Sublime

Skunk Works creator Kelly Johnson was a visionary on at least two fronts—designing airplanes and organizing genius. Johnson seemed to know intuitively what talented people needed to do their best work, how to motivate them, and how to make sure that the desired product was created as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In time, Johnson wrote down t

We always started small, with some inspiration. We made demos. We mixed in feedback. We listened to guidance from smart colleagues. We blended in variations. We honed our vision. We followed the initial demo with another and then another. We improved our demos in incremental steps. We evolved our work by slowly converging on better versions of the

Sprints are most successful with a mix of people: the core people who work on execution along with a few extra experts with specialized knowledge.

On the first day, you figure out the problem you’re trying to solve. On the second day, you sketch out competing solutions. On the third day, you make the tough decision about which solution you want to explore, transforming it into a hypothesis that can be tested. On the fourth day, you throw together a rough prototype that allows you to test the

I’ve given a name to this continuing progression of demo ➞ feedback ➞ next demo: creative selection.