In my previous post I started looking at doing 5-day sprints to discover and test solutions for a problem that you’re trying to solve. This follows my reading of “Sprint” by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz. Once you’ve set the stage for a sprint, it’s time to kick things off: the first day of a sprint is all about agreeing on the challenge that you’re looking to have tackled by the end of the sprint. On the Monday, i.e. the first day of the sprint, the focus is on the following activities: (1) agreeing on a long-term goal (2) making a map of the challenge (3) asking experts and (4) picking a target.

Agree a long-term goal (‘start at the end’)

You start the sprint by asking the the team “why”, make sure everyone is on the same page about what we’re trying to achieve. Why do we want to create this product? Why are we doing this project? Why do we want to solve this problem? Where do we want to be in 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, even 5 years from now and why? What will success look like? Agreeing on a long term will bring the answers together in a shared purpose.

Once you’ve got a shared understanding of the underlying “why” and have set a long-term goal, you come up with number of specific sprint questions, which you can derive from the assumptions and questions that the team might have. To get the team thinking about some of these questions, you can use the following prompts:

• What questions do we want to ask in this sprint and why?
• How will we subsequently utilise the answers to these sprint questions and outcomes?
• To meet our long-term goal, what has to be true?
• Imagine we travel into the future and our product or project failed. What might have caused that failure? How can we best mitigate this risk?
• To reach customers for this product, what has to be true?
• To deliver value to these customers, what has to be true?

Long term goal: More people buying snacks online.

Sprint questions:

• Are people looking to buy snacks online?
• What is the experience customers are looking for when buying snacks online?

Map the challenge

Creating a map is a great way to understand the steps the customer has to go through to achieve a desired outcome. Each map is customer-centric, with a list of key actors on the left. Each map is a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. These are the common elements of a Challenge Map:

1. List the actors (on the left) – The “actors” are all the important characters in your story. Most often, they’re different kinds of customers.
2. Write the ending (on the right) – Write the outcome that the customer wants to achieve.
3. Words and arrows in between – There’s no need for any fancy drawings; the map should be functional, and simple boxes and arrows should suffice.
4. Keep it simple – Your map should have from five to around fifteen steps. If there are more than twenty, your map is probably too complicated.
5. Ask for help – As you create the map, you should keep asking the team, “Does this map look right?” or “What are we missing?”

Ask the Experts

Nobody knows everything and it’s therefore critical that you engage with a range of ‘experts’. One of the biggest challenges of running a sprint is that you’ve got to gather a lot of information and make sense of it in a relatively short space of time. Having short conversations – approx. 30 minutes per conversation – with experts will help massively in collating relevant detail quickly.

Pick a Target

Selecting one target customer and one target event is the final activity of the first day of the sprint. The Decider needs to decide on the target customer and the customer event. Whatever she chooses will become the focus of the rest of the sprint – the sketches, prototype, and customer interviews all flow from this decision. Naturally, this can be a group decision, but it helps to assign decision-making responsibility to a single person.

Once you’ve selected a target, take a look back at your sprint questions. You usually can’t answer all those questions in one sprint, but one or more should line up with the target.

Main learning point: The first day of the sprint should really lay the groundwork for the rest of the sprint. Avoid the temptation to dive straight into solutions. Instead, spend the first day of the sprint to agree on a long-term goal and selecting a specific target to focus on!

Related links for further learning:

1. http://www.nirandfar.com/2016/03/good-products-start-good-questions.html
2. http://blog.invisionapp.com/inside-design-google-ventures/
3. https://stfalcon.com/en/blog/post/how-to-quickly-check-startup-ideas-with-sprint