Why Not Give a New Idea Five Days

Some people have an abundance of time. This is not for them. For the rest of us, there’s Google’s Design Sprint framework, which assumes you have five days (if even that sounds like a luxury to you, read on. We’ve tried this and it works).

The days are organized as follows:

Day 1: Understand
Day 2: Sketch
Day 3: Storyboard
Day 4: Prototype
Day 5: Test

Straightforward enough, right? One day to understand the problem, two days to map out the solution, one day to prototype and one day to test. And yes, they swear you can prototype anything in a day if you’re “Goldilocks” about it – not so barebones that it looks fake, but not so elaborate you’ll never complete it.

They also published a series of Medium posts outlining a typical sprint week, not to be confused with a typical Shark Week.

If you need a manageable framework for iterating quickly, get the book on Amazon Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days and give it a shot.