A world Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

Sprint, Don’t Wander
One of the key ideas from our extreme programming case study was
the importance of working on one objective at a time, without
interruption, until it’s complete. This commitment to working in
sprints is now widely held throughout the software development
world, even in teams that don’t adopt the full set of strict XP rules.
The history of sprinting can be traced back to the creation of Scrum,
one of the original agile methodologies for software development,
back in the 1990s. During a Scrum sprint, a team works exclusively
on a single specific deliverable, such as adding a new feature to a

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software product—no complex task lists, schedules filled with
meetings, or intricate daily planning processes are needed.
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This
productivity hack has become an accepted best practice in this field.
It’s now widely agreed that it would be inappropriate to bombard a
development team in the middle of a sprint with calendar invites for
meetings, or to badger them via email to help out with unrelated
projects. In most software companies, it’s completely reasonable for
developers to be unresponsive during a sprint, as the culture is one
that accepts that this is the best application of their energy at the
moment.
Software development, of course, is a highly specific endeavor.
The question is whether this particular idea—working in sprints on a
single objective—can apply beyond the world of programming as a
general method for achieving more specialized work. Fortunately for
our purposes, a partner at a tech-focused investment fund has spent
the past decade exploring this exact question.
—
In 2009, Google started a venture capital fund to invest some of its
earnings into up-and-coming tech start-ups. It was called Google
Ventures. In 2015, the fund was spun off as a standalone entity, now
called just GV, with Google’s parent company, Alphabet, remaining
its only limited partner (source of money). This close connection
between GV and Google makes it inevitable that ideas from the
search giant’s software culture would make their way into the culture
of the fund. One such idea to follow this path was the value of
sprints.
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A GV partner named Jake Knapp knew a lot about sprints in
software development. In his previous role at Google, he’d helped
teams implement this strategy to increase their effectiveness. When
Knapp transitioned to GV, he began experimenting with ways to
apply this tool to other types of business challenges. He eventually
came up with a revised version of the strategy that he called the
“design sprint.” The goal of the design sprint is to help companies
efficiently answer critical questions by requiring executives to
dedicate five consecutive days of (nearly) uninterrupted
concentration to the problem at hand. In 2016, having deployed
these sprints with over one hundred of their portfolio companies,
Knapp and fellow GV partners John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz

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introduced the design sprint methodology to a larger audience with
their book Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas
in Just Five Days.
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Design sprints are meant to help you figure out where your team
or organization should focus its efforts. In a traditional workplace,
these decisions typically unfold over months of meetings and
debates, augmented with numerous email threads, ultimately leading
to costly investments in new products or strategies that all too often
fall short. A design sprint attempts to compress this work, from the
initial debates all the way to receiving market feedback on the
resulting decisions, into one highly efficient workweek. On the first
day, you figure out the problem you’re trying to solve. On the second
day, you sketch out competing solutions. On the third day, you make
the tough decision about which solution you want to explore,
transforming it into a hypothesis that can be tested. On the fourth
day, you throw together a rough prototype that allows you to test the
hypothesis, and on the fifth and final day, you put real clients in front
of the prototype and learn from their feedback. These sprints have
been used to test new products, but they’ve also been used to try out
advertising strategies and even to determine whether there’s a
reasonable market for a given idea.
The design sprint encourages specialization, as practitioners are
asked to concentrate for five days in a row on a single important
problem. Curious about the degree to which this single-minded focus
is actually achieved, I got in touch with Jake Knapp and asked him a
question I felt got to the core of this issue: “Are people still checking
email during design sprints?” He explained that the hard rule during
sprint sessions is “no laptops, no phones, no tablets, nothing.” The
only exception is the use of computers on the fourth day, if needed,
to construct a prototype. When Knapp coaches a team through a
sprint, he tells them to set out-of-office autoresponders so they won’t
be stressed out by their lack of connectivity. (He calls these
autoresponders a “pressure release valve” for participants worried
about stepping away from the constant thrum of the hyperactive hive
mind.)