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Lurking beneath every goal are dangerous assumptions. The longer those assumptions remain unexamined, the greater the risk. In your sprint, you have a golden opportunity to ferret out assumptions, turn them into questions, and find some answers.

List sprint questions You'll list out your sprint questions on a second whiteboard (if you have one). We have a few prompts for getting teams to think about assumptions and questions: * What questions do we want to answer in this sprint? * To meet our long-term goal, what has to be true? * Imagine we travel into the future and our project failed. What might have caused that? An important part of this exercise is rephrasing assumptions and obstacles into questions.

Instead of waiting to launch a minimal product to understand if an idea is any good, our companies get clear data from a realistic prototype.

Set a long-term goal To start the conversation, ask your team this question: "Why are we doing this project? Where do we want to be six months, a year, or even five years from now?"

Recruit a team of seven (or fewer) Choosing whom to include isn't always easy, so we've created a cheat sheet. You don't have to include each and every role listed here. And for some roles, you might choose two or three. Just remember that a mix is good. Decider Who makes decisions for your team? Perhaps it's the CEO, or maybe it's just the "CEO" of this particular project. If she can't join for the whole time, make sure she makes a couple of appearances and delegates a Decider (or two) who can be in the room at all times. Examples: CEO, founder, product manager, head of design Finance expert Who can explain where the money comes from (and where it goes)? Examples: CEO, CFO, business development manager Marketing expert Who crafts your company's messages? Examples: CMO, marketer, PR, community manager Customer expert Who regularly talks to your customers one-on-one? Examples: researcher, sales, customer support Tech/logistics expert Who best understands what your company can build and deliver? Examples: CTO, engineer Design expert Who designs the products your company makes? Examples: designer, product manager

To build the perfect sprint team, first you're going to need a Danny Ocean: someone with authority to make decisions. That person is the Decider, a role so important we went ahead and capitalized it. The Decider is the official decision-maker for the project. At many startups we work with, it's a founder or CEO.

Ocean's Seven We've found the ideal size for a sprint to be seven people or fewer. With eight people, or nine, or more, the sprint moves more slowly, and you'll have to work harder to keep everyone focused and productive. With seven or fewer, everything is easier. (Yes, yes - we know there were eleven people in Ocean's Eleven. It was just a movie!)

Jake likes to introduce the Time Timer with a bit of narrative, because timing people while they talk can be socially awkward. He says something like: "I'm going to use this timer to keep things moving. When it goes off, it's a reminder to us to see if we can move on to the next topic. If you're talking when the timer beeps, just keep talking, and I'll add a little more time. It's a guideline, not a fire alarm."