Jake Knapp + John Zeratsky

AI product strategy requires solving for trust and significant behavioral shifts in users.

"We found that it's especially valuable for AI startups. So it just turns out that a lot of the complex issues you have to figure out with turning something that may not initially be trustworthy may re..."

AI accelerates building, but can lead to generic products if the team skips the deep strategic thinking required for differentiation.

"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 situatio..."

A Design Sprint is a highly scripted, 5-day 'meeting' or workshop designed to bypass traditional planning cycles.

"The big idea with a design Sprint is to go from a zero to a prototype and a test of that prototype in just five days. And it's a recipe, it's a scripted set of activities that we developed over a numb..."

High-stakes strategic decisions are best made in a time-boxed, 'calendar-cleared' environment to ensure total focus and momentum.

"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 th..."

Design sprints are a structured way to help startups find or expand product-market fit by controlling the workday defaults.

"For over a decade, John and I have been, in quotes, designing time as part of our work with startups, helping them find or expand product market fit. So, we developed a design sprint at Google Venture..."

Sprints facilitate PMF by moving from hunches to evaluating real customer reactions through prototypes.

"We help teams find and expand product market fit with Sprint. It's a tool for doing that and it uses a lot of these principles we talked about with Make Time to change the defaults, but not just the d..."

Using structured silence and a designated decider allows teams to move through complex strategic choices at high velocity without groupthink.

"We're using this tactic that we call work alone together. And specifically the note and vote is this method where everyone's in silence... writing down their own answers to this question... then the t..."

Evaluating different implementation paths through specific 'lenses' (Customer, Pragmatic, Growth, Financial) clarifies the trade-offs of each approach.

"We'll plot those options on these axes of easy to use versus hard to use and perfect solution to the customer problem versus this is just an okay solution... we call this activity magic lenses."

Effective positioning is built on a 'promise' that is both radically different from alternatives and highly motivating to the customer.

"It's crucial then that a product has a clear promise that it makes, and that promise is radically differentiated from the alternatives and that that promise is strong enough that you'll try it and the..."

Starting with 'classic' differentiators helps teams warm up before identifying more nuanced, custom ways to stand out.

"We talk about classic differentiators, fast to slow, smart to not so smart to borrow from the iPhone slide, easy to use to hard to use, and so on."

A product's strategic vision can be distilled into a single 'founding hypothesis' that aligns the team on the path forward.

"If we solve this problem for this customer with this approach, we think they're going to choose it over the competitors because of differentiator one and differentiator two."

Effective prioritization is about placing the most important task first rather than seeking general efficiency.

"It's not about how do I go faster? How do I get more efficient? It's about how do I put the thing that is the most important first in my day or in my life, and then build everything else around that a..."

Competition includes not just direct competitors, but any workaround or alternative the customer currently uses to solve the problem.

"What's the competition for solving that problem? How do they solve it today? And what are the alternatives? How else do people solve this? What are the workarounds?"

A successful competitive analysis identifies a unique quadrant (the top-right) where the product wins, leaving all other alternatives in an 'L-shaped' area of inferiority.

"We want to have a way of looking at the world that puts all of the competitors into Loserville. And then we want to say, okay, if you can deliver on that and if that promise is compelling to customers..."

Moving from abstract concepts to concrete prototypes is the fastest way to define and solve a problem.

"This idea of getting unstuck and turning maybe some abstract ideas or some concepts that you've been discussing, turning that into a concrete prototype, something that you can look at and you can clic..."

The foundation of any project requires explicit alignment on the specific customer and the problem being solved before moving to solutions.

"The first phase, the basics, as I mentioned, that's identifying who's your customer, what problem are you solving for the customer?"

Teams often assume they are aligned on the problem, but individual perspectives usually vary significantly when written down.

"I think that problem can be really interesting because when teams sit down and think about it, it is often less clear than they thought what the actual problem is."

Customer discovery is significantly more effective when testing a concrete hypothesis with a prototype rather than having open-ended conversations.

"These conversations with customers are so much more fruitful and pointed when you've got the context of I know exactly what my hypothesis is and you have prototypes to show them."