I have been asked to give an interview for a FFWD Sprint. What’s this about?
This is good news. Very good news. It means your organization is actively looking at ways to adapt and respond to the challenges it faces. Tomorrow’s winners are the companies that can respond the fastest.
This is where the FFWD Sprint comes in. An FFWD Sprint is the fastest way to test if an idea or solution is “THE RIGHT IT”.
Each 2-to-5 day FFWD Sprint is slightly different depending on the challenge being tackled, but it typically covers learning about the problem, generating many possible solutions to test, building a realistic prototype or mock-up. Most importantly, the sprint concludes with testing the prototype with customers or key stakeholders, bringing the customer into the conversation early in the process.
The key benefits of running FFWD Sprints are:
- Become customer-centric: a sprint forces engagement with customer early in the initiative as opposed finding out, months along the line that it doesn’t meet the needs of stakeholders
- Reduce timelines: a sprint will help you to shortcut debates and move faster by quickly testing new ideas and collecting real-world data (as opposed to thought-world data).
- Increase collaboration: a sprint will help break down functional silos, reduce handoff delays, and get part-time teams to make progress.
- Upskill teams: a sprint will upskill your teams and new ways of working resulting in improved performance.
What do you need from me?
Your lived experience and world perspective.
Prior to the sprint the core sprint team needs to get ‘smarter about the problem’. So we are talking to all the people that feel the pain of the problem we want to solve or can provide us with key inputs and insights – like YOU! For 45 to 60 minutes, we would like to deep-dive on the topic of the sprint. This will ensure that we are able to integrate diverse perspectives into the solution.
Do I need to prepare?
Nope.
You already have the information in your head. We will talk you through what we need. If you have any existing documents or presentations on the topic, that would be great to share with us in the interview!
Who will be interviewing me?
FFWD Innovation and some of your colleagues.
FFWD Innovation is a group of startup founders, serial tech entrepreneurs, corporate innovation experts, digital collaboration advocates. We bring hands on practical experience, underpinned by researched and tested innovation strategies from the world’s most successful companies. We help companies like yours innovate faster.
Solve big problems with speed and urgency.
Let’s do a FFWD Sprint.
