GOOG Alphabet Inc

By Rachel Emma Silverman 

He's no Olympian, but Jake Knapp wants to get you to sprint.

Mr. Knapp, a design partner at GV, the venture-capital arm of Alphabet Inc., says a sprint is an intense five-day session that teams can use to tackle big, nagging problems, such as finding ways to turn a product's free users into paying customers.

Sprint team members develop simple prototypes of their ideas, and within days, they test possible solutions with real customers, rather than employee stand-ins. Patterns will emerge, Mr. Knapp says, regarding what works and what doesn't. The team can then use this information to refine the idea or change course.

"Through the idea of prototyping and testing, the sprint team will find out by Friday how the customer reacts, and then they can change direction within the next few weeks," says Mr. Knapp. "That allows them to take bigger risks."

Mr. Knapp has used the technique with companies such as the messaging service Slack, one of GV's investments, which ran a sprint to determine a more effective way to teach new customers how to use the product. Mr. Knapp says the company tested two ideas, including one suggested by Slack founder Stewart Butterfield, that demonstrated Slack being used by teams of virtual workers, and a more straightforward approach that guided real workers as they used the product, step-by-step. The latter, more direct approach was more appealing to users by the end of the sprint, Mr. Knapp says.

Ideally, a sprint should involve a team of about seven people from different areas of a company, including sales, marketing, design and technology, says Mr. Knapp, co-author of the book "Sprint," recently published by Simon & Schuster.

Team members should get permission to dedicate themselves to the burst of creative speed for the full five days, which he recognizes can be a hard sell for busy professionals. If they can't clear their schedules for the full time, they should at least be available for key appearances throughout the week.

Because of the time and resources involved, companies should only turn to sprints for really big problems that will benefit from a team's focused energy.

A key element to making a sprint work is being clear about who makes decisions, he says.

"It's really important to know who the decider is," says Mr. Knapp. "For many teams there is a lot of ambiguity about who makes decisions. If you can't get the decider for the whole sprint, make sure you can get her in the room for cameo appearances during the sprint to make decisions."

A sprint works best when there is one person tasked with making the final call for big decisions, rather than relying on a more democratic process, he says. Team members can provide input and feedback, but in a sprint there should be a sole decision maker. "We want there to be a single decider to make the calls, and we want him or her to be opinionated, says Mr. Knapp. "It becomes an informed dictatorship."

A sprint only works if team members are open to taking risks and willing to try ideas that may fail. "Half of the ideas are going to be wrong, if not more, but there may be one risky idea that actually works," he says. "The key thing to keep in mind is a spirit of learning, instead of being cautious."

Write to Rachel Emma Silverman at rachel.silverman@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 23, 2016 11:46 ET (15:46 GMT)

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