Solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days — with the Design Sprint

A Design Sprint is like fast-forwarding into the future, so you can see how customers react before you invest all the time and expense of creating your new product, service, marketing campaign... or whatever!

In a Design Sprint, you will:

• Test the key hypotheses behind your product or business
• Rapidly build realistic prototypes that are optimized for answering key questions
• Run effective customer interviews that give you concrete, actionable results
• Make fast, high-quality decisions without endless debate or cognitive biases
• Condense months of product and strategy work into one week

But the Design Sprint is not just about efficiency. It’s also an excellent way to stop the old defaults of office work and replace them with a smarter, more respectful, and more effective way of solving problems that brings out the best contributions of everyone on the team and helps you spend your time on work that really matters.

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If you want to run a Design Sprint with your team, here are the best ways to get going:

• Read our step-by-step Design Sprint guide
• Download the first 17 pages of Sprint for free
• Buy a copy of Sprint (or better yet, buy a copy for everyone on your team)
  Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Audible • Apple • Bookshop‍
• Grab our Miro template to use in your own sprint
• Upgrade your skills with the Design Sprint Masterclass from our friends at AJ&Smart. (Use coupon code SPRINT500 to save €500.)

If you want more help, please email us at jakeandjz@character.vc and we’ll see what we can do.

Jake Knapp is co-founder and general partner at Character Capital and a New York Times bestselling author. Previously, he helped build Gmail and Microsoft Encarta, cofounded Google Meet, and was a partner at Google Ventures. He lives on Orcas Island in Washington state.

John Zeratsky is co-founder and general partner at Character Capital and a New York Times bestselling author. Previously, JZ was a partner at Google Ventures and a designer at YouTube, Google, and FeedBurner, a startup which was acquired by Google in 2007. He lives in Milwaukee.

Together, Jake and JZ are the authors of Sprint, Click, and Make Time and the creators of the Foundation Sprint and the Design Sprint. They have helped more than 300 teams design new products and bring them to market, including those at Google, Microsoft, YouTube, Slack, Uber, and One Medical Group. Their methods for innovation and rapid collaboration have been adopted by Airbnb, Amazon, LEGO, MIT, Mercedes-Benz, Harvard Business School, the University of Oxford, and many other organizations.