You’ll start at 10 a.m. and end at 5 p.m., with an hour-long lunch in between. That’s right: There are only six working hours in the typical sprint day.

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?

Execution can be difficult. What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life?

And if your Decider doesn’t believe the sprint to be worthwhile? If she won’t even stop by for a cameo? Hold up! That’s a giant red flag. You might have the wrong project.

We used voting and structured discussion to decide quickly, quietly, and without argument.

We’ve found the ideal size for a sprint to be seven people or fewer.

The sprint is GV’s unique five-day process for answering crucial questions through prototyping and testing ideas with customers.

On Monday, she can share her perspective on the problem. On Wednesday, she can help choose the right idea to test. And on Friday, she should stop by to see how customers react to the prototype.

First, the team cleared a full week on their calendars. From Monday to Friday, they canceled all meetings, set the “out of office” responders on their email, and completely focused on one question: How should their robot behave around humans?