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Jake Knapp: Click—How to make what people want
00:57:51
We chat with Jake Knapp about what makes a foundation sprint different than a design sprint, and some examples from the book of companies that have used foundation sprints effectively. We also talk to Jake about his decision to start Character, a VC fund aimed at helping startups at seed stage with capital and sprints, and the qualities that they look for in their founders when deciding to invest.
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- [00:02]
Jake Knapp
Every project has a hypothesis behind it, but that hypothesis is usually not specifically defined when you define it. When you say, if we solve this problem for this customer with this approach and we make it different in this way, people will choose it over this competitor. And when you make it really explicit like that, you kind of can't hide from it.
- [00:27]
Aaron Walter
Design sprints have become a staple of the creative process at companies around the world, and they're an indispensable tool in the pursuit of innovation. We owe a huge debt of thanks to Jake Knapp and his former colleagues at Google Ventures, now known as gv, who pioneered the design sprint. There's one gap that design sprints have not entirely addressed, though. What do you do if you're starting a new product or a company from scratch? That is the subject of Jake Knapp's newest book, Click how to make what People Want. Jake lays out the elements of what he calls the foundation sprint. In this book, we chat with Jake.
- [01:06]
Eli Woolery
About what makes a foundation sprint different than a design Sprint and some examples from the book of companies that have used foundation sprints effectively. We also talked to Jake about his decision to start Character, a VC fund aimed at helping startups at seed stage with capital and sprints and the qualities they look for in their founders when deciding to invest. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery.
- [01:31]
Aaron Walter
And I'm Aaron Walter. You can get ad free episodes, discounts on our workshops, access to documentaries like the Design Disruptors and our growing library of books, as well as our monthly AMA's with big names in design and tech by becoming a Design Better premium subscriber. Also, the best way to support the show, visit designbetterpodcast.com subscribe to learn more. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. And now back to the show. Jake Knapp, welcome back to Design Better.
- [02:25]
Jake Knapp
Thanks for having me back.
- [02:26]
Aaron Walter
We're excited to talk to you. You have a new book coming out called Click, and we want to dive into that, but longtime listeners might recognize that you've been on the show before. I think the last time we spoke was in 2018 and you had a great book that came out called Make Time, which was about really thinking about our relationship to digital tools, how we spend our life's energy and our time, and that was enlightening. We'll have a link in show notes for that so people can go back and catch up on that. But maybe you could just tell us what have you been doing since we last spoke. What have you been up to?
- [03:06]
Jake Knapp
So, yeah, Make Time came out. I had left Google Ventures in 2017 and that's my previous book, Sprint before Make Time was kind of written about the experiences there and the design Sprint process. And I spent some time teaching sprints and working with all different kinds of teams. And, you know, whether that was at universities, I spent a little bit of time every, you know, like a week a year at MIT for a couple years a week a year at the Harvard Business School, teaching it, then also teaching workshops in different places to individuals and working with the odd company here and there. I did that for a couple years. And then there's a whole lot of life stuff that happened in there, some family illnesses that really kind of threw our family for a ringer a bit. But a really nice chance to start this new venture with my co author, John Zyratsky and a friend of ours, Eli Blea Goldman. And the three of us co founded a venture fund. All of us, for various reasons, were ready to kind of like reset and think, what's a new way to bring the best of what we do into the world? What's the right way to spend our energy? And I'll admit I did not come up with this idea. This is an idea that John and Eli first cooked up and then brought to me. But they said, look, like if we were running the venture fund ourselves, then we'd get to choose the kinds of companies that we would invest in. And as the general partners ourselves, we would be the ones who are talking to founders all the time, have the most intimate connection with what they need. And there's going to be no better opportunity to do what we do best. What I think is kind of my life's calling accidentally, which is to help with the beginnings of projects, to help people use their time as well as possible by pointing the thing in the best possible direction, building in the best possible team DNA at the very, very first moment. The first literally like days and weeks of a project. And so I thought it was kind of a crazy idea at first, but I got more and more excited about it. Anyway, that fund is called Character Capital and we're now on our second fund and have invested in a bunch of startups. And a lot of the learnings from that are what led to the book. Click.
- [05:26]
Eli Woolery
From the types of companies you take on, are there any common traits? I mean, do you look at folks who have like designers on their founding team or is that irrelevant? How do you kind of frame the types of companies that you Work with at character.
- [05:39]
Jake Knapp
The frame is actually quite large. I'd say that the theme for us is we think we can help when the product is changing behavior in some way. And that's just related to my background and Jay Z, John Zyraski, my co founder's background as product designers and as you know, our experience informed at Google Ventures, doing design sprints over and over again with founders and with startups, we feel like we understand behavior change. But behavior change happens in all different kinds of venues, as you well know. It happens in consumer product, for sure, but it also happens if you're building an oncology tool using AI, you're going to be changing the behavior of patients, changing the behavior of doctors. And in any of those cases where the new solution interacts with a human in a way that that's a critical, you know, failure or success point. That's really the theme for us in terms of, like, genre of company. But the thing we look for, I, I suppose to put it in the simplest terms, is founders who are obsessed with something. They've got an insight that's unique and they've got a unique talent, a unique capability to bring that thing into the world, to put their insight to work and change something important for customers. And that takes a lot of different shapes. We've invested in healthcare companies, we've invested in companies who make software for enterprise. We've invested in companies who are using AI to design molecules, whether it's for pharmaceuticals or molecules for new materials that you might use to replace jet fuel. All kinds of things that are all across the board. But I think those are the common threads in terms of who the founders are and in terms of what dynamic we think we can help with through sprints and through working together.
- [07:44]
Aaron Walter
Is there a filtration process that you go through as you get these initial pitches and maybe spend some time with founders initially? Anything that sort of cues. All right, this is something we want to continue the conversation on or send them on their way.
- [08:01]
Jake Knapp
Yeah, absolutely. We have a framework so similar to. In the Design Sprint process. I learned over time that prior to running Design Sprints, I was starting to get this frustration in meetings. Dan, you're in a meeting and everybody's talking. I was just listening to the episode with Scott Birkin, who's someone I've been a fan of forever. I worked at Microsoft when Scott was there. And I remember seeing a key moment in my career is watching Scott give a talk for the first time and just being like, whoa, where did this guy come from? You know, Everything he's saying is just lighting up my brain. And a lot of the frustrations he talks about with, you've got everybody in the room verbalizing their pitches for their ideas. You've got everybody in the room kind of trying to shape things by their influence and the organization, those kinds of things. A lot of what I developed in the Design Sprint and then crafted at Google Ventures with our team there was about separating out and trying to let people work individually, develop their own opinions, and then be very careful about how you decide among those different perspectives what the right thing to do is. And the same structures and elements are at play in Qlik, which is really oriented on this new Sprint format, the Foundation Sprint, something you do before you run a design Sprint. But this framework of we've all got to work alone together is just, I think, really important and yet often hard to do, because our natural inclination as humans is to have a discussion, have a verbal conversation, to brainstorm. Brainstorming just, I think, comes naturally. I think that if you got together a bunch of scientists from the 17th century Royal Society in England and you put them in a room together, that they would just naturally start brainstorming. Or if you got a bunch of sort of hunter gatherers from the Ice Age and you got them together in a room, that they would just start brainstorming. I think it's just a thing that we do as humans, and you need a structure to separate it out. So when we're evaluating companies, our structure for separating that out is a framework that we call oats. So it's opportunity, approach, team, and success so far. And then we have a sequence of questions within each of those categories that we're considering. And so a lot of it is looking at a company through that framework and starting to think, how do I think this stacks up? That part, that super analytical part, is really important to us. John and Eli and I, all three of us, will score a team before we make an investment. We'll score a team on all of these, you know, 20 or so facets, and we'll do that independently. And only then will we talk about what do we think? And only then will we, you know, sort of make our pitches for the company or not. But there is also in venture capital, I've found I didn't really get this before, but being on the side of things where we're raising money from our limited partners and then we're in turn investing that money in startups, and we're having these conversations with founders and these founders with these conversations with our investors, I've realized there's this huge element of human trust that is such a big part of how all kinds of business works at the level when you're making the investment and also at the level where you've got the product and you're trying to get your customers on board with it. And that trust, which is sort of an emotional, intuitive thing, is really powerful and you have to recognize it and see it because on the one hand it tells you a lot. And we're really good at figuring out what are the elements that make me trust or not trust this person. But you also don't want the emotional thing to override signs that are really important. So anyway, it's a long way of saying it's a combination of those two things. We have to really believe in the person and we also have to force ourselves to be analytical and make sure do they have those outsized capabilities, that outsized insight? Is the thing that they're building actually important and just have the chance because we're fiscally have to be responsible to our investors. Do we think this can turn into a great business?
- [12:11]
Eli Woolery
So let's talk about the Foundation Sprint and a lot of our audience will be familiar with Design Sprints and if not, we'll point back to our first interview with you. I think you're the first person we've had on three times.
- [12:20]
Jake Knapp
Amazing. I'm free next week in case you just want to build a lead.
- [12:26]
Eli Woolery
So we'll point to that episode where we did talk quite a bit about Design Sprints and tell us how the Foundation Sprint evolved and how it's different from a Design Sprint to give a.
- [12:36]
Jake Knapp
Brief recap of the Design Sprint. It's a five day method for teams to solve a problem, prototype the solution and test it with customers. So it's step by step by step so that you can start it. You know, we know what problem we're going to solve, but we don't know what the solution is on Monday morning. And then by Friday afternoon, you've just come off of a day full of conversations one on one with customers where you showed them a realistic prototype. And some may argue, is it a good idea to go that quickly to a realistic prototype? High fidelity, I think it is. And you know, but that's the whole sort of formula there is to just radically go through that with a team of people. It's a method that works really well and I've been shocked by how well it works. I first came up with this structure while I was working at Google and I based it off of some experiences I had had. I was working on Gmail and I had co founded this project with a couple of other Googlers that ended up becoming Google Meet. And that was really catalyzed in this sort of one week in Stockholm when we were stuck together and had a great sense of urgency to get the project going. And I tried to replicate that week and some week long sprints that we had. Similarly, when there was a sense of urgency on a side project in Gmail that became a priority inbox, which is sort of the thing that scores, hey, this message is important or not. The method I originally thought would just be something for Google, but it ended up having applicability outside of Google. It worked for the startups that we were working with at Google Ventures and it's worked for a lot of teams in a lot of places now since the book came out. Sprint. When we started Character Capital, the framework was our special advantage. The way we're going to sell ourselves to great founders who are in the situation where they have people competing to invest in their company. The way we're going to sell ourselves is we're going to offer to work with them in design sprints and this is going to give them, we think, a disproportionate advantage over the competition and it'll let us really build a rapport and hopefully invest in the future with them. And that has worked so far. The design sprints continued to work well with these really early stage founders. We invest pre seed seed, but after the first few sprints right away where the relationship was, we're not just coming in as design partners as we were at Google Ventures, but also as the general partners. We were having more conversations with founders. They were earlier stage and, and I just started to notice there's something missing here. When we have some of these conversations, we get stuck on basic fundamental things that although these founders are really smart people, they have a strong conviction about what they want to build. There's just a lack of clarity around the specifics. So you might say who's the target customer for this? And you might have three co founders. They're totally on the same page, they have a great working relationship and yet they have three totally different answers or meaningfully different answers to that question. Or he'd say to a team, you know, a startup that has five, seven people. And he'd say like how is the product differentiated from the competition? And suddenly you got like a 60 to 90 minute sprawling conversation that does not come to a conclusion where we're bouncing around on who exactly is the competition and what factor is it precisely that differentiates us. And so I just thought, you know, we've got to try to help folks out with this. And we tried some of the tools that we had in our toolkit. We have a Sprint format called the Brand Sprint that I published on Medium a while ago and a lot of folks have used and it works well, but it just didn't address what we needed. And we had some methods and formats we used for making decisions that were more complex decisions. Anyway, I ended up saying, you know what, I'm going to experiment with a new format here altogether. And that was the genesis of the Foundation Sprint. And so what it is, is a two day workshop for teams. And it's for the very inception of a project. The first half of day one, you establish the basics. What are the essentials? Who's your customer? What problem are you solving? What, what's your advantage? Who specifically is the competition? What's the most important competitor or alternative? The afternoon of day one, you figure out your differentiation. What's going to set you radically apart from the competition? How can you reframe the world for your customers and show them that, hey, here's a new way to think about things. And if you think about things this way, we are offering you a much, much better solution. And then on the second day, it's all about choosing the approach to the project. So out of all the ways you could execute on that differentiation that you could solve that problem, which one should you go after first? And so this is a process where we are identifying different options and then evaluating them through different, what we call magic lenses to then choose one approach. And it all ends with a founding hypothesis. And we think every project has a hypothesis behind it. But that hypothesis is usually not specifically defined when you define it. When you say, if we solve this problem for this customer with this approach and we make it different in this way, people will choose it over this competitor. And when you make it really explicit like that, you kind of can't hide from it. And it's the perfect setup to run design sprints and other forms of experiments where you're radically accelerating and proving or disproving or adjusting that hypothesis so that you don't spend months and years building something that just doesn't fit. The real world, doesn't click with people. Thus the title is all about clicking with customers.
- [18:36]
Aaron Walter
Do you have stories of how a foundation Sprint has played out with companies that you've worked with and maybe examples of where people struggled and how they came out on the other side.
- [18:48]
Jake Knapp
Yeah. One of the big things that a struggle for people is differentiation. And it sounds so trite almost to say it. I think this notion of positioning or differentiation is something that people talk about in business school. You know, marketing teams are certainly aware and cognizant of it. But what I believe is that you've got to differentiate from the beginning, rather than as a layer of marketing or sales that you put on after the product is finished, that you've got to start by figuring out what that differentiation is, and then you've got to build a product that embodies that differentiation, delivers on it, so that when you market it, you're not just painting a facade on the front of something else. You're just telling people what it already is, what it truly is. One of the stories in the book that I found it interesting when it was happening. We'll see what readers think. But this, this company. So the founder comes from Google DeepMind, and at Google DeepMind, he worked on this project where they built an AI. Of course, this is like, you know, pre ChatGPT explosion of AI everywhere. But folks who are familiar with DeepMind will know they've. They've been at it for a long time and doing some really interesting things. They developed the transformer approach that I think OpenAI then used to build ChatGPT. So Johnny Godwin is his name, and he had developed with his team at DeepMind this AI that could analyze X rays for breast cancer scans. And it turns out they were able to get it to the point where it could actually beat radiologists in terms of accuracy at diagnosing breast cancer from these X rays. So really cool stuff. Really. An excellent Engineer, really knows AI and he left DeepMind and started this company called Orbital Materials because he believed that if he teamed up with the right folks, folks with chemical expertise, folks with manufacturing expertise, that he could use AI, they could develop an AI that could design molecules and create new materials. And so he'll tell the story of, you know, like. Because I'm like, new materials? Like new molecules? What are you talking about? And he's like, well, in the 20th century, new materials play this huge role in all kinds of situations, and we sort of take it for granted now. But nylon was developed in the 20th century, and it helped to turn the tide in World War II because the Allies could make parachutes out of nylon and didn't have to use silk, which they couldn't get, or the lithium batteries that we sort of take for granted today, that involves sort of processing lithium and, like, you know, getting that to work for us in the right way. The metals that were used, the alloys for space exploration. And he said, there's all of these new challenges that we need to solve in the 21st century. We need better replacement for jet fuel. We need, you know, materials that perhaps can capture carbon better. We need. There's materials that are scarce, that we use in rechargeable batteries. And there are ways to find that. The traditional way will take decades of trial and error. That's the way you developed all those materials in the 20th century. We need a faster way. And if you use AI, you can do it. So the whole notion was, we're going to use AI we're going to design molecules, you know, we're going to manufacture those at scale. And the first step in that is convincing partner manufacturers that this is a legitimate way to investigate molecules. And they've been doing it the old way for centuries. I don't know about centuries, plural, but certainly a century. So the whole framing at first is like, well, we've got this new technology. We look at all these things it's possible to do. And the foundation sprint with them was about figuring out what is it that really you believe will matter to these manufacturers. And when they got really specific about it, when they really dug into here are all the possible words we could use, all the possible sort of criteria that we think we could be better at. It was really about being reliable and being a reproducible process that was, you know, faster. And that. That idea of being more reliable than the old way. If they poured all their energy into that differentiation, then finally the chemical manufacturers started nodding their heads and saying, like, okay, maybe we'll try a pilot program. But in turn, for them, that meant everything we do now in terms of executing on the product, reliability and making this a reproducible process. It's got to be at the top of our principles of how we make decisions about what we deliver, because that's what sells, that's what customers want. That's what's going to make this thing work in the end. So we're not painting it on later at the end. We're actually starting from there, making sure we can sell it first and then executing on it.
- [24:00]
Aaron Walter
We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.
- [24:06]
D
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- [24:14]
Aaron Walter
Often doing something active and creative. We're building, we're cooking, or on an.
- [24:19]
D
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- [27:25]
Aaron Walter
And now back to the show.
- [27:32]
Eli Woolery
Jake, I was wondering if, you know, just to help our listeners paint the picture even further, you can use a case study from the book or one that's top of mind, but kind of walk through the steps of the foundation Sprint and the resulting deliverables or content that comes out of each step. It's just a painted mental picture for people that are interested, like, oh, maybe this is something I should do, but I want to understand it a little bit better first.
- [27:54]
Jake Knapp
Yeah, absolutely. So to use another example, there's a company we invested in called Reclaim. It's Calendar software. So it's like an AI agent sort of that helps you out with your calendar, helps you find free times for meetings, and also helps preserve focus time for work. So it'll understand your priorities and then try to translate those into the realities of your Google Calendar, your Outlook Calendar. And they were at this point where they weren't at the very beginning of the company, but they were at the very beginning of needing to build a project, build a new set of features that people would pay for. So they need to figure out, like, what is it that people will actually pay for and help us turn this idea into a viable business that can stick around and grow and live. And so in their foundation Sprint, if you start off with the basics, you're trying to define who exactly is the customer type. So is it an individual person who's learning about this calendar software for the first time? That's certainly a viable customer and an important one. Is it somebody who works with a team of people and they're the decision maker, they're the IT decision maker. Is it the executive assistant who actually is in charge of the calendar? Who's the most important key customer type for them? So they're identifying who is it who we think is the most important? What is the most important problem we can solve for that person and what's our motivation? And we think motivation, this is a big part of the message in click, or at least also what sort of animates our work at character is that what motivates a founder is a powerful lever for building a product that's much better than anything out there. And motivation, when you combine someone who's got great capability and they've got an interesting insight about the world and about how technology can be applied or how a problem can be solved, but then they have this motivation that really makes them obsess over it. That's what unlocks it. If I think about myself, like, what I'm obsessed with is optimizing how people work together at the beginning of projects. And if I wasn't obsessed about it, I wouldn't ever come up with anything because I have to be obsessed. I have to not be able to stop thinking about it. So for them, it's kind of similar to me, I guess. It's about, well, gosh, people are wasting so much time. These guys had worked in large growing tech companies and seen how much time gets fragmented and how much people are frustrated by the fact they can't do their most important work. So that's their motivation. So they're kind of framing on the first half of day one, what are the things that matter the most to us? So that sort of gets the founders kind of set in the right mindset.
- [30:40]
Aaron Walter
And what are they doing on that day? Are these like conversations or exercises that they're doing?
- [30:45]
Jake Knapp
That's a great question. Yeah, we'll see. We'll get really into the nitty gritty. So we'll do this as a sequence of note and vote activities. So the note and vote is a structure that exists in the design Sprint and I came up with it. Basically, it's just like the molecular element that's needed when you've got a team of people and we need to have a conversation about something, but we can't talk forever. So every person on the team. I tried to keep these teams really small in a foundation Sprint, since it's usually the decision makers, maybe it's the founders, maybe like one or two other people. But it's probably in the neighborhood of like 4ish people. In a design Sprint, it might be more like four to seven people. Every person on the team, you're going to ask a question. So one person's running the process. Maybe they're the facilitator or somebody from the team. They're going to say, who's our target customer? And then every person on the team is going to write down in silence their answers to this. Who could be the target customer? What's every possible way we could phrase who the target customer is? Everyone writes that down. Then you choose your favorites of your own answers in silence. You put them up and then we all look at those, and then we all silently vote on those. We have like, you know, maybe two or three votes a piece. We look across all of them. All right, which ones seem like they're the best ones for us to focus on. We vote on those. And then the decision maker, we say, okay, decision maker, you got to pick one. You can ask us to clarify why we put a vote here. You can ask for an argument for one if you're curious. If you see a bunch of dots on one and you didn't vote for it, you want to hear more, you can bring that forth now. But it's a structure that gets us very quickly, in about, you know, five to 10 minutes through a decision about who's the customer, what's the problem we're solving for that customer, and so on. We'll find that sometimes those go fast, but it's most often the case that each of those, there's actually some real thought that goes into when you look at all the options. The decision maker making the call. So the CEO, the founder, saying, like, okay, who is it really? What's really the best phrasing for us now framing all of this? We're trying to create a founding hypothesis. It's a two day workshop to create a founding hypothesis. So none of these decisions have to be perfect. They're placeholders, they're things that we're going to experiment on.
- [32:55]
Aaron Walter
Got it. So it sounds like a foundation sprint. It draws a lot of the insights and the methodologies from design sprints. This concept of we're working separately together versus brainstorming, where we're sort of influencing one another as we talk aloud and write something on a whiteboard. We're working separately together, creating these ideas, then voting on those, and the conversation comes after. But we end up with a very diverse set of possibilities.
- [33:29]
Jake Knapp
Yeah, that's right. So we want to have a real decision at each point along the way. So there's several components of the basics. On the morning of day one, we want to have options when we choose. You're going to get a better result if you're choosing between some options. And I want to press the decision maker on the team, the decider, to think past their first instinct. You know, I want them to put what they're thinking into concrete form. I want them to put it on paper and maybe they'll choose their own statement, their own definition of the customer. But I want to force them to see, here's some other ways of looking.
- [34:05]
Aaron Walter
At it right so other parts of the beginnings of this foundation sprint, trying to identify what are your distinct advantages, your unfair advantages is a term that's often used in our industry. Industry and then understanding the competition. Can you walk us through how do we look at those specifically in a foundation Sprint?
- [34:25]
Jake Knapp
Yeah. So for the advantage, I break it down into three components. Capability, insight and motivation. So capability would be something like we've got the specialized engineering capability. In the example of Orbital Materials, they've got this great AI capability paired up with chemical industry expertise. So that's a unique capability. Then the insight is, well, here's something you can do with AI that maybe nobody else quite realizes is a possibility yet. We think you can use AI to design stable molecules and then in terms of your motivation, that's what's animating them, what's firing them up to do this. And it's a sense that, hey, if we don't do this, if we allow sort of materials to be developed in the traditional way, there's going to be serious consequences for the world. There's a huge business opportunity here, but it actually also really matters. We can deliver a better quality of life to people decades sooner if we do this thing. So those are the elements of advantage when it comes to competitors. The obvious thing is to think of other companies who are building a product that competes with what you're doing. But a lot of times the most interesting new products, the most interesting things that startups or, you know, any organization is doing is where they're coming up with a replacement for something that people just have like some kind of workaround today. You know, they're not really solving that exact problem. They've got some band aid or some hack. For example, with Reclaim, the Calendar company, people who want to preserve time on their calendar for focus work, they just have to put a block on their calendar and, you know, decline other meetings and continually defend it. And that's what I have to do if I'm not using Reclaim, if I want to preserve time on my calendar. And so we think that often it's really interesting if there's not. If the 800 pound gorilla and we ask people to identify what's the 800 pound gorilla, the most difficult to dislodge competitor for you. It's really interesting if that thing is not another product. I mean, sometimes it is, sometimes it's a product that people are using for, you know, just not its ideal purpose. We had a startup called Design Pro who makes software to help people clarify, track and make the best decisions about their Design. So like I'm kind of a tool for design managers and for them, you know, the main competitors were like spreadsheets, video calls, maybe people tracking stuff in Notion. But there was no tool that was really married to the design process itself. It wasn't something you could use when you're looking at designs in Figma, for example. And so the 800 pound gorilla wasn't a true competitor, it was sort of a substitute. And that's really interesting to see as well. And occasionally there are products that have no competition, there is no solution for it. And sometimes that's a great opportunity, but sometimes it's a warning. If there's no competition, it might mean this problem just isn't really worth solving. People aren't motivated enough to do anything about it.
- [37:32]
Aaron Walter
And it'll be hard to market too if people don't have the question in their head that I might need this thing.
- [37:37]
Jake Knapp
Yeah, that's right. That's right. You have to explain the pain that maybe people aren't conscious of.
- [37:44]
Eli Woolery
Jake. So this sounds like it would work great for a startup team or a company that needs to have this kind of reset. But what if you're part of a larger organization and you're maybe working on a new, could be a new product or a new feature. Could you apply some of these principles in that situation as well?
- [37:59]
Jake Knapp
Yeah, absolutely. The underlying philosophy here is that every project has some kind of a hypothesis behind it, but those hypotheses are not made clear. So people don't really know what the hypothesis is. And as a result of not being made clear, they can't be tested. They're not tested until far too late. Generally they're tested when the product launches. And that's just a setup for a disaster. It's a setup for a lot of wasted effort and energy. Some of that wasted effort and energy happens in debate and discussion, argument, the frustration of trying to get on the same page and get aligned with your team. In the early days and even the middays, you know then that in that buildup to launching the the project, there's going to be all kinds of conversations and decisions that have to be made. And if you don't know what promise you're making to customers, in the end, if you don't have absolute clarity around who this is for and what the promise is to them and why you think your version is going to be better than the other ways they might approach this thing, it's really hard to know how to have those conversations and debates. It's really hard to know, like, what the criteria are for. Is my opinion on this the right one, or is your opinion on this the right one? Like, if we don't know what the framework is for, what we're trying to achieve, it's, you know, it's just really hard to do that. So for any team, and actually, I think maybe even disproportionately, that part is going to be valuable in large organizations, because that's where it gets harder and harder to get things done. I've experienced this firsthand. You've got, you know, different teams you have to coordinate with and align with. You've got maybe some politics between different job functions. You know, you're trying to think about what this boss thinks and that big boss thinks. And so having clarity around the hypothesis and being able to put that on, you know, it's one sentence that you can show to anybody and say, like, look, this is what we're doing. And in the beginning, maybe it's saying, is this right? This is what we're testing. This is what we've proved in design sprints. We've used the foundation sprint to get our founding hypothesis. We've used design sprints to prove that it works. It clicks with people. But do you argue that this is not what we're trying to do? I think that's useful everywhere.
- [40:06]
Aaron Walter
One of the steps in a foundation sprint is around principles, and you gave us some examples earlier about defining principles. There's a fair bit of debate online about how do you create a design principle or a guiding principle for a product? And is this abstract or broad enough, or is it so specific that it's not a good guide? When you do principles really well, it can so focus a team on a problem and create the boundaries, which creates the opportunity for independent efforts that can happen in tandem and still kind of arrive in the same place. Can you give us some guidance about how you shape principles?
- [40:51]
Jake Knapp
Well, principles can be a total waste of time. I think there's certainly a lot of principles out there that people don't really know how to apply. And as a result, they just kind of sit there and gather dust and. But there is, as you said, there's that kind of principle that's really quite helpful. And I experienced this at Google when I started working at Google, this is in the 2000s and 2007. There was this document called 10 Things We Found to Be True. And I think you can still find it online, although I think it's been. It may have been edited a little bit in the intervening years. But they were lessons from the early days of Google and some of them, some of the 10 that were really crisp and very easy to understand how you put them into action. For example, fast is better than slow was one. So if you're debating about, hey, here's a new way we could design this feature, we could do it like this or we could do it like this, well, which one is faster? How many milliseconds is this going to add or subtract from the page load time? And fast is better than slow would make it really clear. One of them was it's best to do one thing really, really well and we do search. So if the thing you're doing does not somehow relate to search or if the new product you want to make does not have one very specific focus and does that one thing really, really well when you're missing the boat. And so those kind of principles were the kinds of things I could understand and put into action. There was also a principle that said or one of the 10 things we found to be true was you can be serious without a suit. And I didn't really know how to put that into action. I mean, I don't mean to say that it was, you know, stupid or anything, it's just I didn't really know day to day as I was making a product decision I don't really know how to put you can be serious without a suit into action. What I hope for teams and the reason why we put principles into the Foundation Sprint is that if you can get one of those useful principles, one of those practical principles, principles that you can think of as survival guide, you know, because fast is better than slow was a survival guide for Google when it was in the very early days competing with Yahoo and AltaVista and you know, the other ways that people navigated the Internet at that time, aol well, Google was faster and that's how they survived. That's what set them apart. So if you can create a principle that helps the product survive and that helps people make decisions that continue to help the product survive, that's really useful and it's certainly worth what will take, you know, 15 minutes or so. In the course of the Foundation Sprint. We develop principles in the Foundation Sprint right after we've defined differentiation. So we do differentiation in the, the classic most Cheesy Business School 101 way with a two by two diagram that's got the two differentiators and they're polar opposites. And I want to see the company, I want to see this Project's product in the top right. And I want to see those competitors, whether they're substitutes or other products, I want to see those pushed far away into the, you know, the far bottom left. And we will spend a long time trying different criteria, being really honest, as honest as we can be about how the competition stacks up and repeating that until we find factors that create that separation. Once we've got those, at the end of the day I want to say, okay, what's a decision making principle that would help us enforce that differentiation? So for differentiator one, if it's, this is going to be a more reliable solution than what traditional chemical manufacturing delivers, or this is going to solve your calendar pain more than anything else, how are we going to deliver that time and time again as we make decisions to build this product?
- [44:40]
Eli Woolery
So I was just looking through Google's principles which we'll link to, and I think I was loosely aware of them. But it's interesting that the very top one feels very much like a design principle. Focus on the user and all else will follow. Yeah, you don't really think of Google maybe in its origin story as a sort of design led company, but it's definitely up there on their priority list, at least by these principles.
- [45:00]
Jake Knapp
I found it when I arrived at Google from Microsoft. This is Microsoft and sort of the Steve Ballmer era. And if he's listening to the podcast, I apologize, Steve, but I found Google to be a radically user focused, customer focused place and depending on your definition of design, very design focused. I found that the amount of respect that I was just given by assumption by the engineers because I had the title of designer was actually like, if anything, they gave me too much credit for my ability to make decisions. And this notion that we're going to figure out what helps the customer first and we'll figure out the business later. Not how are we going to squeeze money out of people and then what's the product we can kind of build around that cash generator. That was a totally different philosophy. And I don't want to make this a big ad for Google. It's been a long time since I've been there. I'm just talking about my experience at that time. It was really powerful and it changed me and I just felt like, you know, this is the way I want to build things. This reminds me of building video games when I was in high school, you know, on a black and white Mac computer, just caring about, are you making something that matters to the person? Are you making something that does something for Them that changes something for them, that improves some element of their day or their month or their life. And if you do that really well, if you're exceptional at that and you put that ahead of everything else, then you just trust we will be able to figure out a way to turn that into a business. If we create value for people, there will be a way for that value to come back to us. At the center of this book is the notion that we start the first thing on the first day is who's the customer? And then everything from there is based on how can we serve them, how can we solve a meaningful problem for them, what's the way that we can do it that's special to us, what's the way that we can do it that will be incredibly special to them and meaningful. They'll change the way they look at that problem. Of all the paths we might take towards delivering that solution, which one is the smartest one for us to take so that we give that to them in the end? And design sprints are meant to put us in front of our customers one on one as fast as possible, showing them what we plan to build so that we build that connection with them, not only so that we prove that yeah, this is a thing that has value and merit and maybe there's a good business there, but most importantly, so we understand who's those people are, not as an abstraction or not as a Persona that we've written up or sort of analyzed, but as real humans. And we make that human connection as quickly as possible. I just want to make that whole loop as short as it possibly can be because we spend so much of our lives building products, building things, trying to solve things for people. And we so rarely, if we're in technology, get to see those humans face to face. And it makes the whole thing abstract. And it leaves a lot of it to be about our heads in the tools, our heads in these conversations and debates with our colleagues. And it takes away some of our humanity, I think. So that's a bit grandiose, perhaps, but that is absolutely like the motivation behind this.
- [48:15]
Eli Woolery
Jake, I'll take a quick nerdy diversion because you mentioned making video games in black and white on a Mac. I'm assuming you were a Dark Castle fan, possibly growing up. Do you remember that game?
- [48:25]
Jake Knapp
No, I'm not aware of Dark Castle. Okay, but you know, I don't know what era you're talking about, but one thing that listeners might need to understand before we dive into this conversation is if we're talking about the 1980s, 1990s. The only way that you would find out if something existed was and I lived on an island in the middle of nowhere. So I might go to an actual store that had software on the mainland, which is what we call like the continental United States. I might go there and like maybe once, maybe twice a year. And most part, if you're going to find out about something, maybe it was on like a bulletin board, which was like sort of the precursors to the web. So there's all kinds of great stuff I've learned in my adulthood because I'll go back to. And like I never knew about it. So anyway. Well, you told me about Dark Guests.
- [49:07]
Eli Woolery
Yeah, well, so check it out. I'm sure you could find an emulator to play it. It was a classic Mac game.
- [49:11]
Jake Knapp
I got an emulator bookmarked, by the way, in my browser. It's just open all the time.
- [49:15]
Aaron Walter
So yeah, that's dangerous.
- [49:17]
Eli Woolery
So as a related point though, there's this great book by Jordan Metschner. I think his name is pronounced. You know him? He's the guy that created Prince of Persia.
- [49:24]
Jake Knapp
Prince of Persia. I have that book.
- [49:25]
Eli Woolery
Yeah, that book. Awesome book. We'll put a link to that in the show.
- [49:28]
Jake Knapp
Notes. Oh, it's so cool. It's so cool. I mean, just a little quick like sideline into that. He had the idea to do motion capture. So he's taking video with like, I mean, I guess like a camcorder with like a probably, you know, VHS tape of his brother. Of his brother? Yeah, his brother, like running and jumping and then going in and pixel by pixel, he had to get. Gosh, there's a whole story about how he converts because it's not like, oh, I shot footage on my phone and now I just airdrop it onto my computer. He had to figure out frame by frame how to digitize the images and then draw them by hand. And if you ever played Prince of Persia when you were a kid or it was just like what like these pixels. It looks like a human doing something. So cool.
- [50:11]
Eli Woolery
Yeah. Super cool book. And he goes through his whole. It's just kind of his diary essentially. And he goes through the whole process and the business of it. It's all really fascinating for that era. So speaking of that kind of stuff, what's inspiring you right now? It doesn't have to be work related. It could be a book, a movie.
- [50:26]
Jake Knapp
Podcast, anything along those lines I am listening to. The rest is history off and on. Whenever I get the chance to podcast. It's just about history. And I'm inspired by the creators, their enthusiasm for the topic. And it's just a reminder to me every time I listen to it, I can tell they're having fun. They're talking about subject that, you know, it's all kinds of different episodes from the history of the world. And some of them I'm interested in, some of them I'm less interested in. But I'm always reminded, like, to not settle for having any less than their level of enthusiasm for the topics of whatever I am doing day to day. I don't want to settle for just going through the motions of things. I want that kind of joy in my work and that kind of joy in the people who I work with. And so that's one inspiration point, a random one. We started homeschooling our younger son a year ago. So we're kind of in a year two of this. I don't know how long we'll end up doing it, but it's been very fun. And in the curriculum that we use recently, there was a choice of assignments. He could choose for art and history for the Renaissance. And one of the options was watch an opera. And he said, well, I'm kind of curious. I want to watch an opera. And I've always divided the world into people who are interested in opera and people who are not interested in opera. And I've been in the not interested category pretty enthusiastically not interested. But we needed to go through with this. So we did a one week trial with the Metropolitan Opera in New York has like a streaming service. I mean, just like everybody has their streaming video service. So we did this one week trial and we watched the opera Carmen, which I now know is like the crossover hit. You know, it's the Shake it off by Taylor Swift of opera and really has some great music in it. And so we ended up actually going beyond the seven day free trial and watching some snippets of opera because it is just honestly does not seem like it would be my thing. I just don't even know who I am. But it's really impressive to watch these folks do this thing that requires so much almost athletic ability and to think about the composers who put these things together. I mean, sometimes it's like 150 years ago or whatever, 200 years ago these operas were written and they've been performed again and again and again and again and again again and interpret it in different ways. And I just kind of have been like, generally inspired by the like. That's impressive. They put so much effort into this craft of this thing that it can live through all of the changes that have happened in our society. And it's not as central in our society certainly as it maybe it was when it first came out. But will I ever be a part of anything that has that kind of longevity or in a way is the work that we do sort of a performance of an opera of sorts that's been around for many years? I don't know, it's just kind of thought provoking.
- [53:26]
Eli Woolery
That's cool. I like opera music, but I've never actually sat through and watched an entire opera. So I'd like to check out that Met opera. Maybe I'll do it. That the kids and they could get something out of it.
- [53:37]
Jake Knapp
It has subtitles, which is a game changer really. So that's the big draw for me is subtitles also. They zoom in. I have been to an opera and you know, sort of unwillingly earlier in life and obviously it did not change my mind. But in the streaming service you're seeing people's expressions and actually they're good actors too. So they're singing, they're doing all this stuff. And then a lot of times I'm like, you know, every opera sort of ends with like an hour long death scene. It's always a tragic. So I mean you're really feeling it like, oh man. Like I feel bad for the father who's whatever, like son is whatever. It's always horrible and it can get to you.
- [54:14]
Aaron Walter
Wow, that's wonderful. I will check that out too. Jake Knapp, your new book is called Click. Where can people get it and when can they get it?
- [54:23]
Jake Knapp
They can pre order it right now on theclickbook.com, so theclickbook.com it comes out in April, but if you order it right now, like literally in the next couple of days, we have a wonderful pre order package that we've put together because really want to enable people to run foundation sprints right away and not even have to wait for the book. It'll get even better when you get the book. But all the tools that you'll need. A guide to running the foundation sprint ahead of the book is available to you once you pre order the book. So yeah, check it out now. TheClickBook.com that's great, Jake.
- [55:00]
Aaron Walter
Thanks so much for being on design.
- [55:02]
Jake Knapp
Better Again, thanks so much for having me. Aaron, Eli, always a pleasure.
- [55:06]
D
Foreign.
- [55:10]
Aaron Walter
This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio if you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team/channel designbetterpodcast.com It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.