Service Planning for Google Ventures - 5 Basic Principles 

Have you ever read a book called Sprint? The author, Jake Knapp, was a former chief designer at Google.

He is currently a design partner for Google Ventures (renamed to GV), helping startups with service planning.

Jake's book 'Sprint' tells about 'Sprint', a manual you can use when you want to plan a new idea.

This book contains examples of how Slack and Blue Bottle Coffee used the sprint, and vividly shows the planning methodology of Google (and, in fact, Silicon Valley).

He picked out five planning principles that he felt while reading the book.

In today's article, we'll introduce each of these principles, and provide guidelines for the execution of sprints related to them.

Principle .1 The fast beats the slow and the perfect.

This is a principle that runs throughout the sprint. Fast and lacking beats slow and perfect.

In English, ‘Done is better than perfect’ means
Horses are famous.

The goal of a sprint is to quickly validate an idea that solves a problem.

Most of the ideas are wrong anyway. So speed is more important than perfection to reduce waste of time and money

The sprint period must be 5 days.

A sprint is a process that can be completed in just 5 days. To speed things up without spending too much time validating ideas.

Decide by voting rather than arguing

When several people work together, they spend a lot of time making decisions.

Sprints favor voting over debate to reduce decision-making time and keep pace.

If you have to decide which of the many ideas is most important, you don't decide by way of opinion and criticism.

Instead, hand out two dot stickers and vote for the one you think is most important.

The final decision is made by the decision maker.

Usually when a group of people get together, a discussion is held until everyone agrees. However, Sprint is not democracy oriented.

Within the sprint team, there must be a ‘decision maker’ for the project.

So everyone has an opinion, but the final decision is made by the ‘decision maker’.

The moderator should say, ‘The discussion is good now, but there is a lot of work to be done, so let the decision maker decide now’.

This is because procrastinating on decisions can be debilitating and prevent you from sticking to your time schedule.

Discussion should be done with a process in place.

 

If a discussion is absolutely necessary, a defined process is used.

1. Post the solution sketch on the wall so you can see it all.
2. Set the timer to 30 minutes.
3. The 'moderator' explains the sketch
4. The ‘moderator’ points out the ideas that received the most votes.
5. Team members point out ideas that the moderator missed.
6. The clerk writes the ideas that have been well-received and puts them on the sketch.
7. Review concerns and criticisms.
8. The person who sketched the solution doesn't say anything to the end.
9. The person who drew the sketch at the end explains an idea that people didn't say or didn't understand.
10. Proceed to the next sketch and repeat this step.
11. When all sketches are explained, it goes to the decision stage (voting).

Write a timer with a visible time

Continue through the sprint and set a deadline with a time timer.

Setting short deadlines can help you feel urgency and focus, so you can use your time more efficiently.

Principle 2. You must read the questions carefully and write the answers well.

This principle runs through the first day of the sprint.

“If I were given an hour, I would spend 55 minutes defining what the problem is and the remaining 5 minutes finding a solution.”
(Albert Einstein)

Start with goal setting

On the first day of the sprint, the whole day is ‘problem definition and goal setting’.

Everyone on the team agrees on the ultimate goal of the project. Share how your current customers are using the service.

Then we define what the gap is between our goals and reality.

This is the problem to be solved. It is the most important cornerstone for a successful sprint.

Describe the problem in the form of ‘how can I do it?’.

In sprints, when describing a problem, we use the form ‘How might we?’.

It is said to be a technique learned from IDEO, which is famous for design thinking. Each team member has a post-it note and takes notes one at a time.

On a piece of paper, write the question ‘How can I do it?’.

When written in the form of an open, optimistic question, you can spot the problem without rushing to a solution.

If you try to think of a common problem, you may come up with various expressions such as ‘lack of brand awareness of your product’, ‘there are no advertisements to increase awareness’, ‘customers do not know the store’s philosophy’, and so on.

If we change this question to a ‘how’ format, it can become ‘how can we show our brand values ​​well?’.

It is said that by changing the problem in this way, communication becomes easier and new perspectives emerge.

Hear various expert opinions without prejudice.

“There are a lot of subtle details in important tasks.”
“To understand this, you have to get information from a lot of people and integrate it.”
“For this, it is fastest and most effective to ask the experts at the start of the sprint.”

So Sprints first interview 4-5 experts with different perspectives on the problem.

When Jake was interviewed by an expert,
Asking ‘Remind me’ proves to be effective. Since this is an interview to accurately understand the problem, it is recommended to ask neutral questions that do not contain the questioner's preconceived notions.

Principle 3. Unexpectedly

Most of the communication in Sprint is written and sketched.

Images are more powerful than words. This is especially true when multiple people are collaborating.

Visualizing ideas helps team members understand and persuade them.

Progress, data, diagrams, ideas, etc. should be written down for all team members to see.

Pictures and text that express ideas well are worth dozens of minutes of explanation.

In addition, it helps you to discover parts that you did not even consider while expressing your ideas through writing or drawings and to make them more concrete.

Be sure to use a whiteboard and post-it notes.

Before starting the sprint, the checklist contains the item ‘Prepare at least two large whiteboards’.

“The magic happens when you use a large whiteboard when solving problems.”
“A whiteboard with drawings, diagrams and paper is a kind of shared brain.”
“Even if it is the same material, there is a difference between what you see in front of your eyes and what you have to look for yourself.”

Post-it notes are also essential. While everything is going digital, Sprint still emphasizes that there is no better way to express ideas in a simple and easy way than Post-it notes.

The conference room where the sprint is held is covered with post-it notes like this

You may not be able to draw, but write clearly.

On the second day of the sprint, you sketch out your solution.

As I said before, it's undeniable. It doesn't matter if you don't have any drawing skills.

What matters is not your drawing skills, but the quality of your ideas.

However, even if you can't draw a picture, you should write in a way that you can read exactly as much as the text in the picture.

Principle 4. What are you doing?

Without prototyping quickly. There's a huge difference between building something and testing it, and just explaining and asking what it's like.

Once you've come up with a good idea, stop procrastinating and build a realistic-looking prototype.

But you don't have to make a real solution to test it. You just need to create a look that looks plausible.

“When you’re prototyping, you have to completely change your mindset.”
“Prototypes are mostly one-time use and throw away, and you only need to build enough to learn something.”

Prototypes are made quickly.

Sprint limits the time it takes to create a prototype to 5-6 hours.

After all, most ideas fail. We need to know early on whether we're adventuring with crazy ideas or not.

The purpose of prototypes is not to build well, but to fail quickly. It's better to finish with a time limit

The prototype does not need to be a web or an app.

You don't necessarily have to prototype just a webpage or an app. In fact, prototypes can create any product/service.

If it is a physical space, you can remodel the existing space slightly.

If you don't have time to actually build the product, you can substitute it with a demo video or brochure.

Be clear about what you want to test.

For prototyping to be effective, it must be clear what you want to test. We need to consider whether we can test hypotheses about customers that we must know, not 'let's just do this'.

With these questions in mind, you should create a prototype.

Principle 5. Sit face to face with the customer

No matter what the creator thinks, the customer thinks differently.

You should not be conceited that ‘the customer will be like this’. People who come up with solutions tend to think that their ideas are right and interpret the evidence accordingly.

So the last day of the sprint is a customer interview.

We need to sit face to face with our customers and see how they react to the solutions we come up with.

You can understand customer emotions and behavioral patterns that cannot be known from market trend reports or questionnaires.

By actually observing your customers, you can infer “why” they do what they do.

But customers don't know themselves well. Because customers don't do everything consciously.

“There is a story that demonstrates the importance of observing customers firsthand.”
“A designer named Joe Gebbia starts a startup with two friends.”

“I built a website and I've been improving it for a few months. But there was no response at all to this service.”
“So the founders took extreme measures. I put down my work, left the office, and went directly to the customers who were there.”
“One at a time, we watched our customers use our website firsthand”.
“Joe said that this interview made him sober. It was easy for people to get confused and make mistakes even on simple things like choosing a date.”
“The friends who came back to the office fixed the problems they had discovered through observation.”
“Then sales doubled in one week. The founders went out again, interviewed and improved the website.”
“Then the amazing rate of growth continued. This company is the ‘Airbnb’ you are familiar with.

Interview with only 5 people

In the sprint, no more, no less, only 5 people are asked to interview.

This is based on the work of the master of usability, Jacob Nielsen.

In conclusion, 85% of the problems are

It was discovered after interviewing 5 users. After that, the number of discoverable problems is drastically reduced.

Another 5 is adequate for an interview in one day.

It is the number that can get the most information with the least effort.

Do not ask customers for answers. Don't ask your customers, 'What should I do?'

Our goal is not to get our customers to come up with new ideas, but to test our team's ideas on customers.

Rather than that, it's important to get customers to talk about their honest feelings through open-ended questions as much as possible.

All team members watch and record the interview.

When conducting an interview, only the person in charge conducts the interview, and other team members may want to do other work.

However, this will also take time to understand and review the interview content later.

You can't really see what the customer is saying and doing, so your understanding may be different, so Sprint says everyone on the team needs to be interviewed.

Summary

Shall we summarize? Sprint is a bestseller containing the planning methodology of Google Ventures.

It's a good book, but it's difficult to put into practice if you just follow the simple manual. Google's planning principles embedded in the sprint were selected into five categories.

Principle 1. Fast beats perfect slowness
(1) The sprint period must be 5 days.
(2) Decisions are made by voting rather than debate.
(3) The final decision is made by the decision maker.
(4) Discussion should be done with a process in place.
(5) Write a timer with a visible time.
Principle 2. If you read the questions carefully, you can write the answers well.
(1) Start with goal setting
(2) Describe the problem in the form of ‘how can I do it?’.
(3) Hear various expert opinions without prejudice.
Principle 3. Unexpectedly
(1) Be sure to use a whiteboard and post-it notes
(2) You may not be able to draw, but write clearly.
Principle 4. What are you doing? Without prototyping quickly.
(1) Prototypes are made quickly.
(2) The prototype does not need to be a web or an app.
(3) Be clear about what you want to test.
Principle 5. Sit face to face with the customer
(1) Interview with only 5 people
(2) Do not ask customers for answers.
(3) Watch and record the interview together