supermario scale problem, a really big supermario scale problem. i love mario. i have since it first came out. and so you can imagine, this isgoing to date me a little bit,
but i was super excitedwhen they announced the ds and announced that they weremaking the new super mario brothers where you couldbecome giant mario. and so at the time i wasliving in eastern canada, way off on the edgeof the continent, in a little place called princeedward island where i grew up. and i didn't have a whole lot ofdisposable income at the time, but it was just afterchristmas, and i had gotten some cashgifts from some family.
and i was thinking,aw, you know, i could totally getone of those things, and it would be awesome. i already had a littlesneaking suspicion that i had maybe a bit of anaddiction problem with mario, but i decided, you know what? screw it. i'm going to go get one anyway. and so i drove upto this place called
the future shopin charlotte town. i swear to god it'scalled the future shop. it's like best buy. and it was no lessinviting in january then as this photo, whichi grabbed off google maps, is now. this is the actual shop,a real photo of it. and so i went in there, andi threw down my hard earned money.
and it was awesome. it was just everythingi imagined it would be. so i played it. and i played it a lot. i played it every single dayfor about three months straight. i beat every single level. and then i beat every singlelevel plus the secret levels, then every single levelplus the secret levels with all the coinson every level.
and then on the ds you couldhave three different lives per game. and so i beat it once. i beat it again. and then i beat itagain even faster. and it was at the end of march. and i was just about to resetthe device so i could do it three more times, and iwas like, oh, fuck this. and i put in a box, andi mailed it off my sister
in los angeles. and i never saw thedamn thin again. but unfortunately iwas out about $170 that i didn'treally have to burn and three months of my life. i swear to god, i playedhours of this game. jake knapp: well, to throw intosharp contrast what an idiot daniel is i want to tellyou a story of my own. and this also involves nintendo.
this is from a simpler time. so if you remember whennintendo looked like this. raise your hand if you remember. oh, ok. awesome. all right, great. i'm glad that someof you are also old. [laughter] jake knapp: so my storytakes place in the year 1986.
and it's actually astory about my wife who was nine years old in 1986. as was i, although i didn'tknow her at the time. and like all nine year oldsin the united states in 1986, i don't know about canada, buteveryone wanted a nintendo. and this is what thenintendo looked like. it was a big box. and everybody wasso excited about it. but it costs a lot of money.
so it cost $199, which if youadjust that for inflation it's over $400. it's a lot of money at anytime if your nine years old. actually, daniel, i don'tknow for you canadians. hopefully this will help. daniel burka: i have todeal with this all the time. thanks. jake knapp: this isactually how much maple syrup you can buy for $200in case you guys were curious.
and leaders is spelledthe canadian way. craftsmanship here. so anyway, my wifeis very industrious. and she scrimped and saved. she did chores aroundthe neighborhood, and she saved up her allowance. and finally, finallyshe had $200. she was ready tomake the purchase. and then right at the lastminute she got cold feet.
she was like, oh my gosh,i saved up all this money, i don't know if i should dothis, i'm only nine years old. i don't know if she thoughtthat, but she wasn't sure. and so she made this reallyunusual arrangement that for $4 she would rent a nintendofrom her neighbor. and she'd have it all daysaturday, all day sunday. she could play it as much asshe wanted, all the games, you know, the laser gun, everything. and i think that whatmy wife envisioned
was something like this. so this is a photo fromnintendo on the box at the time. and this is kindof like captures the scene of excitement thateveryone had about nintendo. if you look closelyat these brothers you'll notice thatthey don't even seem to notice supermario brothers is actually a one player game. but that's what it was like.
i mean, it was so great. and so she picturedthis, and she pictured the familygathered, and everybody, you know, watching her play. and the realitywas more like this. and this is not a photo. this is an artist'sinterpretation that my wife was reallyexcited about when she saw it. but this is what it was like.
she's up till 3:00, 4:00 am,you know, eyes bloodshot, barely sleeping, playingnintendo the entire time. and by the end of the weekendwhen she gave the nintendo back she realized i cannothandle owning a nintendo. and she came to thisrealization after just $4 and 48 hours of her time. this idea of renting beforeyou buy we think also applies to product development. and that's theessence of what we're
going to talk toyou about today. daniel burka: so theway that we typically see design and developmentdone at startups is that you come up withan idea, a hypothesis, something that might bereally great for your product. and then you build thelightest weight version of it that you can, youknow a simple v1. you really boil it down. launch it into the wild,measure the results,
learn from those results, andthen iterate around the circle. also from our experience thisis actually not a great way to operate as a startup. and what really happensin the real world is you frequently arestarting with a bad idea. and that's fine. i mean, that's the wholepoint of a hypothesis is something you're not sureof that you want to test. but then you spend a lot oftime actually building out
that idea, and thisinvariably takes much longer thanyou think it will. you've now investedthe time, and so you feel like there's no going back. aw, we better launch thisthing and see what happens. and where you're expecting tohave really nice statistics and learn whether ornot something works, it's usually much muddierthan you hope it will be. and what's that quote?
there's lies, damnlies, and statistics. and then when you're supposedto be iterating again, you actually just move onto the next shiny idea. and your productsout in the while. and it's gumming up the works. you've got all this codenow in your code base that you no longer want. it's really hard togo back at that point. so we're trying todo at google ventures
is we're trying toshortcut that process. over the course of a week weideate and flesh out an idea, we prototype it,and then we test it. and we call that afive day design sprint. jake knapp: i want to tellyou just a super fast bit more about google ventures in caseyou're not familiar with it. you probably haveheard of google. if you haven't, you shouldtotally check it out. it's a create search engine.
but google ventures is actuallya small, separate company. so about 50, 60 employees. and basically what happensis google gives us money, and we in turn investit in startups. so we've invested in250 startups so far. and as design partnersdaniel, and i, and the other three designpartners on the team, it's our job to help thosecompanies make the best products possible sothey'll be successful.
and we've done this withcountless different companies. but the story that i wantto tell you about today is actually abouta coffee company. so blue bottle coffee. i'm not sure how many ofyou have heard about it. somebody. so actually a coffeecompany, not just a clever name for a startup. but if you're not familiar,they have a number of shops
here in san francisco, abunch in new york city. and if you were to go to theferry building, which is not far from here-- ifyou're from out of town you should totally check it out. there's a bunch of shops insidethe ferry building for tourists and commuters, andthere's one in particular that always has a long linekind of going down the hallway. and it's not the storethat sells only mushrooms. it's actually bluebottle coffee.
and here's the line. and in fact, if you lookclosely at that line you might recognizea familiar sort of praying mantis style figure. daniel burka: apraying mantis who only apparently owns one shirt. nice. jake knapp: that'smy favorite shirt. daniel burka: it looks good.
jake knapp: as i was sayingbefore i was so rudely interrupted, it'sa fantastic cafe. and they have thisbeautiful interior design some wonderfully friendly,knowledgeable baristas, and great coffee. their shops are very successful. it's a successful business. but they have a problem. it's with their web store.
they felt like it could be abigger part of their business, and it wasn't livingup to what they wanted. so after we invested in themthey came to our design team and said, could youhelp us out with this. so we decided todo a design sprint. and the first thing wedo in a design sprint is to manufacture a deadline. one reason why people liketo ship early and ship often is because shippingcreates a deadline.
it helps us get things done. i don't know aboutyou guys, but i'm kind of a naturalprocrastinator. and the deadline thatwe create in our sprints is also external facing, butwe do it with user studies. so on monday, the firstday of the sprint, we'll schedule fivecustomers outside to come in and interview. and they're going tolook at a prototype
that we haven't designed yet. so right away we're like,oh my gosh, the fuse is lit. like we have toget something done. another key for uson the first day is getting all the right peoplein the room for the sprint. and there are more rightpeople at most companies than you'd think. it makes sense tohave the people who are going to beworking on the product,
and building it,and designing it. but we've also foundit's critical to have the founder, the decisionmakers, the people who really understand on the groundhow the product works, and how customers areinteracting with it. we all need to work together,because in this case understanding how yousell coffee beans online, it's actually notstraightforward. i didn't know how to do itheading into the sprint.
and so another thingthat we do on day one is to look at thingsout in the world and see if we can findinteresting patterns. so we look at a bunch ofsuccessful coffee websites, and we saw thispattern right away that coffee is organizedquite commonly by region. so you can see it here. latin america, africa. here it is again,africa, the americas.
again here. this is the menu at starbucks. starbucks obviously knows athing or two about marketing. you can see guatemalancoffee, colombian. and actually would youguys raise your hand if you know the differencebetween guatemala and colombian coffee. does anyone hereknow the difference? ok.
so a couple of you doknow, which is awesome. but the rest of youshould not feel bad because as it turns outnormal humans don't get this. i mean, most of the people inthis room didn't understand. daniel burka: heck, weeven had a guy came in for one of the userstudies who told us that he roasted hisown beans at home. so he's buying green beans,he's roasting them himself, and then brewing his own coffee.
and even he sheepishlyadmitted when we asked him. he's like, ah, when igo to a cafe i never know really whatthe difference is. jake knapp: we're like, dude,like you roast your own beans. if you don't know nobody knows. and don't feel bad. so this is like abig challenge for us. like how should weorganize the beans and help people decide whatto have shipped to their home
if people don'tunderstand the regions? we asked blue bottle,because they really wanted to take thein-store experience and kind of bring it to the web. and we said, well, like how doyou guys do this in the store? if somebody comes in andthey're looking at all these brown paper bags, andthey want to buy some beans, how do you guide themthrough that decision? and they said, oh,well, when somebody
asks for a suggestion we turnaround and say, how do you make your coffee at home,because whether you make it in a french press, or a chemex,or a drip machine that's going to help us recommenda great roast for you. and i remember whenthey said that. i was looking at danieland his eyes got big. and it was as if thisbeam of inspiration like shown in from outside. daniel burka: just like that.
exactly. jake knapp: it wasjust like that. this is a photograph,so you know that it's exactlyhow it happened. and that kind of insightactually only comes to us because we have thewhole team together. we have people who understandevery part of the product. and that turns out to be trueacross all kinds of companies. so on the second day we've got abunch of insights from day one.
we want to come up with abunch of different solutions to compete with each other. so we don't just take one ideaand run with it off the bat. and the way we dothat is with drawing. but i want to makesure you understand we're not doinggroup brainstorming. so we found that groupbrainstorming just does not yield highquality results. instead what we wantare individuals spending
a long time, so an hour, twohours, sketching very detailed, very well thoughtthrough, and very divergent opposing solutions. by the end of the day we've got10, 12 different designs that are all very detailed, andthey compete with each other. they can help us pick from anumber of different options. that choice thoughis not so easy. and if any of you know, youmay have been in meetings like this where you'rekind of discussing
things, andintellectualizing, and try to imagine likewhich solution will work best in the real world. and, you know, we want to getsome wisdom from everybody, but we also don't wantdesign by committee. and the way we kind of hackthe decision making process is something we callweighted voting. so first we'll giveeverybody as many as they want of theselittle blue stickers.
and you put the stickers by theparts of ideas that you like. so very quicklywe get a heat map on all thesedrawings of the parts of the ideas that work best. next, we talk to the companyabout how they make decisions. in this case, james thefounder, katie the coo, they're the ones whoreally need to make the call on whichprototype we build, on which design goes forward.
so we give them a numberof these very big red dots, and they have alimited quantity. in this case theypick three designs. so first there's this ideaof recreating the cafe. so what if we literally tookthe interior design of a blue bottle cafe and made awebsite that looked that way? the second idea is storytelling. over the last dayand a half we've heard all of this greatknowledge and expertise
from talking to theblue bottle folks, and we wonder whathappens if we just write a lot of thatstuff on the website. and then third,there's that idea of organizing beans by the wayyou brew your coffee at home. problem is we've got likethree different ideas, and we still have tomake a prototype, right? so we decided todo, in this case, is what we call a battle royale.
we're going to pit the threeprototypes against each other, and we're actually goingto build all three. problem is, it'salready thursday, and we only have oneday, and it seems like there couldn'tpossibly be enough time. daniel burka: sowe're going to build three prototypesin a single day. and we're not going to stayup until 4:00 in the morning to do it.
we've got a few fancy tricksin order to get there. the first, is that when wewere doing the sketching we were not just sketchingindividual screens. we were sketching littlethree step or four step flows. so when we unpack theideas that we want to make, we're able to lay themout in a storyboard. and this is, runningfrom the top, a storyboard of the15 or 20 screens that a user will run through.
and we can just translatethose right onto the board. and then, as jakewas saying earlier, when people weredoing the sketching they weren't bsing it. they were taking thetime to write real copy. they were putting wherethe image might be, where buttons might be, whatrealistic micro copy there's going to be. and so we're able to justtake it from low fidelity
and push it up to amuch higher fidelity. and to move to thatlevel of fidelity we actually chooseintelligent tools. and we're not workingin photoshop generally. we often work inkeynote for instance. this is a keynote mock fromthe blue bottle sprint. and we find it gives us thatgoldilocks level of fidelity. it's neither sobasic that users know that they're in aprototype, but it's also
not a good enough tool to doproduction design where we're spending a lot oftime polishing buttons and making everythinglook exactly perfect. we just want it to be goodenough to suspend disbelief. keynote also has the advantagethat many people on the team can contribute to it. it's a low barrierto entry design tool. and then we use thingslike keynotopia, which is a little toolkitthat you can buy first
for keynote to drag and dropform elements into the mocks, so we're not redoing thingsfrom scratch every time. it helps us movereally, really fast. so in the end we've takenthese three different ideas and stitched together15 to 20 step prototypes of each one of them. we've got this one under thebrand telescope coffee that is exploring the storytelling,lindon alley coffee, which is doing this kind ofskeumorphic version
of the store, and pottingshed coffee, which is doing the filteringinterface for choosing coffees. jake knapp: so it's friday. and all week long thisfuse has been shortening. now the bomb's going to go off. this is an amazingdrawing that i did in keynote of an explosion. but it's time for us tofind out which prototype is going to succeed.
so we're doing the research. and i want to talkfor just one second about research, becausea lot of companies, both small and large, arereluctant to do user research. and one big barrieris that people feel like it's going to bereally hard and complicated. people think, ah, i need tohave a behavioral psychologist on our team to runthe interviews, and we need a special roomwith like a one way mirror,
and like a laser eye tracker. and the reality is youreally don't need much. this is our very fancy set up. it's a laptop. and on the laptop we'rerunning keynote full screen. we've pasted a browserbar on the slide so it looks like you'rerunning a browser. and there's a webcam. and using gotomeeting, or apple tv,
will project into another roomso that the rest of the team can watch while oneperson from our team conducts the interviewwith these customers who we've recruited. so we do five oneon one interviews. and each interview we'reshowing the customers the three prototypes. we're showing them theexisting blue bottle website, so we get kin d of a baseline.
and what's greatabout this is we get really good, really deepdata from just those five users. we'll hear a lot about whythings work and don't work. we'll get a sense fromwatching people react about whether they understandparts of the designs. so the results ofour battle royale are clear at the end of friday. and this idea of recreatingthe cafe totally bombed, which
is disappointingto me personally because it's thedesign i worked on. but it's actuallyreally good news if you're blue bottle,because they didn't have to build, andlaunch, and then wait to get thoseresults from the wild. and you remember that thiswas an idea that we really liked before we tested it. so it's great.
we dodged a bullet. and it turns out that boththis idea of storytelling and the idea of sortingby how you brew at home were very successful. and that's also kind of coolbecause both of those ideas were a bit risky. putting a lot oftext on a website isn't what you suspectwill normally work. and nobody else wasorganizing coffee in that way,
so if they justhad one shot at it they might not havetaken those risks. now they had the confidencethat these ideas worked, and they went ahead and did theship early, ship often thing. and so they designedthe full site. and here's what it lookslike in the wild today. so you can see you organize thecoffee by how you brew at home. and you might recognizethis from the sketches. a lot of that copyis still there.
you see this reallylong block of text. and conventional wisdom, don'tput a lot of copy on the web. people aren't going to read it. turns out, we know thatit builds confidence that these guysare legit and they know a lot about the coffee. they launched this website,and it did quite well. so they doubled thetime spent on site, and in turn they doubled theirsales growth, which is great.
that's exactly whatthey were hoping for from this partof their business. but you may be thinkinglike this is just a website. daniel burka: so we'vedone these types of sprints with many different companies. part of the reasonwe chose blue bottle is because it's a prettysimple story to tell, but it's also a pretty simpleapp when you look at it. you know, everybody's designedan e-commerce site before.
we've done lots and lots ofmobile prototypes as well. this is an examplefrom a sprint we did with a companycalled cluster. so you can see we'reusing a similar method to sketch it out,similar ideation. here we're designing inkeynote, piecing it altogether, and then we're dragging it intoan app called flinto, which is an excellent mobileprototyping tool, which means that we canget it onto device.
and we've developed twocomps here in a single day. as you can see,they look and feel a lot like a real mobileapp, even though they're just static images stitched together. they've got buttonsand transitions. the title bar stays still. it's good enough tosuspend disbelief so we can get really,really valuable feedback from the users.
and the second brand,same kind of idea, all put togetherin a single day. and the set up is reallysimilar for user studies too. just a document cameraover top of the device. and we have the person actuallyinteracting on a phone. we've done ipad prototypes. this is a company called fitstarthat does a mobile fitness app. and here we wereactually prototyping-- i'm not sure thisis going to go.
we were actuallyprototyping motion and sound on this prototype. and so there'sactually video playing, and we were recording audioduring the prototyping phase. so we were actuallyprototyping an audio interface where you're stepped back threeor four feet from the ipad, and it's giving youinstructions out loud. and that was a reallyinteresting study that we did. see if we can get tothe next slide here.
maybe if i press it harder. jake knapp: thisis pretty exciting. i'm going to go try tophysically press the button. daniel burka: all right. i don't know. my technique might be off. jake knapp: guys just talkamongst yourselves for a moment here. i'm sure we'll beready to go in no time.
daniel burka: oh boy. jake's the funny one. jake knapp: yeah, so askeleton walks into a bar. and he says-- daniel burka: ohhere we go jake. it's moving. jake knapp: i'd likea beer and a mop. daniel burka: oh geesh. jake knapp: thank you.
thank you forlaughing at that joke. daniel burka: so you can seea bunch of video and audio as well. and then the examplesi just gave you, everything i've shownyou thus far has all been consumer stuff. and so it's easy to recruitusers for consumer things, because they're similar tous, and there's lots of people all over the world whofit that demographic.
but we've actually done workwith many different startups in many different areas. we've recruited people likegeneticists and oncologists, woodworkers, truckers evenfor one of the studies that we did, and 80 othercompanies across a wide variety of industries, everythingfrom small startups to big enterprises. jake knapp: so we'reinvesting in these companies, and we want themto be successful.
we think this is anexcellent process for them to use to buildconfidence quickly. and if you guys are interestedin running a sprint like this, there's kind of threekey ideas that i think you ought to remember. one of them iscreating time pressure. it turns out that you canmanufacture a deadline in a lot of ways. the second is gettinginto a prototype mindset.
and we try to figure out how tobuild something high fidelity as quickly as possible, ratherthan building something real. just creating aveneer of reality. and finally, getting in thismode of doing quick research, which really doesn't haveto be very complicated. we hear this phrase a lotaround silicon valley, and i don't think it'snecessarily like a bad idea, but we just want to edit ita little bit, because what everybody reallyought to be doing
is learning earlyand learning often. and when you doit that way you'll find that you can really buildgreat products with a lot more confidence, or as my wifewould say, rent before you buy. if you guys are interestedin running sprints we've written a seriesof blog posts about how to run your ownsprint, everything from the kind of pins youshould buy to all the way through to how torun the research.
if you go to gv.com/designsprintyou'll find the whole series. we've heard from a lot ofpeople who never actually talked to us, and successfully runnedsprints using that diy guide. and thank you very much. that is the endof the first talk. now, you may have one lingeringquestion about design sprints, which is like if iwork at a big company, like this is greatat the startup, but how do i make this work?
and i actually createdthe design sprint process when i worked at google. and i ran a bunchof different sprints with a bunch ofteams across google. but i wasn't sureif it could really stick in a largeorganization, which google is. nadya direkova is a staffdesigner and design evangelist at google. and she's taken the designprocess, made some hacks to it,
made some hacks togoogle's culture, and been able to do over80 sprints on some really awesome products. i'm very excited tointroduce you to nadya. and she's going to tell youhow it's done at google. so without furtherado, here's nadya. nadya direkova: thank you. thank you, daniel. thank you, jake.
i'm really excitedto be here today. i've been looking forwardto this because very rarely do we get a chance to talk abouthow we do design at google. and with the designsprints we have something that'sreally cool and unique. is it cool and unique becausedesign matters for all of us. and speed matters. if you're a startup up,you're running out of money as soon as you raise them.
and if you're alarge company you might have a teamand a goal that is so large that by thetime that you meet it it becomes obsolete. by combining speed and designwe are creating design sprints to help a number of productsadvance their goals. that helps us avoidwasting time, money, and precious ideas. it is true what jake said.
i have done 80 design sprints. and perhaps i shouldwarn you, it's an addictive way of working. once you start you don't knowwhere you're going to end up. i have not done thesesprints by myself. in every case there'sbeen a talented team that worked with meto compile their goals and to decide how andwhere they want to end up. so today i want to share withyou some stories about sprint
at google x, sprintsat google at scale, and i want to give youfive hacks about how you might be able todo your own sprints. let's start withgoogle x. as you know, x is the new product laboratory,and we developed things like the self driving cars. that was also the firstlarge sprint that i did. the team came tome, and they said, we want to create a sharedvision of how this product can
be not just an amazingscientific discovery but also an amazing product for people. as i started talkingto them i realized that an interesting thing isthat by the nature of their job each of them are focusedon different time frames. some people are focusedon the short term, and some people arefocused on the long term. in addition, whatwas going to be available for the team in termsof technology and capacity
changes over time. so what's available today,tomorrow, and in four years from now really expands. the technology frontier foranyone expands over time. so how do you create theshared vision for something that changes so much,and where people already perceive it in different ways? what we did is createtwo teams in parallel. in five days we were ableto create even more output
by sending one teamwith requirements for working two yearsfrom now, and another team working with requirementsfor four years from now. they were able to createreally exciting vision videos, and show the team kind oflike a postcard of what might be happening in the futureand help make better choices. that was one week out of many,but a very interesting week. one day i walked intocampus and i saw this. and i thought what is this?
this is one of theballoons for project loon. the team is sendingthese balloons in the air in order to helpdistribute internet for parts of the worldthat don't really get it. it's an amazing project. it gives me a sense of wonder. at the same time whatwas really important for them to creategreat antennas so the signal that'ssent from the air
can be received on the ground. so the talented design team atthe design kitchen at google x ran a design sprint. they came together. they explored different ideas. and they made prototypes,like hardware prototypes, like various different kindsof antennas that they can test. what's interesting about itis that if you put an antenna on a conference room table, youcannot tell if it's too large,
too small, or ifit's easy to install. it doesn't give youa lot of information. so you actuallyhave to try putting the antennae on differentpieces of something that kind of looks like a house. and, in fact, they builta house mock up in order to be able to do that like that. how cool is that? if you go to yourteam and say, let's
build a house so wecan test our ideas, they might think you're crazy. but that might alsobe the right thing to do if you want totest your idea if it's related to something like that. glass is another teamthat uses sprints internally as oneof the toolkits. but they also pioneeredthe idea of design sprints for developers, for you guys.
so the glass developmentteam invites developers to come and learnabout the platform. what are the designrequirements? how do you makesomething good with this? they had a chanceto try the hardware, to come up with differentideas, and quickly put the ideas from a post-itinto something that's like a functional prototype. it all happens inabout four hours.
the sprint is not very long. and they logged their ideas. and now they can seewhat they've made. and they can get feedback too. quick learning. exciting experience. so you see how this workspretty cool for a product lab like google x. butdoes it work at scale? if you have a huge team and ahuge goal how does it happen?
indeed, we havefound that sprints have become very popular withteams across the company. it's become one of the waysin which the teams work, from google fiber to hangouts. in fact, if you have usedhangouts to call your mom please thank jake over here. the guy created theidea of design sprints at google working withteam, and he used the sprint to create an early versionof what became hangouts
as a product. the team that'sworking on hangouts is also using design sprintsto redesign and launch new uis. so if that's not a designfeat, i don't know what is. the sprints here helped uswork with teams of four people, and up to teams of 175. i'm not kidding. we literally hadthat many sprinters in a recent sprintone month ago.
i want to share a videowith you that gives you a sense of what it's like tobe a part of this large sprint, where teams are runningin parallel in order to meet goals in a veryshortened time frame. [video playback] -great design happenswithin constraints. and those constraintsare good because it helps narrow your focus. there's something aboutpressure, and in many cases
conflict, thatcreates good things. -so in our context a sprint isa very focused, intense period where we have a team ofpeople coming together from differentdisciplines and focusing on solving a specificdesign problem. -too often there's a processwhere one group works on something, and then theyhand it to the next group, and then that group handsit to the next group. and something getslost in translation.
so this is a mechanism wherewe can all get together on the same page, and you getmuch more tangible results much more quickly. -the ability to kind of leapfrogthe traditional design process is incredible. -i think a lot of people'sidea of creativity is you have thisfreedom, you know, leaning back in your chairand just imagining things. and it's really notlike that anymore.
-watching what wasgoing on yesterday, there was a lot of arguing. there was a lot ofdissatisfaction, and they had to figuretheir way through that. and so today they're actuallytesting their prototypes and changing tack a little bit. and that's kind ofthe magic of it. when you see these transitionsthat these teams go through. -a lot of what comesout of sprint week
is this intangiblecamaraderie that helps us work better together. but the second partare the projects. -what we're trying to do hereis create very high quality deliverables that turninto real products. -an actual artifact atthe end that you can then take to engineering to build,or you can take to customers to get more feedback on. we hope that there willbe a lot of the projects
that people are workingon that will get picked up in some form or another. but there's really no losers. when you participate in a sprintyou either win or you learn. [end video playback] nadya direkova: all right. win or learn. that's the spirit of the sprint. you win when you get tomake something awesome
and get totally shockedat how fast you can run. and then you learn ifyou create something that advances your goals. you know how to doit better next time. so you might haveyour design process and your own way of working. i want to share fivehacks with you that will help youcompress your design process from a large pieceto something that's short,
a week or less. we're hoping that thesehacks will help you. first is to be aware that thesprint is something to design. it's worth puttingthe effort into it, and here's the workflowfor a typical sprint. there's work before,during, and after. before the sprintyou want to make sure that you're solvingthe right problem. it doesn't matter ifyou create something
that no one wantsto use or it's not useful in your organization. so you need to focuson a challenge. you want to create a team. bring the right people together. schedule the sprint so that itmakes sense and every minute is planned. during the sprint it's aboutletting the teams experience the right set of designmethods and research methods.
and it's about workingas fast as you can, helping resolve theconflicts, looking for that deeper insight. after the sprint it'sall about making sure that the results arepointing towards launch. you want to be successful. i want to drawyour attention here to how much effort isinvolved before and after. many people skip thatpart, and they only
focus on the middleof the sprint. it's so exciting, let's justrun and make amazing things. you want to make surethat you're prepared, and that you're pointing towardslaunch before and after so that you can be successfulin order to create. now, here's another hack. because the design sprint isa unique way of working we have also created a new role. we call that the sprint master.
this is the person who's goingto be the ceo of the project and make sure for the durationof the sprint everybody's working at an amazing pace. now, this is not aduck with a snorkel. it's a ninja. these people are awesome. so here's jin. he's the designer andthe sprint master. here's marty.
he's a designer andthe sprint master. ellen, lauren, and dave. what they have in common isthat they're awesome designers, but they also are preparedto be sprint masters, and they can taketheir team and make them totally shocked in howmuch they can achieve together. we found that by measuringthe satisfaction of sprints that had and didn'thave trained sprint masters that thesecond kind was better.
people are more satisfiedwith participating in a sprint that's well crafted. so the reason also thatsprint masters matter is that if you have a teamthat's only sprinters, the most predictableoutcome is that they end up in different directions. you need the sprintmaster in order to create the sense of acommon goal, of a shared goal, and a shared dream,and let them run fast.
and the sprintmaster ensures that. designing the team is anotherand very interesting part of it. now, you know from jake thatworking with designers, pms, engineers, everyoneis really crucial. what happens if you'remissing someone? say you need to add theresearcher to your team because you don't have one. the sprint is an opportunity toredefine who is on your team.
you can invite the researcherfrom your larger organization, or find someonefrom the industry. no one wakes uphoping that they're going to have a boring day inwhich they do not contribute decidedly anythingtowards mankind. so when you invitesomeone to a sprint they have a chanceto do something cool, and generally people say yes. i've been surprised on how manypeople i've been able to invite
and enrich the team. another hack isabout accountability. i put these bracketshere because i call theseaccountability brackets. it's about startingand ending something. just like in software youdon't start and forget to end something because itdoesn't compile if you don't have the right braces, theseaccountability brackets help remind us about whatto do at the beginning
and at the end. no matter what yourdesign processes is we recommend that you startand end with user research. at the beginning youwant to open the bracket and talk to users,learn about their needs. it is always amazing thesense of empathy and discovery that you can get from that. like the time daniel kind ofgot this shining light over him because he observedwhat people are
like when they go tothe store to buy coffee. and you want to endwith user research. you just created something. you finished, closedphotoshop, or you closed yourprototype and coding. and now you can bringthat to people and ask, is that meeting your goals? there's always interestingthings to learn. the other hackaround accountability
is how to optimizethe executive time. now, we saw thatat google ventures the executives are often apart of the entire experience. what happens if yourexecutives are not available, or not availablefor the whole time? you can invite peopleand your executives to visit you at thebeginning of the sprint. you can interview themfor about 20 minutes and learn about theirgoals so that your team can
be aligned with wherethey want to go. as a bonus, you can bringthem in in the middle to get a check in. are we going the right way? and then afterwardsyou want to make sure that resources are committedso that your sprint is going and continuing waybeyond the [inaudible] that you created it for. now, if you're adesigner it might
feel intimidating togo to an executive and invite them to a sprint. i understand. but think about it from theexecutive's perspective. they don't wakeup in the morning hoping to have a boring day. by going to a sprint,even in 20 minutes, they get a chance toparticipate in something special, energizing, impactful.
so it might be worthit for them too. so starting and endingwith someone's time, someone who'll be approvingyour work, is very important. so with that we learnedabout stories and sprints from google x, across google,and we learned some hacks. that's great. but something's missing here. i promise. there's something thatyou haven't heard yet.
you cannot learn aboutdesign by listening to me. talking and thinking aboutit is only so helpful. i would like to inviteyou to some sprints. i'm so glad you're excited. tomorrow at 9 o'clock there'llbe a sprint with glassware. the glass team is puttinga sprint for you guys. and at 11:00 the legendaryteam at google ventures will be running a sprintfor you guys as well. these will not befive days experiences.
audience: yay! nadya direkova: there'llbe two hours in which you have a chance to learn aboutthe basics of the methodology and to test and learnsomething quickly. later this summer wewould like to welcome you to additional sprints forglassware material design that got announced today,and for android wear. you can sign up. and if you're interestedin this way of working,
let us know at this form. designsprints with an s 2014. let us know and bring your team. i want to leave youwith this message. make great things. and you might aswell do it fast. the world needs you. [applause] nadya direkova: ok.
jake knapp: do we have time for? nadya direkova: let's check. jake knapp: oh, we do. we have four minutes. nadya direkova: we have fourminutes for your questions. jake knapp: fast questions. nadya direkova: take it. jake knapp: right there. yeah.
first hand up. nadya direkova: there'stwo mics here and here. so you can line up andgive us your questions. jake knapp: oh sorry. daniel burka: or just yellit out, and i'll repeat it. audience: how do you go aboutselecting users for your user testing at theend of the sprint? jake knapp: great question. so how do we go aboutselecting users for our studies
at the end of the sprint? the method that weuse at google ventures is actually mostly craigslist. we'll post an ad on craigslist. we'll get 200, 250responses in a major city. and what's really important isthat we have a screener survey. so we'll use agoogle survey to ask them to answer a bunch ofquestions that doesn't reveal exactly what we'relooking for, and then we
get a spreadsheetwe can go through. the way you structurethat survey, the way you write that ad isreally important so that you don't get, you know-- youwant quality customers that match exactly whatyou're looking for. and there's some posts on there,if you follow that same link, gv.com/designsprint, you canfind your way to some posts about how to do that. for some customers, justto add one more thing,
if you need a certainkind of expert user we'll usually relyon the company to use their connections. audience: ok. my question will be what are thegeneral questions that you will be asking the users onthe interview session after you have the prototype? i mean, you must havea template questions to facilitate yourdesign to the users.
what are those templatesand general questions? jake knapp: the best sourcefor those questions is also gv.com/designsprint. but to give you alittle tantalizing hints of what it's likethe key is actually to structure the interviewguide right to the prototype. so you want to get peoplereacting rather than giving you feedback. you want them to be movingthrough the prototype
as though it was real. and the best way to do thatis actually a little nuanced. so i'll totally direct youto check out the blog posts for all the detail aboutwriting those questions. audience: cool. you guys spoke about twopretty different scenarios. you spoke aboutsprinting as individuals, whereas you talkedabout bigger groups and sort of teams that sprint.
my question is when you havegroups that sprint together, do you interfere at all withthe dynamics of that group? because sometimes you have,you know, really strong voices, and really shy voices,and stuff like that. do you at all interfere withthe dynamics of the group, or do you just kindof let it happen? nadya direkova: the questionis whether in large groups trying to interfere or not? that's the role ofthe sprint master.
i don't call it interference. i call it leading. jake knapp: we alsowant, when there's a dynamic about how decisionsare made in the company, we want to understandit and expose it. we want to askthem how it works, and make sure that theway we make decisions mirrors that sothat we don't create a false sense of collegiality.
daniel burka: a lot of thedecision making stuff jake was showing withthe stickers, you know, we're not standingaround arguing with each other, because then the person withthe loudest voice can win. we're stopping, doing alot of individual thinking, and then voting individually. so people are much moreindependent of each other, and not susceptible toso much group think. audience: hi.
what are some of your tipsfor enforcing deadlines when you need to waitfor significant data to make intelligent iterations? jake knapp: well, i mean that'sa pretty complex question. i think that what significantdata is defined as is like-- i don'tknow what you mean. we think that you canget really good data from a lot of different ways. and one of them is thesekinds of user research.
there are otherways to get it fast. and i understand sometimes thereare certain kinds of decisions that you can only getfrom a real world launch. but our framework,our lens, is what is the fastest way we can testthis hypothesis that we have. there's something we don't know,and how can we get to an answer as quickly as possible? we need to test it somehow. and if we think of it asa prototype and a test
it opens up a newworld of possibilities. when you think theonly way you can get data is tolaunch and measure a live product, or a fullyfunctional live product, it limits you. so without detailit's hard for me to not give that kindof hand wavy answer, but i think the keyfor us is always thinking what's the fastestway to answer the unknown.
nadya direkova: we'lltake one more question. audience: what toolsor modifications can you suggest for workingwith a distributed design team? so if they can't physicallybe there to put stickies do you have liketools they you use? jake knapp: the besttool is a plane. if you can just get them therethat would work the best. nadya, do you haveany experience with this that's worked well?
nadya direkova: youcan do hangouts. i mean, it's bestif you're together because you reallyfeel that bonding. but you cam work in a virtualway using like virtual tools. you just need to planit, or think about it. audience: thank you. nadya direkova: you're welcome. jake knapp: thanksyou guys so much. you can chalk us down.
thanks a lot.