Jake Knapp (00:00:00):
We would have a conversation with founders, you're saying like, "Gosh, I'm almost embarrassed to ask this question, but who exactly is your target customer?" And three co-founders have three different answers.
John Zeratsky (00:00:09):
After these hundreds of teams that we've worked with, we've seen that there's one failure mode, which is they don't know what that set of basics are. Then there's this other failure mode where they never test it.
Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:19):
Let's talk about the Foundation Sprint. Walk us through the process. How does it start? What are the steps?
Jake Knapp (00:00:23):
The very beginning of your project, we recommend this kind of crazy idea that you clear your calendar. So the core team come together for 10 hours roughly and go through a sequence of activities so that we can make all of the key decisions together.
Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:38):
I think a lot of people wonder as they're hearing this is why don't I just build something and launch it and learn?
John Zeratsky (00:00:42):
One phenomenon we've seen when teams are building things really quickly with AI is that the more AI-generated or assisted they are, the more generic they tend to turn out. Put yourself in a situation where you can slow down and do some hard thinking, some deep thinking about what's actually going to make your product unique. Going fast can actually slow you down in the long run.
Lenny Rachitsky (00:01:01):
Today my guests are Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. The framework that Jake and John share in this conversation is basically the missing manual for founders and product teams trying to refine and test their startup or product idea. It's called the Foundation Sprint, and it emerged out of the famous Design Sprint, which Jake and JZ co-created, and also from working with over 300 teams, building both new product at startups and also with teams at larger companies like Google, Microsoft, YouTube, Slack, Uber, and many more.
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